During "my" session on Building Communities, at the OSCMS Summit, one of the participants, Cathy Aster, generously spent the hour filling the dry-erase with erasable writing that captured the essence of the discussion.

And it was a good discussion. I hardly said anything! Which made room for lots of great insights and observations. Nothing like a roomful of community leaders to engage in community discussion!

Anyway, at the end I snapped some pics of the board. I won't bother trying to interpret the notes, but perhaps it will be helpful to those attending.

The other day, I proposed facilitating a discussion at the Open Source CMS Summit 2007, hosted by Yahoo:

Building community online

Community building is more than just software, and more than just people. The nature of online communities is changing, no longer defined exclusively by bulletin boards or superblogs.

One question we run into when talking to people about Drupal web development over the past several years is, "What is 'Web 2.0,' anyway?" Greg has found as clear and concise an answer as any I've seen, and without all the blah blah blah....

If you prefer more info and context, then here's another video perhaps more to your liking....

One of the more interesting developments in search engine indexing of websites in this "web 2.0" era has been the advent of the sitemap — a special file listing all website urls, maintained by the website's own administrator. With dynamically generated content being added and updated constantly, it only made sense to help out the search engines, to make sure that they didn't miss anything. The only catch was that they all had their standards.

Now they've finally united:

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

People can download it here (or use this direct link to the .tar.gz file.)

There probably will be a couple of betas after this, followed by a couple of release candidates before the official release of Drupal 5.0. Starting in the next couple of weeks, we'll start using Drupal 5.0 as the development foundation for new sites we develop that won't launch before December or January and don't depend heavily on the hundreds of the contributed modules in the Drupal community. For sites wanting a lot of those functions, we'll either work off of Drupal 4.7 or work module upgrades into the sites' development processes.