Green Venue is a hosted service for Web Content Management (WCM) with a different design philosophy. For content authors, it is extremely simple to use compared to other web content management systems (WCM). For end users it delivers rich, friendly and personalized content. The simplicity is achieved by applying a different design philosophy. It does not mean a less powerful delivery vehicle. On the contrary, the simplicity translates into a more powerful content delivery platform for a large class of applications.
Before getting into the details of the design philosophy of Green Venue, let us examine the problem we intent to solve. WEB is a huge repository of information and it is growing by seconds. The growth has accelerated due to user’s contribution in forums, blogs and Wikis (more people play the role of content author). This poses a new challenge for the user - how does she/he find the right information quickly? Sometime people spend hours looking for information and not find it. There are times when people are lost in the web of information. This is not good for the content provider and consumer both. People develop WEB fatigue.
How do we solve it? On one hand, we need tools that bubble up right information beyond search engines. Google allows the user to rate search results which takes search engine one step further. In this case, prior users help future users looking for similar information. On the other hand, we have WEB sites such as Amazon that present personalized content based on the user profile. In this case, WEB content provider helps user. Users helping each other and content provider assisting users are only two viable ways. In a semantic WEB the process can be automated but still will rely on content providers and consumers’ inputs. There are attempts to solve the problem by deducing semantic of information based on the popularity index and phrase parsing without any assistance from authors or readers. This approach is a suspect because we have not been very successful in parsing natural languages and anything short of 100% will not be acceptable.
Green Venue solves the problem using conventional wisdom - prompt author to tell more about the content implicitly and sometime explicitly. Let us see what is the goal of an author, it is to convey some useful information to the reader in a friendly manner. An author’s end goal is not to build the best WEB site or the best navigation to the information. The best site and navigation help him achieve his goal. The current WEB Content Management Systems are targeted towards building the best site. Many of them do a fantastic job but leave it to creator how good the result would be. It means creators have lots of flexibility but at the same time a lot to do as well. This works well for a large organization where content author and WEB site creators are two separate roles complementing each other. If this flexibility is not used properly there is a great danger of failure. Therefore it is more often the case that seemingly nice sites do not deliver good results. Green Venue approach is to let an author focus on a single page used to express content. One or more authors create pages and catalog them in a book (this is the only classification they do). The rest is left to the engine that delivers content to readers. The delivery engine automatically lays out the content based on type, user profile, information user supplied during page design and what it learns about the page as readers browse through it and rate it. A page’s position dynamically changes based on its relevance for the user. Another design principle of Green Venue is to motivate authors to be concise.
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