The Tuesday, Nov 9th meeting of the Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group (RMIUG) will feature a panel discussion called "Content Management: Wrangling the Beast."

If the Internet is the medium of the Information Age, then content is the matter. According to Netcraft there are over 55 million websites in existence. Although there are no hard statistics some estimates that the number of web pages is well into the hundreds of billions. Google, even with its incredible breadth and reach, only catalogues 4 billion of those pages. It's amazing that we ever find anything!

Since the dawn of the Internet, many netizens have wrestled with the challenge of making content more digestible, manageable and, ultimately, usable. Companies such as Vignette, Documentum, and, of course, Microsoft, have spent millions inventing systems to help organizations get a handle on their information. According to IDC, worldwide enterprise content management (ECM) will to grow at a double-digit pace from $2.7 billion in 2003 to $3.8 billion by 2007.

Dave Taylor is the founder of Intuitive Systems (http://www.intuitive.com/), an executive management and communications consultancy. He's been involved with the Internet for over 25 years, including a stint as a research scientist at HP's R&D Labs and another as senior editor of Advanced Systems magazine. He's written 16 books including the best-selling "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts", "Creating Cool Web Sites" and "Learning Unix for Mac OS X" and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, including having founded four startups in the last ten years. Dave will talk about RSS (Really Simple Syndication, a content publishing "dialect" of XML) and weblog (aka blog) technology and how they are used in content management.

Robert A. Dickinson, Product Architect at Xaffire and founder of Reasonably Sane Inc. (rsane.com) Trained as both a software engineer and writer, Rob has always been fascinated by automated authoring and publishing. Having led technical development of collaborative information systems for several local startups, including CorpMed.com and Achieve.com, Rob founded Reasonably Sane in 2001 to advance multi-author, multi-format publishing. Rob will speak about the role of document compilers, including Wiki engines and the RSane Compiler, in managing large structured publications with many contributors.

The meeting is Tuesday, November 9th from 7:00 - 9:00 pm (with optional 6:30 pm start for refreshments and informal networking). The meeting will be held at The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at 1850 Table Mesa Drive in Boulder. To get to NCAR from the Boulder Turnpike (US 36) or Broadway (US 93), take Table Mesa Drive west towards the mountains for approximately 2.5 miles into the foothills. NCAR is at the top of the hill. For door-to-door driving directions, go to MapQuest (http://www.mapquest.com/), click on Driving Directions, enter your starting address, NCAR's address, and voila! Park in the NCAR lot, go in the main door, and ask the guard to point you to meeting, which is held in the main auditorium, right off the lobby. The meeting is free and open to the public, but we may pass the hat to help defray expenses.

Our meeting location seats about 120 people. That is usually enough room to accommodate all attendees, but it's impossible for us to predict how many people will show up for any given meeting. Seating is always on a first-come, first serve basis, and in the event of more attendees than seats, we won't be able to admit additional people into the auditorium after all seats are filled.

Thanks to our three sponsors who help make RMIUG
meetings happen:
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MicroStaff (www.microstaff.com) which provides Creative and Technical Talent
for Web, Interactive Media, Marketing Communications and Software
Development projects, is the sponsor of food and beverages for RMIUG
meetings.

ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com) -- a Colorado-based software company that provides semi-custom web-based applications, sponsors the RMIUG meeting
minutes.

Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com) which provides
marketing project management, marketing communications
consulting, and web content development is the AV
sponsor for RMIUG.

Consultants and companies are invited to bring Internet-related Product
information, brochures, and business cards which will be displayed on an
information table.

There are email mailing lists set up for this group. To subscribe or
unsubscribe, see http://www.rmiug.org/maillist.html You can also reach the
RMIUG "Executive" Committee at rmiug-comm@rmiug.org. Our web site is at
http://www.rmiug.org/

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Please note that RMIUG is hosted at NCAR and we are their guests. NCAR has security regulations in effect
that we must follow in order to use the facility. If any RMIUG attendee is unwilling to follow these simple
regulations, I would ask that he or she not attend and instead read the minutes after the meeting.

Here are the NCAR security policies that must be followed:

1. No weapons.
2. Must sign in at front desk and provide name.
3. Cooperate with security folks including providing ID if requested.
4. We are guests of NCAR so cooperation and courtesy are expected when dealing with NCAR staff.

If there are any questions or concerns with this policy, please contact me directly. Thanks, Josh Zapin
(josh@r...).
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