I was doing some research on Link Management this morning and came across CMS Matrix , which lists no less than 761 CMS entries. And the list doesn’t include high end commercial offerings like IBM FileNet, Day Communique or Hummingbird RedDot. This means there’s a good chance that your neighbor Joe Nextdoor is cooking up a CMS in his garage for commercialization in the next few months.

Of course, most of these are rubbish. It reminds me of the Learning Management System (LMS) / Learning Content Management System (LCMS) rush a few years ago. Everyone was building an LMS (including me). Then suddenly, nobody cared about learning and now you can buy an LMS at a garage sale for about $1.25.

Perhaps content will go the same way. They used to say “Content is King.” Naturally, they meant that when the content dies we should run through the streets yelling, “The Content is dead! Long live the Content!”

I’ve been reading The Long Tail and wondering whether anything really new is happening. The thesis is that, thanks to the magic of Google / Amazon / eBay, what used to be marginal is now commercial, at least in the realm of entertainment. The 80/20 rule no longer applies. Paretto is dead! Long live Paretto! I haven’t looked too closely at the math but it seems to me the curve hasn’t really changed shape. It’s just that the 20% used to be ignored and now digital providers not limited by the physical constraints of shelf space are able to make decent money off the onesy-twosies out in bizarroville at the end of the curve.

The CMS plethora seems to confirm that the Long Tail applies in the CMS market. But I wonder if the Long Tail applies only to the neatly-packaged entertainment category, in other words, to things you “consume” and then move on from, like books, games, music and films.

The commercial market is clearly starting to consolidate, as evidenced by IBM’s purchase of FileNet and OpenText’s purchase of Hummingbird, and I’d expect the trend to accelerate for the next year. The market is already quite segmented into Enterprise, middle tier and low end vendors. I think the 80/20 rule still applies here.

On the Open Source side, the winners will have open frameworks and active developer communities. So far these appear to include Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal and DotNetNuke. Plone and e107 also seem to have their devotees, but outside this list of Open Source leaders, you are literally taking things into your own hands.