Social finance seems to have gained root on the web. Sellaband is a great concept. It enables musicians and their fans to raise the money for a professional recording, selling music through the site and the sharing of any advertising spoils. At the end everyone makes money – the artist, the believers [fans] and the site itself.

Being socially responsible has always been fashionable in the corporate world. But after Al Gore’s moving and thoroughly inspiring ‘An inconvenient truth’, a lot more companies have jumped the bandwagon of being socially responsible or environmentally friendly.

We were working on a blog site for a client, who over the course of a few years has also become a friend and well-wisher of our company. I remember, when the senior partner at Pigtail Pundits, briefed me about it, I wasn’t the least bit amused.

Is content, and conversations about content driving the next social networking wave? By now, we do know that pure social networking sites MySpace, Orkut, ibibo, Fropper, Facebook, etc, generate content [profiles, pictures, audio, video, blogs, events] and conversations [guestbook, comments, discussions, personal messaging]. These were the first wave social networking sites.

At one time in the past, in the year 2000, we had about 12 programmers working with us out of a staff strength of 20. Some of these folks were proficient in .NET and others in Java and PHP. Life wasn’t hunky-dory, though.

Given the salutary, all-round benefits of embracing a CMS today, both by an agency and by a client, how exactly does one go about selecting one? One way would be to go through the entire list at CMS Matrix. A better way would be to start from what you want/need.