Open Source

I am now in the chapter of Long Tail where he talks about democratization of means of production. Chris Anderson points out that the pre-Long Tail economy was one based on scarcity. The means of production -- factories, printing presses, TV stations and editing facilities -- were too expensive for common people to possess. (Might I add that I hesitate to include the "masses" in this because again it's the middle class who have the income to buy these things. Yet this may change when the internet becomes more pervasive in mobile phones -- which makes technology more affordable, even to the masses. I need to write more on this later.).

Here's another advantage of Drupal and dynamic category management.

My blog started with only 5 categories, which at that time were enough for the content that I wrote. I wrote one story on Drupal which I tagged as "Tech". Soon however, I was adding Drupal stories. Then, as my time to write grew, I started putting entries on Open Source which I tagged too as "Tech".

In other CMS, I would have been stuck on this. My only recourse in non-Drupal CMS would be to reprogram and probably even restructure my content. In Drupal however, all I need to do is to open the Categories (or Taxonomy) module. Then I add the new terms ("Drupal" and "Open Source").

Comparing Drupal with other content management systems (CMS) is tricky because it is like comparing Walkman and iPod for consumers who have never tried iPod before. We can say that both can play music and are portable, and iPod is at a clear disadvantage because it's the younger technology. It is difficult to explain why iPod has more advantages, and the only way is to demonstrate what it does and which famous celebrities endorse iPod (like U2 and Madonna, for instance).

Like many of you, I'm torn between using Microsoft products -- which are easy to use but expensive -- and Open Source Software (OSS) -- which are free but usually kludgy.

If there's a a new-fangled gizmo or product out in the market and everyone's talking about it, I prefer to wait it out and let others try it out.

That was my strategy when Internet Explorer first came out and I was using Netscape. That was still my strategy when Mozilla came out with Firefox. I decided to wait it out, even though my Internet Explorer was giving me pop-up headaches and its security holes was letting various spyware to run on my system.

NOTE: this is the theoretical side of taxonomy. If you are a beginning Drupal user and wish to start quickly with Drupal, please read The Power of Drupal Categories.

Updated: 4 Sep 2008

I. Is Drupal similar to other CMS?

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