Tip-o-the-hat to Danny Ayers for his "Thinking Outside The Box" post.  Great photo! On his blog, Danny asserts that everything is related and it appears that this is especially true when it comes to cats (his or mine).  His weblog is definitely worth keeping up on if you are into the symantic web (who wouldn’t be?).  He’s into Java and RDF programming, which is an interest of mine too (I’ve just downloaded the open-source Informa API and hope to play with that in Eclipse real soon now).

OK, how about this for a new "show".  Like TLC’s "Overhaulin" or MTV’s hit show "Pimp My Ride", except that it’s a hot Graphic Design firm that remakes some ugly website and surprises the owner.  Perhaps this could be aimed at bloggers and their friends vote them "most needy of a makeover" and we do it.  Could be sponsored by a major blog provider like Blogger, MSN Spaces or TypePad.  It would be great if we could "hijack" their domain or host as part of the shock factor.  Maybe raise their search engine ranking too, add banner ads, paypal, forums, flash, hook in RSS feeds, the works!.  A show about making over your digital presence.  Run a blog about the building of each new site, interview friends or clients, big surprise for the "contestant".  Like the car shows, interview the "backend" guys to give a peek at the tech behind the site.  Could be entertaining content and viral.

How do you build a community?  Can one start with an existing open-source content management system (CMS) and extend it to meet the community’s additional needs?  What features are important to start with?

I’m starting to take another serious dive into content management systems.  There are lots out there, lots of features and lots of platforms and architectures.

It would be interesting to know what some of the popular sites are using.  I note that Webjay is a heavly modified version of Geeklog.  Of course, I already mentioned that Microsoft has open-sourced the Channel 9 wiki. The AlwaysOn Network is PHP based.

While I am not wedded to any particular architecture or platform, I want to be able to integrate easily with SpinXpress, which is a mainly a Java/SWT app based on the Jetty web server.  SpinXpress and the SPIN directory server, use HypersonicSQL for metadata storage.  I’ve been seeing a lot of job ads lately that mention Hibernate and an inital review of this object2db mapping api looks very powerful.  Needless to say, many people are using MySQL these days.  Apache and Tomcat based solutions are plentiful.

I know I have not mentioned what the community is for and what it’s features will be.   At this point, I am only interested in basic and typical community and content management features so as to determine the a good one to build upon.  What’s your experience?

Hmmm.  Suppose my mother took a photo of me as a child and my sister takes the only copy and sends it to me.  If I scan it and put it here, can my mother sue me for copyright infringement?  Can she have my sister arrested for theft?  Could I be considered in possession of stolen property?