You know you are a has been if you launch a new site using a kick ass CMS and the projectlead of the CMS is not even blogging it.

Sleep tight Metallica.

The (dead tree) newspaper sector is not particularly known for being innovative or getting up to speed. In fact, it seems that they only look at each other; what system is newspaper Y using, we have to get that as well! As if online the newspapers are competing with each other. They are, but more important, they are competing against every single website in the world. People only have x hours per day to get the latest news or backgrounds per day, and every minute spend on a blog or on a wiki, cant be spend on the Great news paper website.

It seems that the newspaper sector is waiting for the result of The Record Industry versus The Internet and will decide after that has been settled (in a year or 5 ) what they will do online. In the mean time, there is -or so I have been told- something going on on the Internet that is called UGC. Based upon the old credo If You Don't Like the News...Go Out and Make Some of Your Own, these blogs, wikis and other 2.0media are far cheaper to produce and have more knowledge on the subject; hard to believe for Mr. Journalist but true.

But the newspaper industry is still looking at their own navel. At my former employer, I had nearly all Dutch newspapers as a customer and I also visited some "independent" newspapers from the UK and "world" newspapers from Germany. And while all these newspapers where experimenting with new technologies and ways to generated income and bind readers (and let them become writers) at the lower levels in the business units, at the corporate level, the CTO's and CIO's were still full of the proprietary nonsense CMS-es. And they had to be, since they were taking on boat trips with lots of beer and "no cameras" by the proprietary CMS vendors. I once saw a very ugly site that was rather expensive; around 500K euros (800k dollars) that could have been made in Drupal for less then 1/10 and more then that, be a lot better, faster and hipper.

Recently however, I see lots of old media switch towards Drupal. And not just as a CMS or even CMFramework, but as an Enterprise Service Bus. A central hub were all data is aggregated, enriched and send towards another medium.

If you read the news, three things striked me:

NEW YORK The New York Sun has begun using WoodWing's Smart Connection Enterprise editorial solution from WoodWing, headquartered in Zaandam, the Netherlands, with U.S. offices in Detroit.

The paper's WoodWing editorial content-management system has been used in conjunction with Drupal, an open-source Web application framework, as the publishing platform.

Launched in 2002 as New York City's first new general-interest newspaper in two generations, and with a Web site designed by Danilo Black, the Sun now claims an online and print readership of more than one million.

And the three things were:

1. The NYSun is indeed running an old version of Drupal. Good for them! (well, good for them running Drupal, they might want to upgrade)
2. There is a Dutch company Woodwing (running Drupal) that is rather big in the media and has 4 offices worldwide
3. They actually have a rather good slution for the media.

Although their 3 tier graph on this page is a lot of BS!

It is not that the NYSun is a very big site but the cracks in the proprietary CMS world are getting bigger by the day and every newspaper switching towards Drupal, is a good thing. Because in 3 years time, there will be a lot of action, jobs and money to be made in the combination of Drupal and old skool newspapers.

Via a direct message on twitter, I got the news that jumbo.nl switched to a new site today using ... Drupal. Jumbo might not be a world famous brand, but it is a very old (board) game manufacturer, founded in 1853 in the Netherlands. It is a nice looking site, colorful, a bit 2.0-ish but with a stylefull more timeless look. It is not finished content wise yet I think, there are some missing pages. And while using heavily the i18n possibilities of Drupal, it is still based on D5, not on D6, see their changelog. I fully understand the D5 choice, I think that it will take more then 1/2 a year before corporate sites will be build on D6.

Since this year I make money selling and building Drupal sites and the good news is that Drupal is gaining ground very very fast in the Netherlands. And a site like jumbo.nl really helps to sell it to other corporate prospects.

Via Steven Peck, via 21764, the corporate site of AOL is using... Drupal! Note that their developer site has been using Drupal since nearly a year.

I think it is great to see that the big corporations use Drupal, the showcases make it easier to sell Drupal to other corporations, there is more critical mass, more good things will come to and get out of "the community".

Note that there is (or might be) also a dark side. I will blog about the downside soon, but what do you think -apart from the brand AOL- is the downside of corps like AOL using Drupal?

Today at the second day of the DrupalCon Adobe launched a new site as a showcase for their Flex technology. They use their own technology for the frontend (flash, flex etc) but the backend is powered by... Drupal! See for yourself, at the showcase site of Flex.