The concept of ‘content management’, at least in one respect, is easily unraveled:No prizes for guessing it must be the process or activity by which you ‘manage’ your ‘content’.

Tongue in cheek as that may seem, as somebody who works with a content management system or CMS almost every day, I have sincerely come to think of it this way. This article will help you to understand what it means journalistically as well as semantically, whilst explaining why the simple, and playfully tautological definition of it above is the most useful one.

This somewhat abstract definition is the easiest and most flexible way to think of content management, because this way we can allow the words ‘content’ and ‘management’ to do all the work separately before we put them together.

It turns out that people mean a lot of different things by these words, which is why they are so commonly misunderstood, even in professional web development circles.

Forget whatever else you’ve heard elsewhere. For our intents and purposes we need nice, liberal definitions. In fact, the idea of ‘content’ here becomes almost ludicrously abstracted.

‘Content’, as we ought to think of it online, is any idea or work that starts in somebody’s head, can be created, edited and stored digitally, and is distributed to others via the internet. Please read on if that sounded confusing.

Let me give you some examples of things that are content, and some corresponding ones that aren’t: The information you provide in your Facebook profile is content, whereas the actual functionality on Facebook that allows people to have profiles isn’t. The text of the posts on your blog if you have one (and you really ought to) is content, whereas the blog itself – the system that lets you do the blogging, for example WordPress – isn’t. The videos on YouTube and the music in iTunes Music Store are content, but YouTube and iTunes Music Store themselves are not. You name it, if you can find a way to convincingly publish it online, it’s ‘content’.

Sadly, some art forms have been left behind a bit, which is why we should all switch off our computers sometimes.

The ‘management’ part is far more prosaic. It is (or at least should be) entirely dictated by nature of the content. All large-scale distribution of any sort of content online requires some sort of content management system, simply to prevent the amount of work involved in the maintenance from being unrealistically huge. The ‘management’ part should never needlessly make any qualitative or quantitative prescription as to the nature of the content. Hopefully it’s just a system for allowing people to take full advantage of the mass-publishing opportunities afforded by the internet, without knowing any code.

Incidentally, this is why Dreamweaver is not a CMS. It does not publish. It creates documents – more in a class with Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop than with any CMS. It actually predates almost every major content management system in existence (and yet it doesn’t really seem to changed much since it was first introduced).

Returning to our topic, what are some familiar content management systems? With liberal definition of ‘content’, Facebook is arguably a content management system, albeit one that specialises in certain kinds of content. YouTube is one that specialises in others. So are Blogger and Twitter and Flickr and iTunes Music Store and LiveJournal and MySpace and Drupal and Smartest and on and on forever. Each is a tool that has a slightly different type of output and which elicits different creative, intellectual, semantic and/or aesthetic decisions from the content publisher, you.

Well, actually, sometimes the content publisher is you, and sometimes – for example in the case of iTunes Music Store – it isn’t. It’s a few drones in an office somewhere far, far away, distributing content to potentially millions of people all around the world.

In fact, as little as five years ago, most content management systems were privately owned tools, which only people who were paid to use them were allowed to touch. Whenever you hear somebody dreary refer to ‘web 2.0′, what they are actually referring to, most likely, is the shift towards ‘trusting’ the [internet using] general public to generate and publish content on their sites.

Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and just about all of the most popular sites on the web these days (interestingly with the current exception of the ‘reputable’ news and information sources) are part of this trend: let the users do the ‘management’.