Compass Designs .net

Last week I posted about Reputational Management in Twitter, interestingly enough, this concept of online reputational management seems to be cropping up more and more on my radar.

There are even web applications springing up that will aggregate online references to yourself and searching for "web reputation management" get's over 800,000 hits.

Only this morning I see an interesting example chirping its ways through the Twit-o-Sphere about some dubious reporting about a site that was running Joomla and switched to a custom .NET platform.

The interesting part is that we can watch the thing evolve in real time and see what players catch on.

The Cast

• www.itworldcanada.com
  Posted an article with some dubious facts in it.
• Briony Smith
  Author of said article
• www.sweetspot.ca
  The website in question
• PixelCarve
  The original implementor
• Trioro  Inc
  The new company that ported the site from Joomla to .NET
• The Joomlaverse
  Rapid open source fans that will jump all over ill-fact checked reporting

My Prediction

If I was to make a guess, I might say that Pixelcarve will never notice this, Trioro and Sweetspot might make some sort of clarification, and itworldcanada won't do very well at defending their reporting.

My 2 Cents

Seems like it was a poor implementation*. One thing open source has to wrestle with is how consumers can find quality vendors. Proprietary systems do this through certification/partner programs. Mind you, for this application, I would have recommended Drupal :)

* After some research it seems like there may have been more user error involved than issues with the quality of the initial implementation, and the second company's inexperience with Joomla.

Shameless Plug

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