"Keep a diary, and eventually it will keep you." -- Mae West

But of course, keeping an empty book with the word "diary" on the outside is pretty pointless, it's the content that is going to keep Mae, and it will only do that if she manages it properly.

Content exists as part of communication. Content is the  stuff without which there would be no need to communicate: it is the information itself that gets from one mind to another in the process of communication.

Communication happens through media - the physical representation of the content. Mae, for example, can keep a paper diary, a video diary or a blog, or she can  broadcast it on telvision or over the radio, or even by means of text messages.

Any of these media may be appropriate, and each of them is going to need managing, one way or another, to keep her in business.

She needs a whole load of strategies, long term and short term, ranging from relying on those very private donations resulting from promises to restrict circulation of content to herself, allowing access to certain parts of the content to particular people or groups of people, if only to proved to them that the content exists. 

Once she decides it is time for wider publicationand having a scedule of publication combined with advertsing to the wider public.

And then she may well want to manage conversations with people, to publish news items about her exploits and the court case resulting from them, and she may even want to bypass the middle man and sell the diary direct.

Perhaps, as her notoriety grows, she may wish to branch out on her own lines of merchandise ...

Content management is about about managing all kinds of information relevant to your objectives, and those of your organisation, in such a way that they end up supporting you, or of course, not, if you do it badly.

In fact, the management of content is pretty much what organisations are devoted to. A filing cabinet is a content management system, as is an Accounts Department. And all the Picasso ever did was to create content that people wanted, and also a system to manage it so that it supported him.

Contrast van Gough, who created brilliant content, but not the system to manage it. That was left up to other people, and it has been they who made all the money.

A computerised content management system supports you in doing that using a computer, with an accounts package or a word processor, for example.

Since computers are definitely no longer novelties, the chances are that you already have computer-based content management systems.

Content Management tends to come up in relation to websites, because many websites are produced using what are called content management systems, or more properly, web-based content management systems.

Before intoducing web sites to the scene, therefore, it is a good idea (if you are an organisation of any size) to suggest you consider having a formal policy for the management of content, and that that policy includes a policy for managing information through the web, which can create the foundation  for you web-related activities.

A Web Content Management System manages content through the internet, usually by means of a standard internet browser, such as Internet Explorer, of Firefox. As such, its medium is ultimately web-based technologies such as html. The term content management system most commonly refers to software which lives on a server, and keeps and/or manages its content in or through a database.

Access to the content is through normal web browsers such as Internet Exlorer or Firefox, and what you see is generated by the content management system, rather than being present as a series of pre-composed pages on the web server.

You are probably here  because you are thinking about having a web site, but a Web-based Content Management System doesn't have to be about generating a website for the world to see.

Think about it as being there to support you in managing information, and the possibilities grow enormously.

Managing information is as much about controlling who has access to what, and when, and who gets to add to or modify the body of information, and how, and under which conditions, and for what, the information is used, as it is about display.

You use a content management system, in effect, to ensure that your website is much, much, more than a brochure.