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Solving the problem of tracking content

The more that it seemed like I would be using a lot of different tools, formats, and venues to publish my content, the more it appeared that I would need a really efficient way to track my work. This meant that every revision, every posting, and every comment would need to be kept on record somehow in a way that was very versatile. Ive fallen in love with a lot of different project and ticket management systems in the past: Fogbugz, VersionOne, Teambox, Pivotaltracker, and Lighthouse, to name a few. I tried all of these, as well as other kinds of services like Tender, but only a few could cut it. One thing that helped to focus my testing of these systems was the understanding that I was dealing in asset management, not content management. It is common for people to think that if you post links to an article to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., that you are creating content. My thinking has been that you always want to identify your core piece of content. Anything else that you do is only marketing, distribution, etc. All of your activities need to point to a single destination. This makes it easier to track traffic to the core piece of content. My methods will also help when you are dealing with revisions. The challenge here is that with some services as soon as you make a change to the body or the headline of an article or webpage, you have to make an update to possibly a fifty different sites. One record for an asset should contain every reference to the piece of content that youve created on the Internet, so that later it is easy to go back and make the necessary changes. So, which service became my preferred platform for asset management? I chose Fogbugz. Here is why: Customizable. The plugin which allows you to create custom fields allowed me to add anything that I needed for data that you normally wouldnt be able to capture in a ticket management system. Flexible. Fogbugz lets you sort by almost any value, and then export to Excel. This is a very important feature. Tickets can be made public accessible. This was another plugin that I installed. It allows me to reveal tickets using their public URLs. Startups and educational institutions are able to create a Fogbugz account for free, as long as they only need to give access to two users. If you have the budget to purchase a subscription to Fogbugz, I would even recommend it because it is a really solid tool.