wikis

MindTouch Deki's new release integrates...just about everything

Disclosure: I am on the advisory board for MindTouch.

Double disclosure: I really, really like the latest release of MindTouch Deki (formerly "Deki Wiki").

MindTouch has always thought that a wiki should be about more than simply creating basic web pages. With its new "Kilen Woods" release, the company has significantly bent the rules as to what constitutes a wiki, and just which data sources can feed into a wiki.

LinkedIn? Yep. Salesforce.com? Sure. SugarCRM. Uh-huh.

MindTouch Deki enables businesses to connect and mashup the growing number of application and data silos that exist across an enterprise - including legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications, databases, and Web 2.0 applications....For example, MindTouch Deki can visualize content from a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Access databases and mash it up with other services, such as Microsoft Live Earth or Google maps, LinkedIn and a CRM system - offering a common wiki and web-service interface for content and behavior from multiple sources.

eWeek and others have some good reviews. Me? I just like that I don't have to learn any wiki language to use it. Take a look for yourself:… Read more

Software was made for people, not people for software

I had a very frustrating experience this morning. I decided to start editing an internal team wiki and ran into a significant roadblock: To edit the wiki, I first needed to learn "wikiml." What is wikiml? I'm glad you asked. It's a wiki markup language so that wikis look more like Web pages/documents, and not like a stream of undifferentiated text.

There's just one problem: Wikiml. Who wants to learn a markup language just so you can collaborate with colleagues? It's not that the markup language is particularly difficult (here's a cheat sheet for reference), but requiring the learning of a new language is a step backward, not forward, in terms of ease of use.

Wikis may be more powerful than a Microsoft Word document, but if they're not at least as easy, then they're simply not going to get used. Period. Google gets this: Google Docs is actually easier to use than Microsoft Word.

The Bible has this great counsel in Mark 2:27:

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

The idea is that Biblical commandments were not designed to inhibit people, but to enable and improve them. Sometimes we let the letter of a law impede the spirit and end up cramping our capabilities. Is there a correlation to software?… Read more

SocialText wiki platform gets collaborative spreadsheets

Corporate Wiki software company SocialText is adding a spreadsheet to its wiki product. The new feature, SocialCalc, allows users to collaborate on spreadsheets the same way they do in the company's text-based Wikis. The product is based on Dan Bricklin's open-source Wikicalc.

For spreadsheet jockeys this is both good and bad news. On the positive side, SocialCalc spreadsheets inherit wiki-style revision tracking, which is an automatic audit trail that will arguably be even more important on spreadsheets with financial and other hard data on them than it is on text-based wiki pages. "There's no inherent audit … Read more

Wetpaint Injected brings user content to old-fashioned Web sites

We've covered the wiki company Wetpaint's experiments in expanding its products several times over the past two years. The company has had a solid wiki service for consumers since 2005. It has continued to improve the core product by layering in the capability to embed widgets in wiki pages (now pretty much a standard feature), and it's even tried to meld wikis with social networking through a Facebook app. Today the company is heading off in yet another direction with Wetpaint Injected, a service that enables content sites to not just embed wikis in their sites, but … Read more

In a crowded market, Wetpaint's colors look solid

Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.

Long version: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It's Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven't heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.

The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also … Read more

MindTouch closes a banner year

While it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow.

Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming:

Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase… Read more

Socialtext enterprise wiki getting social network features

If you love a good theory--of psychology, physics, economics, you name it--go work at SocialText. These guys live in their heads. That became apparent when I talked to founder Ross Mayfield and newish CEO Eugene Lee this week about the updates they're making to the company's enterprise wiki product. I learned that if you want to sell to enterprise IT bigwigs, you need to talk a good talk. You need to, "reduce the latency of getting information transmitted."

Which, I think, means: Talk fast.

And it helps to have some contemporary features in the products your … Read more

WikiFM glues Last.fm to Wikipedia artist biographies

Ever catch yourself hearing a new band on Last.fm, then popping open a new browser tab to look them up? WikiFM saves you a step by creating a two-frame page that keeps your Last.fm online radio player on one side, and an automatically populated Wikipedia biography page in the other.

The advantage of viewing Wikipedia's artist biographies over Last.fm's puny artist pages is the sheer depth of information (Tom Jones was born in Pontypridd, Wales?). The WikiFM page layout isn't the most elegant treatment we've seen (we've got FoxyTunes for that), but … Read more

Wikipedia missing China's voice in its 10 million articles

That's right, Wikipedia now has 10 million articles. But participation in this global brain-share is restricted in China.

Wikipedia being blocked is news to no one in China, but there's a bit of a catch-22 even for those who use proxies to get around the restrictions: many proxy URLs and anonymizers are banned from editing Wikipedia to reduce vandalism.

When I want to see an article on Wikipedia, I pop it into the Anonymouse Web site, and the content comes right up. But if I see a mistake in an article, I'm unable to make my contribution.… Read more