wikis

BOSTON--When it comes to using Web 2.0 technologies in businesses, Microsoft is officially onboard.

Microsoft's general manager of SharePoint tools and platforms, Derek Burney, gave a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here, where he announced a Web 2.0-style add-on called Community Kit for SharePoint.

Also, enterprise RSS vendor NewsGator announced that it has enhanced SharePoint's feed subscribing tools with tagging and an Ajax interface.

The notion of integrating Web 2.0 technologies from the public Internet--blogs, wikis, and social networking features--in businesses has been gaining momentum for the past few years and is … Read more

Critics of the U.S. patent system have long griped that it's entirely too easy to get patents these days on obvious or otherwise unmeritorious inventions--in part because overworked patent examiners don't have ready access to information about what's already out there.

A yearlong pilot project, endorsed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in partnership with the New York Law School, is supposed to help.

The goal behind the Peer to Patent Project, officially launched last Friday, is to allow anyone who's interested to weigh in on 250 pending patent applications belonging to … Read more

SideReel is a new video fan site. I talked to the site's co-founder, Bart Myers, at the SF Beta mixer last night, and he convinced me to check it out. What I found is, at its heart, a wiki. There are a few major video categories (Television, Movies, and "Video" for everything else) as well as a catchall category for nonvideo entries, such as actors. Pages for the video assets, like TV shows, have special fields. For example, each show has a "Watch it now" box, where you should be able to find links to … Read more

Still barely three months old, Fatdoor can probably be forgiven for delaying its promised Web 2.0 Expo launch. Originally scheduled for an April 15 rollout, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company says it will make its public debut on May 1 instead.

But Fatdoor had no qualms about setting up a booth in the Expo hall and answering--or not answering, as the case may be--questions about the social network and mapping service still in stealth mode.

Fatdoor CTO Chandu Thota, whose background is in mapping, claims the service is more Web 3.0 than 2.0, as in human … Read more

Wetpaint, the wiki editing and hosting service, added private and group messaging this morning. The new service allows users to communicate one-on-one just like e-mail, and gives wiki administrators a new way to communicate to those moderating and contributing to their pages.

Sending a message in the service is pretty simple. If you're signed in, just click a user's name to pull up a "send message" pop-up. If you want to send out a group message, just start typing in names and the service will pull them up (like Gmail does).

In comparison, wiki juggernaut Wikipedia … Read more

At the Under the Radar: Office 2.0 conference on Friday, one of the sessions I'll be moderating is called "Team Work." Yes, almost everything in business is about teamwork, but there are some interesting Web products that will be demo'd during this session. I previewed two of them.

First up, SystemOne, an enterprise-knowledge-management system masquerading as an ordinary business wiki. What's cool about this product is that it automatically creates, at the bottom of each page, a list of relevant other wiki pages, feeds, and Web search results. The autocreation of the links removes … Read more

Wetpaint on Tuesday is upgrading its wiki editing and hosting service with the ability to embed widgets, or mini-applications, into a Web page.

The "Easy Edit" button on Wetpaint wikis now lets people include a widget on a page, which can be anything from a YouTube video to a group Web calendar. The editing tool presents a variety of options, including adding RSS feeds and links to popular video-sharing sites services.

Rather make you write the HTML by hand, the Wetpaint editor generates it for you. The company developed the widget feature in response to customers, who are … Read more

Comic books are hard to take seriously sometimes. They're even harder for the casual reader to pick up, which is where Comic Vine comes in handy. Like Wikipedia, Comic Vine is a user-created encyclopedia that can make you an instant expert, but just about comic books. The big difference between Comic Vine and a site like Wikipedia is the community and user submission, which is where Comic Vine steps it up in a big--make that super--way.

User profiles on Comic Vine let you become a superhero or villain. Instead of listing the usual social networking details, such as what … Read more

Online applications company Zoho has launched Zoho Wiki, a Web-based wiki tool that integrates with Zoho's entire suite of productivity applications. Zoho Wiki lets you create three different wikis, each with a custom URL and unlimited pages. What's a wiki? Well, it's an information repository that anyone with the right permission can read, write, or edit. The most famous, of course, is Wikipedia.

Wikis have lots of uses, especially in small businesses. Creating casual documentation for projects, or a knowledge base for products and services is easier to navigate in a wiki than a spreadsheet or large … Read more