"With its easily identifiable name, thousands of people are visiting the site daily without the aid of a search tool, signaling increasing interest in the technology and the value of a domain that drives natural traffic."

Apparently 500 people signed up in the first five hours to wiki.com.

Then earlier this week a PR person from Wikia contacted me, saying there is a rumor that all wikis on wiki.com will be removed this week - and that Wikia intended to "rescue" those wiki.com customers. Wikia you may recall is the company co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Right now Wikia has a wiki page up saying that MindTouch is shutting down by January 25, 2007 (see Message from Mindtouch). Wikia's page currently reads:

"Wiki.com is not affiliated in any way with Wikia.com. Wikia has no control or ownership of the domain wiki.com. This rescued wiki was created following rumors that wiki.com was closing down. At the time, there was no indication whether wiki.com wikis would disappear or not, so Wikia made plans to migrate these sites to Wikia. Since then, MindTouch have said that they have begun migrating the wiki.com wikis to new servers and that the content of these sites will be made available on a new domain in future."

What is confusing me here is that currently wiki.com actually re-directs to Wikia! But how is that possible if Wikia has no control over the domain wiki.com?

Anyway this morning I received an email from MindTouch, stating that MindTouch will officially take over all hosting and support of Wiki.com no later than January 25. However it seems that MindTouch will not get control over the domain, wiki.com. They note: "The Wiki.com domain name will not convey - all customer content will now be available at www.wik.is."

So what is going on here! What is happening to the domain wiki.com, for which such a princely sum was paid, and how does Wikia have control over the wiki.com domain currently? What seems to have happened is that MindTouch and Gotts have gone their separate ways. The domain name wrangling suggests that Gotts may've done a deal with Wikia for it. But it's all very confusing and wiki.com users must be scratching their heads and wondering where they stand.

While it seems that Google will imminently be joining the wiki market, Deki Wiki has been busy beefing up their already mature offering.

Since we wrote about the Deki Wiki product in July, MindTouch has added dozens of new extensions amounting to over 100 new features, according to the company. These include support for Google Maps, Blogs, News, and Video, Flickr images, Microsoft Live Virtual Earth, and Live Contacts, a tie-in with ThinkFree for viewing Microsoft Office files, Yahoo! finance data and others.

MindTouch is also announcing today the release of two desktop products, the Deki Wiki Desktop and Microsoft Outlook Connectors. The Desktop Connector lets users browse and search for files on their computers and add them to their wiki project via drag and drop. The Outlook Connector makes it easier for users to publish email messages, attachments, and contact information to a wiki page.

Deki Wiki is free and open source. You can head on over to the OpenGarden Sandbox page to give it a whirl.

However, I'm having problems inputting an Excel spreadsheet into a Wiki. i.e. my data has a lot of rows and columns. Does anyone know of a wiki that makes it really easy to input tabular data? And probably more importantly, makes it easy for users to edit and add to that data. Please let me know either in the comments here, or by emailing readwriteweb AT gmail.com. Thanks!

We're not seeing it yet, but read on for an explanation of what the feature will do and a reaction to the announcement from Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki.

This isn't Google Labs, this isn't a little project off to the side, apparently there's a Google Search Wiki team and they have access to the primary search results page. We expect this to be a very big deal.

Reaction from the Inventor of the Wiki

We asked Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, what he thought about Google Search Wiki. This was his first reaction.

I think it looks pretty sharp. It's simple and powerful - it will respond well to scale. I'm surprised that they called it a wiki. When I heard they wouldn't call a wiki a wiki [Jotspot was renamed Google Sites -ed.], then I decided I wouldn't call my searches Googles. Now that they are calling a wiki a wiki, I guess I'll call my searches Googles again....or should I call them wikis?

I can't tell if they have a wiki there or not, it might just be a forum. Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior and I didn't see that demonstrated in the video.

They are going to get a lot of data. They obviously have the ability to wield information, let's just hope that we will all benefit. I don't think it's obvious that we all will benefit - but I guess I have enough trust in the behavior of a large number of people.

Photo of Cunningham by Joi Ito

eBay Wiki is located at www.ebaywiki.com and the wiki topics are categorized and tagged. You must be logged in as an eBay member to edit a wiki page, which then presents you with an easy-to-use wysiwyg HTML editor. So no awful wiki syntax to learn!

Choosing topics/sub-topics and tags is very easy, as the following screenshot shows:

eBay Wiki also has article history and ratings, the editor's user details and seller/buyer ratings (i.e. their eBay reputation), RSS feeds and other easy-to-use social features.

So why did eBay choose to add a wiki? eBay has a buyer and seller community of more than 193 million members - a huge community that is thriving with conversations and activity. Their message boards get over 100,000 messages per week and eBay users are very knowledgeable on their topic niches. Having a Wiki on eBay will serve to refine and formalize the cream of the content in its user forums. It will also help eBay in the search engine rankings, as its user-generated content coffers will increase significantly over time!

Joe Kraus: it's a Wikipedia for eBay

In a Skype call, Joe Kraus described eBay Wiki to me as "a kind of Wikipedia for eBay and about eBay". He said its main focus is to give "tips and tricks on how to get the most out of eBay". The Wiki will complement and build on the eBay forums, in that the wiki will be a "single point of reference" on topics. 

Joe sees eBay Wiki as another step towards wikis coming of age and becoming mainstream. I agree, the use of wikis from one of the Internet's biggest consumer companies may be vital to their uptake outside of tech and enterprise circles. Joe said eBay will promote the Wiki as part of their community hub and eBay CEO Meg Whitman is announcing it in her keynote address at the eBay Live! user conference in Las Vegas today.

Wiki, the collaborative editing of web pages named after a Hawaiian word for "fast," was kind of like the Twitter, or blogging, of its day. Wiki is just about as old as blogging and both belong in the same category of wildly disruptive technologies.

Every time a person learns that they can edit the content on a web page, view the history of edits by other people and become a part of that history as their edits become subject to further editing - that's a life-changing experience. 14 years and a whirlwind of innovation later, wiki is still probably the best example of collaboration on this social technology we call the web.

So thanks, Ward, for inventing the wiki. The world is a much better place for it.

Cunningham celebrated the 14th birthday of the wiki at the office of wiki company AboutUs. He's the CTO there, the first job he's ever had at a wiki company it turns out. (He's famous in the world of Extreme Programming as well.)

AboutUs celebrated the historic day with a birthday cake that the whole staff tried to blow out together and a blog post about the event, which was collaboratively edited. You can visit that page and join in the celebration.

It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.

The group says that the Universal Edit Button "will be a convenience to web surfers who are already inclined to contribute, and an invitation to those who have yet to discover the thrill of building a common resource."

"As this kind of public editing becomes more commonplace," they say, "the button may become regarded as a badge of honor. It may serve as an incentive to encourage companies and site developers to add publicly-editable components to their sites, in order to have the UEB displayed for their sites. We hope that this button catalyzes the acceleration of the editable web, and helps accelerate society's trend toward building valued common resources."

We do wonder how many people notice the RSS icon in the browser toolbar, and thus how many people will notice the Universal Edit Button - but we love the idea. The fact is, the world is full of people who don't even know the difference between the address bar and the search bar of their browsers.

Installing this extension is a no-brainer though and could help any of us remember to edit the pages we knew we could but perhaps didn't think about. Seeing all these wiki providers come together to build a common standard is particularly inspiring.

Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that "can create or find" a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to be assigned a theme or topic identifier - then matched up with an existing Wiki page, or if no such page exists then one will be created on-the-fly. I especially like this comment from Don, as it resonates with my own Microcontent Wiki article:

"One great benefit is that comments are no longer second class information: isolated, unindexed, and often overlooked."

My article stated that comments on a weblog post are like a "Microcontent Wiki": it's essentially a conversation based on the topic of the weblog post and anyone can participate. Don's idea is to actually use Wiki technology to track weblog comments - that is, to track weblog conversations. If it can be done, it's a revolutionary idea. The strengths of wikis are that there is one page per conversation (usually on one theme or topic), anyone can publish to them, and conversations can cross-link each other. The strengths of weblogs are that they allow people to own their own publishing space, entries are generally organised chronologically, and they are more flexible - you can expand on topics and organise them how you like. With weblogs, you're master of your domain. However weblogs so far have not been good at organising content by topic, or tracking conversations. Which is of course where Wikis excel. So why not use the strengths of Wikis to enhance the weblogging experience! I think Don is onto something here.

The first two products out the door are Class Reunion Planner and Bug Reporter, but Kraus told me they are planning 30-50 such products this year alone. Plus JotSpot will be enabling third parties to create custom wiki applications - and onsell them. It's quite the wiki app ecosystem that JotSpot is planning...

JotSpot Class Reunion Planner

JotSpot's company strategy is to be "a platform for building collaborative web applications". Currently their reputation is as a hosted wiki company, because the wiki was the first application they rolled out.

During 2005, says Joe, they discovered that people used their wikis for a lot of different uses. On a personal level they used them for planning class reunions, family reunions, planning a wedding, making associations, organizing their sports teams. While on the work level, people used JotSpot wikis in 2005 for things like project management, building an intranet, tracking bugs, running a recruiting process, as an event calendar, etc. However JotSpot found that people had problems adapting their wikis for each specific purpose.

So the theory behind the new pre-packaged wiki applications, is to enable people to utilize wiki technology for the kinds of use cases Joe outlined above.

JotSpot Bug Reporter

The Bug Reporter is a fully-functional bug tracking application, in the form of a wiki. It'll cost $49.95 per month. The JotSpot Class Reunion Planner (cost: $39.95 per year) seems aimed at the post-Facebook.com crowd, potentially a lucrative business. As well as enabling the usual wiki functionaility of reading and writing a webpage, JotSpot's product has links to online maps, blogging tools, and other information from the Web - such as popular songs and movies from your graduation year (coincidentally the demo Joe showed me was for 1989, my graduation year from high school -- Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli were big back then... um, apparently...).

Tomorrow I'll post the second half of my interview with Joe Kraus, in which we discussed the Web Office.

How does a small startup secure capital in such turbulent economic times? Being profitable helps - something AboutUs achieved by mid-year 2008. The company is forecasting continued growth this year. CEO Ray King says the company is targeting $5 million in revenue for 2009. The primary source remains advertising, but the online marketing services AboutUs sells - including content creation and custom page development - continue to gain traction.

AboutUs dynamically creates pages from publicly accessible information on Web sites, like meta tags and whois information. Once built, the pages - like any wiki - are available to be edited by the company, users, or anyone who visits the site. AboutUs also offers monitoring services to facilitate "reputation management" - knowing who is saying what about you where. When a monitored page is edited, users are alerted to both the change and the user who made the edit. And given that it's a wiki page, they can choose how best to deal with the edit.

For more information on the company and its offerings, visit the AboutUs page on AboutUs.org.

When working to advance a new concept or technology, few things are as important as showcasing proven, inspiring use cases. The new CC database does a good job of that. If your organization is interested in making your content easier to distribute, this database is a great place to learn from the experiences of others.

Creative Commons Business and Community Development Manager Jon Phillips says that the database has been in the works for months and was contributed to by quite a few CC community members. That's evident by how well developed the site is, too often things like this are launched while still bare bones.

The database is a part of the Creative Commons wiki, so anyone can add to it. Site navigation is very convenient, see for example the list of organizations using CC for video content.

Two of our favorite examples in the database are the page for the African Sleeping Sickness Test and for Architecture for Humanity. It's pretty great that content like that is available under CC license. The CC content we most often use is from Flickr, but the Flickr case study in the new database is not fleshed out at all. What are some of your favorites?

We expect that this database will prove very useful for people all around the world and for the Creative Commons Foundation.

No Advertising

The Wikimedia Foundation has always declined to run advertising on its pages. Given that it is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it could surely make more than $6.2 million in revenue every year, but the organization, and Jimmy Wales in particular, have always vehemently rejected this idea in favor of direct donations from users.

Mememoir is a completely new development and as of now, its only deployment is in the form of the WikiGenes wiki. Both Mememoir and Wikigenes, a database of literature about genetic information, were created by Robert Hoffmann, a fellow at Society in Science in Switzerland and a visiting scientist at MIT.

For scientists in academia, publications are the lifeblood of their careers. Having published in a wiki is not going to persuade a tenure track committee anytime soon, but the systems that Mememoir puts in place might just make those contributions stand out a bit more. Besides attribution, Mememoir also gives its users the ability to rates authors and their contributions.

The developers are still looking at their options for possibly open-sourcing the code behind Mememoir. As Robert Hoffmann pointed out to us, the project will look at its options at a later time and is mostly focused on running the Wikigenes project for now.

WikiGenes

The information in WikiGenes itself was based on iHop, another project by Hoffman (and not the infamous chain of pancake houses). The idea behind iHop is that information about a single gene can often be dispersed over hundreds of different academic papers, which makes finding and synthesizing all this data extremely hard. IHop used algorithms to parse all this information and bring it together in one database, which was then used to seed WikiGenes.

According to Hoffmann, the idea behind WikiGenes is that it will combat this dispersal of information in the first place, as scientists can enter their research results into the database directly.

Trust and Authorship

WikiTrust, which rates authors on Wikipedia according to an algorithm is trying to do something similar for all of the Wikipedia, but Mememoir takes this to a more personal level. Both systems are, of course, potentially fraught with problems, but it will be interesting to see if scientists will warm up to the wiki model.

We would really like to see Hoffmann and his team open up the code to Mememoir, as the wiki itself is a highly capable piece of code that looks flexible enough to power any kind of wiki - academic or not. In testing it, it turned out one of the easiest to use wikis we have seen so far and it could surely benefit a lot of different projects in the long run. If you would like to see it in action, the project has create a short screen-cast that you can see here.

Jon Udell on RSS: "It's about a new way of communicating, one that's defined by personal publishing and subscribing, and that empowers writers and readers as never before."

Amen to that, brother.

People are trying to change RSS into something called Echo. If you want to know why, then I recommend you check out Jon Udell's conversation with Mr Safe. But also read Dave Winer's post in reply. And if you really have to, browse the Echo Wiki.

Midlife Crisis

During a talk at the Semantic Community-Semantic Exchange Workshop, Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, outlined some of the reasons for this reluctance to adopt the Intellipedia.

One of these reasons cited by Rasmussen is a fear of the unknown. Instead of solely relying on Intellipedia, users often use additional, unconnected systems to save their information as well. Rasmussen also notes that some users are simply not comfortable with contributing information to a social-networking tool.

Rasmussen also points out some problems with the grass-roots approach that is at the core of the Intellipedia, which, by the way, is built on top of MediaWiki, the same software that powers the popular Wikipedia. As there is no standard for tagging articles, for example, users often use very 'agency-centric' terms to tag their posts, or use the wrong tags altogether.

Solution: Force People to Use It (?)

The solution to this? Rasmussen tells the GCN that the grass-roots approach has gotten them this far, but that a top-down approach might be necessary to push the project further: "This is work. We force people to do stuff [they don't want to do] all the time -- we make people come in sober and wear clothes. In certain cases top-down may not work, but in certain cases it does."