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.

Having said that, there's no doubt that wikis/weblogs would be much stronger technologies if we could discover how to add layers of structure to the information that we produce using these tools. But that's when the Semantic Web looms into view like a giant blimp and techies start throwing 3-letter acronyms at each other like paper airplanes. Long story short: when the day arrives that we able to structure Web information from the bottom-up in a practical and user-friendly manner, that's when wikis and weblogs may begin to replace CMS's and Doc Mgmt systems.

All this doesn't stop us from implementing wikis and weblogs now as tools to foster collaboration and easy information publishing. That's basically what I'm aiming to achieve at my company. Today I had a look at Twiki and I came across this excellent presentation by Twiki creator Peter Thoeny, which he made to LinuxWorld on 21 Jan 2004. There's a lot of great advice in this presentation, but the things I want to highlight are his views on Knowledge Management. He makes the point that Knowledge Management is typically viewed as "control over content" and this is what conventional CMS's aim to achieve. He argues that knowledge cannot be managed, it can only be enabled. This is a point that resonates with me, because I think that "knowledge" is subjective and therefore cannot be 'captured' as an objective entity. Information can be captured though - and that's where wikis and weblogs come in. They enable anyone and everyone to capture (write down) information. Knowledge needs context - the reader's.

This is all fine and dandy in theory, but the practical reality is I have to convince my company that wikis and/or weblogs are a viable KM solution. A lot of people still subscribe to the "top-down" approach of KM. With regard to Intranets, the top-down approach says that Intranet content needs to be controlled. That there needs to be a gatekeeper or webmaster who decides what is appropriate for publishing and what is not. Of course, I don't agree with this approach - this weblog isn't called Read/Write Web for nothing! To my way of thinking everyone has the right and ability to not just consume information, but produce it too. And this is the fundamental benefit that wikis and weblogs provide. The question is: are corporates ready for the read/write culture, or is the need to control information going to remain for a while yet? I'm asking this question in the context of a corporate Intranet, but it's the exact same question being asked of journalism, politics, marketing weblogs, book publishing, music, etc etc.

All in all, my colleagues were open to using wikis and weblogs - as long as they're targeted at the right problem and to the right audience. That is, ordinary people must be motivated to use the tools ("passionate" is a word that was used) and it must be a suitable context. For example, a Wiki could be used to enable communication between teams, as an alternative to team members using email to send and store work-related information. My colleagues are enthusiastic (albeit slightly skeptical) about me testing out these technologies and seeing what evolves. I'll let you know how it goes!

Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research, stated that despite there being a lot of buzz about the consumer market for web 2.0 applications, "the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space".

For the technologies that Forrester is most bullish on, social networking and wikis, the report stated that the "cultural resistance" to social networks will "eventually break, allowing workers to connect with like-minded colleagues and enabling a collaboration channel that previously didn't exist in the enterprise." On wikis, Forrester noted that users have already reported success with wiki projects and it expects this to grow even more. Wikis are most successful, said Forrester, when sponsored by business leaders and connected to business processes.

Forrester estimated in April that the enterprise 2.0 market will hit $4.6 billion by 2013. They also predicted in October that enterprise 2.0 apps will fall dramatically in price. So while the overall value of enterprise web applications will increase, the amount vendors charge for them is expected to decline over time.

This week I spoke to Ross Mayfield, CEO of wiki company SocialText, about "Enterprise 2.0". To put it very crudely, Enterprise 2.0 means blogs and wikis in the enterprise. According to Ross and others, Enterprise 2.0 is slightly different to the "Office 2.0" or Web Office meme also doing the rounds. In our discussion Ross defined Enterprise 2.0 as "free form social software adapted for enterprises". Rod Boothby says it means "Emergence Software", while M.R. Rangaswami of Sand Hill Group wrote an in-depth article to try and explain the concept.

I have to admit I'm less concerned with how the term is defined (or even what term we use), than where the market for web-based software is heading and what products are out there right now. So let's get to the nitty gritty...

Like JotSpot, which we profiled on Read/WriteWeb recently, SocialText aims to extend the notion of wikis. Or as Ross put it at the time of the SocialText 2.0 launch:

"The solution isn't turning the wiki into yet-another-enterprise-tool, but to raise the bar on what a wiki can be, while making it open and extensible."

Best of breed apps vs office software incumbents

In our talk, Ross said that enterprise software incumbents will enter the market next year. For example Microsoft's Sharepoint will bundle in blogs and wikis and IBM Websphere will have wiki modules. But Ross' theory is that there are a number of "best of breed" web applications that are well positioned to compete against the big companies.

SocialText itself is positioning itself as "best of breed wiki application". Other best of breed apps mentioned by Ross were SixApart (blogs) and Newsgator or Attensa (enterprise RSS). In contrast Sharepoint, said Ross, is a suite that is "trying to be everything to everybody". So he believes there is still room for best of breed web innovation.

This is something I've long been a proponent of too. In February this year, I wrote a post entitled Web Office Suite: best of breed products. In that post I listed out a number of best of breed Web Office apps - like Gmail, Zimbra, BaseCamp. These are web apps that are Web Native and take full advantage of what the Web has to offer - plus they are focused on certain core functionalities.

The other point here is that we're talking about a new breed of enterprise software. Wikis and blogs are part of that, but there are many more hybrid Web Office apps in active development that are changing the game for office software - Zimbra, Morfik, Dabble DB are just a few examples.

Google said in July that it would be adding JotSpot to Google Apps, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. The Google Operating System blog speculates that the launch will be timed with an announcement at this weekend's Office 2.0 event in San Francisco.

Certainly Google Apps is not as comprehensive as Zoho's suite, but adding wikis and presentations will put it on firm footing in the web office wars and extends it into areas that Microsoft Office does not tread.

It's a big deal, it's awkward, it's frightening, it's brave, it's already both loved and hated - but it's not a wiki. As Ward Cunningham, the man who invented wikis, told us in our initial coverage of SearchWiki, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior..." Days into the experiment it's clear that this feature is more like a forum, and it's not a particularly well architected one at that.

There's no way to reach consensus, or stasis, in SearchWiki. You can't see the past history of anyone who contributes. Documents don't change, they just get bigger. There's no discussion of the "wiki" document, just the document itself.

The Two Biggest Problems With SearchWiki

There are two major problems with SearchWiki, beyond the fact that it's not a wiki. First, the usability is awful. It's really bad. Users have the visual UI of Google, famous for being clean and clear of disruptions, but if they want to view the markup from other users they have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the search results page. Then, in many cases, clicking that button just tells you there are no wiki results. It's a terrible user experience.

Second, there's no changing, challenging or hiding anything that's been posted. Try a search for McDonald's, for example. There are two notes - one from some random web designer that's spamming the "wiki" with a link to his page, the other from some joker testing the obscenity filter. Neither can be removed, edited, nothing. We presume that the McDonald's PR department has seen this - but is there anything that even they can do about it? Apparently not. Wait until it's you that has things you don't like appended to the page just one click away from page 1 Google for your name - what are you going to do about it?

This Could Be Big

Wikipedia has a big, engaged community that's worked out some practices and tools to make it all work as well as it does. Google, on the other hand, threw hundreds of millions of people into a forum, called it a wiki and left everyone to their own devices.

Wikis are something very special. They are one of the first types of social software that many business users are introduced to at work. Wikis are used for every kind of collaborative effort you can imagine, from tracking the history of politicians, to sharing best practices for librarians to categorizing every living species on earth. Wikis are not forums for dropping comments, spam and thumbing up your favorite web pages.

There's a whole lot of potential here - but as it is Google SearchWiki is an absolute train wreck. Maybe when larger and larger numbers of people wash over it things will get better. We're not so sure, though.

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.

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.

"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.

Dina also adds, about KM in general:

I'm not sure this fits into traditional definitions of Knowledge Management (i really dislike the term) - i wish someone would coin a really neat term for it.

I feel the same about the phrase "Knowledge Management". To me, KM is full of fluffy words and phrases that have little practical value in the real world. It's too easy for so-called "Knowledge Management Consultants" to swan into organisations and pontificate about leveraging 'this' and setting up processes for 'that'. It's all so top-down, all talk and no action. The thing I like about wikis and weblogs is that it's bottom-up, there are no rules or processes or KM systems trying to pen workers in like sheep. KM is like a sheepdog and KM Consultants are the Shepherds. Except the 'sheep' are actually people, not sheep, so they resist herding.

With wikis and weblogs, people can just click a button and type (notice I said 'can' - it remains to be seen whether they actually do). People can produce information, subscribe to information they value, edit each others information. It's like a flow of information and Knowledge gets created in the mix and mingle of it all.

Information Flow is the term I suggested to Dina to replace Knowledge Management. It's not an original term, I've heard people like Dave Winer use it. Information Flow is what wikis and weblogs enable. To "manage" knowledge suggests a top-down approach where we get to tell Knowledge what to do. Well guess what, knowledge can't be ordered around. Information routes itself around of its own free will. What's more, Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder - i.e. it's a Subjective thing, not Objective. Am I mixing my metaphors? Sorry, it is late on a Friday...

Hey, maybe I can style myself as an "Information Flow Consultant" :-) I'll get the business card made up on Monday morning!

Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...

The other way startups are adding innovation to the enterprise is through new types of products that are tackling problems such as information overload. An example that we've been wanting to mention for a while now is Cognition Technologies, which is licensing its semantic web technologies to various organizations. Cognition's Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is being used for a number of different applications, from health to law. While not so much enterprise at this time, it's easy to see how Cognition's technology could be used to filter information where ever there is a large data set - which is many businesses these days.

Graphic from Cognition's website

What other startups and products have you noticed lately that are tackling the 'info overload' problem - and so boosting productivity - in organizations?

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price, which ends this Friday.

Like a Microsoft Office for social tools, Grou.ps offers the following modules: chat, blog aggregation, wikis, talks (forum + mailing list), photo albums, links (bookmarks and news), calendaring, maps, subgroups, and people (profiles).

Each module can be customized as to its size and contents and, unlike some of Grou.ps' competitors, modules can co-exist on the same page. The group admin sets the permissions to these various modules at a fine level of control, specifying who can read the content and who can edit the content for each item.

The platform comes with different templates you can choose from, but none of them have any sort of Grou.ps branding - they are yours to customize.

Grou.ps also offer mobile access and a stats package, so you can see how popular certain modules or activities are. You can check out some existing groups from the site's homepage, or, to learn more, check out this video:

Grou.ps, backed by Golden Horn Ventures, is now going into public beta, but they already have over 150,000 users.

Disclosure: Emre Sokullu is a contributor to ReadWriteWeb.

The ability to set up an Open Source social network is now available to anyone who can put a Mediawiki install on their servers. Look out Ning and other proprietary social networking platforms!

ArmchairGM in particular has been a big social networking innovator in the Wiki market and was acquired to help drive the design of the whole Wikia ecosystem. That site is made up of news driven editorial and has a remarkably active community of participants.

Why do social networking on a wiki? On one hand, a wiki is just a web site that's easy for anyone to edit - see Mahalo for example, another Mediawiki-based community. Beyond that though, social networking features create more points of contact for users with a website and help populate the site with content far beyond what the site's owners or solitary users editing alone could put in.

What's Included

The source code released offers Wikia's features for profile creation, avatar upload, friending (and "foeing" - the making of enemies in a network!), and a Facebook-"Wall" style messaging system for individual and group friend messaging called the Board. These features are now available for Mediawiki-based sites anywhere on the web, including for commercial use.

[Story continued below screenshot of profile page]

There are quite a few other features on ArmchairGM that I wish were being released but aren't. See the Digg-spy style Site Scout, for example. The Recent Changes display on GM is also quite nice but not being open sourced.

Why This Matters

This release is sure to be of interest to the owners of and participants in thousands of Mediawiki-based communities focused on a wide range of topics.

More generally, though, it could impact the social news and networking economy overall. We wrote earlier this week that the big social news aggregator model (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz) is vulnerable to market share erosion at the hands of niche social news sites. The same can be said for the big, general interest social networking sites. While most users will probably always want some presence on big sites, the potential is there to have the majority of communication online occur in a targeted niche community of people interested in and informed about the specific topics that an individual is interested in.

Related Resources

If you're interested in the wacky world of wikis, here's an RSS feed of blog posts about wikis (filtered with FeedRinse to remove mentions of Jotspot just because that's going to clog the airwaves for the next 48 hours), here's a wonderful video explaining wikis in plain english from CommonCraft, and here is wiki consultant Stewart Mader's great short video series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

Back in July, JotSpot released its 2.0 version. It was described by Joe Kraus at that point as "wikis meets Microsoft Office". The upgrade enabled JotSpot users to collaborate on different types of "office-like" products. Its spreadsheet product, Tracker, was integrated into their core wiki product - along with calendars, File Cabinets, Photo Pages.

New Features

In the latest release of JotSpot, more apps have been added to their application gallery: group directory, forum and To Do Lists. Nothing revolutionary there, but it beefs up their Office Suite credentials a bit more. This screenshot from their Applications Gallery page shows the latest list of office (aka productivity) apps:

Page Type Model

These are all "Page Types", which basically means different types of productivity applications presented as Wiki pages. The theory behind this, Joe told me, is that all the Page Types "have this wiki-esque properties - they're group editable, they're immediately collaborative, they have the same access control model on top of them."

Hybrid Wiki/Office

Joe said to me that although JotSpot still positions itself as a wiki nowadays - they don't necessarily see themselves in that space in 5-10 years. But he said the metaphor of wikis still has appeal to people, as a representation of the Web's shift from a monolog to a dialog - aka the read/write web! JotSpot then is about "bringing the familiarity that people have with office [software] and bringing the Wiki metaphor to that." In essence, bringing the 'dialog' and collaboration features of wikis into the office environment.

I completely agree with Joe that Web Office startups need to do things differently and more Web native than Microsoft (and Google). Indeed that's the topic I spoke about in my recent Office 2.0 Podcast Jam podcast.

Screenshots of new JotSpot features

To conclude, here are screenshots of the latest new JotSpot Page Types:

Group Directory

Forum

To Do List

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!