ReadWriteWeb

Five years ago Lee LeFever was an online community manager for a B2B healthcare company called Solucient. Today, his voice has been heard by millions of people around the world, making strange new applications feel easy to use and offering some of the clearest explanations of how the Internet is changing.

LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one.

Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes classified, confidential, censored or otherwise secret documents for anyone to see, put out a call last night for help in advancing the site beyond its remarkable early success. Just a week after publishing one of its most high profile documents yet, the organization sent an email to subscribers last night asking them to "tell us your most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained."

Mahalo popularized the term "human powered search" when they launched just over a year ago. Many of the pitches we get still use that term as part of their positioning. Many of them are bootstrapped, so the price of entry is clearly low. But the upside has not yet been established. In this post we look at the pros and cons of human powered search engines in general, look at some differentiating strategies and ask "what is the future for Human Powered Search?"

GroupSwim is a company whose SaaS collaboration solution uses semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. As an Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad finalist, the company was honored for making enterprise team collaboration fun to use thanks to features like thumbs up/thumbs down voting and its ability to monitor your favorite topics. Recently, GroupSwim released version 5.0 of their collaboration software which includes even more features like wikis, hidden groups, and new system APIs.

Five years ago Lee LeFever was an online community manager for a B2B healthcare company called Solucient. Today, his voice has been heard by millions of people around the world, making strange new applications feel easy to use and offering some of the clearest explanations of how the internet is changing.

LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one. He's gone from social media consulting to co-producing the wildly popular "...In Plain English" video series. Common Craft's videos have been translated into scores of other languages and landed the company big jobs making custom videos for companies like Google, LinkedIn and MeetUp. Now Lee and his wife Sachi LeFever are making another major work transition. They've stopped producing custom videos for clients and have found an interesting new business model.

A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research performed the study for Inc. Magazine and their findings confirm what previous studies have argued as well: social media use is now a major, mainstream activity.

The San Francisco based social groupware provider Grou.ps announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing for $1.1 Million in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps has also announced that it is open sourcing a restricted version of its code under the Affero Public License.

Grou.ps aims to provide users with a comprehensive set of tools to collaborate online and currently has about 200,000 active users worldwide.

Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface.

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.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we explored: next gen apps outside the browser, uses for wikis, Facebook's usefulness (or lack thereof), the public launch of Google Health, and 4 promising mobile social networks. On the trends side we analyzed: the Mobile Web, how to utilize Social Media in education and social change, and the state of the URL. Last but not least we covered this week's SemTech conference, about the Semantic Web.

Only a handful of years ago, it was common to hear people laugh at Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it! How could you take it seriously? These days, just as blogs are, wikis are on their way to winning a reputation as serious publishing platforms.

Free hosted wiki provider Wetpaint announced last night that it's now raised a total of $40 million in venture capital. To celebrate this major financial validation of the wiki world, we thought we'd offer a brief survey of some of the most interesting ways that wikis are being put to serious use today.

The Republican nominating contest for President of the United States is all but sewn up -- Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are footnotes and with 256 GOP delegates at stake today, John McCain may have enough pledged delegates to have his party's nomination in hand by morning. The Democratic contest, however, is still close and all-important primaries today in Texas and Ohio (and important-but-less-so elections in Vermont and my own home state of Rhode Island) could decide the fate of that party's nominee. Yesterday I had a chance to talk with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, whose software is being used by the Obama campaign to manage field operations in Texas.

Wikia, the independent commercial wiki site founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, is releasing components of its very nice social networking toolset under the GNU General Public License 2.0.

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!

Open source wiki vendor MindTouch is releasing a series of major new features Monday and some of them are quite interesting. People used to talk about MindTouch for its outlandish stunts - like working with nutball John Gotts on the short-lived Wiki.com platform and hiring a Bono impersonator to walk the exhibit floor at DEMO. Those days seem like the distant past as now the MindTouch software gets attention on its own.