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

Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

The History of Common Craft

Common Craft started out as a consultancy focused on creating and teaching organizations about online communities. Lee LeFever left his day job and opened up shop in 2003. He blogged prolifically and worked with a number of large clients in the earliest days of social media.

One of his most notable projects was working with consultant Nancy White on the very successful community Share Your Story, a March of Dimes site where parents with children in the neonatal ICU could find support. Share Your Story is still one of the most successful use cases of niche social networking online.

By 2007 the LeFevers began trying something that many social media consultants and trainers try - they began making videos explaining certain tools and trends emerging online. They tried using white boards and other methods but nothing really stood out - until Sachi LeFever thought to put the white board on the ground, cut out some simple cartoon figures and use a stop motion method of animation.

The Common Craft Show was thus born. April 2007 saw the company's first video in their now famous style, called RSS in Plain English. Though Common Craft's production skills have improved dramatically as they've produced video after video - RSS in Plain English remains the best introduction to RSS on the web.

One month later, Common Craft published a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Two months after this five year old consultancy began producing the simple introductory videos, the LeFevers decided they wanted to dedicate 100% of their time to the series and they stopped doing online community consulting.

Over the next year, Common Craft produced videos for clients, for general interest and for fun on a wide variety of topics. From California School Financing, to the company PR Web, to Zombies in Plain English (not to be confused with the PR Web client video) - the breadth was really impressive.

Hold the Show!

The Common Craft show was a huge success. Inquiries from clients were coming fast and furious, the company saw between five and ten inquiries for custom videos every day. Why have Lee and Sachi decided to stop making custom videos then? We asked them and this is what they told us.

"This was a perfect fit for us - we could work from home, make a good living and work on fun projects with interesting companies and people. And it's been a blast. But soon we started to look at the possibilities. A few things were clear:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What Now?

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved. "People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

Fortunately, all the social media work the company has done has put them in a place of great prominence regarding the issues they tackle. People love their videos, so they get a lot of links and have excellent search engine ranking.

When the Common Craft Store opened in April, the first video sold within two hours. Last month, video licenses were bought by individuals and organizations in nine countries around the world. The LeFevers report that their customers include Fortune 500 tech, chemical and services companies, school districts and Universities, government agencies, individual consultants and educators.

The store isn't operating in the black yet, but it is covering their business expenses and "a nice chunk of our living expenses." We hope Common Craft can go all the way and support themselves fully with this work. An ad-free business model, developed by two independent creatives, is very inspiring.

Though the videos seem simple, each one takes days to prepare. The hardest part of making them, Lee LeFever says, is really nailing down clear, effective explanations of these concepts. It's a powerful skill set that Lee and Sachi bring to an interesting new market.

We love the fact that there are enough people willing to pay for this kind of content that Common Craft has decided to make it their sole business strategy. We've written here about the most awesome freelance producers of custom screen casts we know but when the LeFevers told us they'd left those ranks we were very curious to hear the details about what they are doing next.

We think their story can inspire anyone who dreams of making a living doing good work and exploring new ways to do business on a changing Internet.

Recent Landmarks

We profiled Wikileaks last winter when the site was temporarily taken offline for US visitors by a court injunction in California. The judge in that case quickly reversed his injunction and the site lived on to post more whistle blowing reports.

From Apple iPhone documents to internal communications by the Church of Scientology, Wikileaks is publishing secrets fast and furious regarding some of the most high profile issues of the day.

Probably its most high profile post went up last week, though. On Friday, November 21st Wikileaks published the entire membership and contact list of the white nationalist British National Party. Record numbers of people flooded the Wikileaks site to scour over the list and see if they recognized names on it. Police officers, members of the Army, former and serving prison officers and a number of school teachers were identified. At least one police officer identified has been publicly rebuked by his employer.

Wikileaks published 24 more documents since the Party list, including a copy of a pamphlet that Party members were arrested for distributing in Liverpool. The site condemned the arrests and argued that politically repugnant speech was the most important kind to protect.

Next Steps

As Wikileaks continues to raise its public profile, publishing a greater number of damning documents and facing more intense scrutiny - the organization is communicating very publicly about the ethical, legal and technical challenges it faces on a companion blog called Wikileak.org.

"We have never lost a source, never lost a case and have never been successfully censored," the site says. Now we'll see if their supporters can help them scale up to new heights and still maintain that record.

When Mahalo first launched, my instinctive reaction (which I recorded on my personal Blog) was that this was "old wine in new bottles". Traditional publishers have been doing "human powered search" even BI (Before Internet) but these went by boring names like Directory. Human editors work great in well defined niches, always have done and always will. Human editors produce the expert content that Google finds for you. This is long tail publishing. This is Business Media and Enthusiast Media, large but slow growth traditional publishing segments of the media industry.

But an Internet scale venture powered by humans rather than software? We look at three reasons why this might work and two reasons why it won't work.

Three Pros And Two Cons

Most ventures in this space highlight three things that a human editor can always do better than a software program. These are the three Pros:

1. Spam control. Humans can easily spot even the most ingenious spam .

2. Duplicate control. 10 articles that all say virtually the same thing are just a waste of time.

3. Disambiguation. Computers need an awful lot of expensive programming to always spot the difference between "apple" as a fruit, a consumer electronics company or a record label. Humans can do it in a flash.

The two Cons:

1. You cannot persuade people to break their Google habit until your searches are better than Google for most cases (not just the few cases where you specialize). This massive hurdle is true for all search engines.

2. You cannot win as a destination site if you are general purpose. You go to the sites that specialize in the areas that interest you. If you don't know what sites to go to, Google will find those sites for you.

So, do three Pros beat two Cons? Not in this case. The Pros are three relatively minor irritants that human powered search fixes. The Cons are total showstoppers.

Pay People To Write Content?

Mahalo pays people to create content. That means they can predict the quality of the results. Paying people requires lots of funding. Mahalo has plenty of funding and it is unlikely anybody else will get funded with the same model. So Mahalo has a fairly long and clear runway before take-off. Mahalo is private company so we don't know how long it will take them to get to profitability or even if the basic economics make profitability feasible at all. In today's climate, nobody will buy Mahalo without a clear path to profitability.

Are you Bullish or Bearish on Mahalo? Cast your vote in our Company Index (powered by TradeVibes). My vote was Bearish and I was in the majority at the time I cast my vote (80% Bullish vs 20% Bearish). The sample size on that vote was too low to be meaningful (40), so the more votes the better.

The Elephant In The Community Generated Content Room

Most other ventures get "the community" to create the content. The elephant in this room is of course Wikipedia. How on earth do you get general knowledge content that is better at scale than Wikipedia? How do you motivate people to create content if, unlike Mahalo, you are not paying their salaries? Google's answer with Knol was to pay them indirectly via Adsense revenue. The market jury on Knol is still out. If Google cannot win, how can any other start-up without their brand power? If the Knol competitor also monetizes through Adsense, their margin is even less.

About The Players

The other well funded venture that wears the human powered search label is Wikia. Founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame, this looks like the largest pure Wiki style venture. Content is community generated, but it appears that they have editors/moderators/curators on payroll.

Squidoo looks like a bootstrapped venture. It is hard to tell if it has traction. Looking at Squidoo's page on TradeVibes will point to many other inexpensive Wiki style ventures. The basic technology of Wikis is now a total commodity.

One of the earliest ventures, About.com, is now owned by the New York Times. On my survey of one, About is the one site other than Wikipedia that surfaces a lot in general knowledge type searches. At the scale they operate, it may well be profitable. So Mahalo, Wiki and other human powered search engines may have a bright future.

What do you think? Can general purpose human powered search engines scale and make money? Or will they either fail or move into small niches? What new ventures have a fundamentally differentiated approach to this market?

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.

One of the best features in the latest version of GroupSwim is the new integrated wiki application which puts GroupSwim in more direct competition with services like Central Desktop, existing SharePoint implementations, and Confluence and less directly with other wiki providers like Wetpaint, for example, as well as with other group collaboration suites like Grou.ps.

With GroupSwim's wiki solution, you don't have to learn any sort of technical markup code. Instead, their WYSIWYG editor is easy to use and lets anyone write, share, and collaborate on documents with other team members. You can insert files, images, widgets, and tables into the wiki and if you mess something up, content can be quickly recovered thanks to the wiki's versioning feature. The wiki also offers built in access control permissions so admins can specify who is allowed to edit pages.

Another change to GroupSwim is the addition of system APIs. Where before they offered only a couple (single sign-on and member management), they now have a whole host of APIs to let you better integrate their software with other third party systems your company may be using.

Other features included in the latest update are:

• Redesigned home page for feed style information across all groups
• Hidden groups that are invisible unless user is a member of the group
• New email notification permissions let you tune who can send email notifications
• Improved auto-tagging capability
• Insert files and images directly into discussions and wiki pages
• Various performance enhancements

Why GroupSwim Works

So far, GroupSwim has been so successful in making a name for themselves in the Enterprise 2.0 space, first getting selected as an Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad finalist and more recently being selected as one of the 12 finalists out of some 85 companies to be a Preview Company at the SIIA OnDemand Conference in November.

We think the reason for the company's success goes beyond the software's feature set alone. What's really appealing about GroupSwim is how easy it is to use. After having spent years editing and uploading files to SharePoint, using GroupSwim is a breath of fresh air - it doesn't feel like work. And that's quite the accomplishment because behind the software's simple Web 2.0 interface, they offer a robust feature set which includes things like role-based permissions, private groups, support for rich media, the ability to embed both Zoho and Google Docs, the ability to add files via email, document previews on the web, suggestive search, and more.  How they managed to cram in all those features while making the software appear so easy is beyond us.

For more info on how GroupSwim works, check out this post which delves into the details of the software including its semantic features. However, the best way to get a feel for how GroupSwim works is to visit their demo sites. On this page, there are three different sites already set up for you to explore. 

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.

Common Craft started out as a consultancy focused on creating and teaching organizations about online communities. Lee LeFever left his day job and opened up shop in 2003. He blogged prolifically and worked with a number of large clients in the earliest days of social media.

One of his most notable projects was working with consultant Nancy White on the very successful community Share Your Story, a March of Dimes site where parents with children in the neonatal ICU could find support. Share Your Story is still one of the most successful use cases of niche social networking online.

By 2007 the LeFevers began trying something that many social media consultants and trainers try - they began making videos explaining certain tools and trends emerging online. They tried using white boards and other methods but nothing really stood out - until Sachi LeFever thought to put the white board on the ground, cut out some simple cartoon figures and use a stop motion method of animation.

The Common Craft Show was thus born. April 2007 saw the company's first video in their now famous style, called RSS in Plain English. Though Common Craft's production skills have improved dramatically as they've produced video after video - RSS in Plain English remains the best introduction to RSS on the web.

One month later, Common Craft published a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Two months after this five year old consultancy began producing the simple introductory videos, the LeFevers decided they wanted to dedicate 100% of their time to the series and they stopped doing online community consulting.

Over the next year, Common Craft produced videos for clients, for general interest and for fun on a wide variety of topics. From California School Financing, to the company PR Web, to Zombies in Plain English (not to be confused with the PR Web client video) - the breadth was really impressive.

Hold the Show!

The Common Craft show was a huge success. Inquiries from clients were coming fast and furious, the company saw between five and ten inquiries for custom videos every day. Why have Lee and Sachi decided to stop making custom videos then? We asked them and this is what they told us.

"This was a perfect fit for us - we could work from home, make a good living and work on fun projects with interesting companies and people. And it's been a blast. But soon we started to look at the possibilities. A few things were clear:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What Now?

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved. "People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

Fortunately, all the social media work the company has done has put them in a place of great prominence regarding the issues they tackle. People love their videos, so they get a lot of links and have excellent search engine ranking.

When the Common Craft Store opened in April, the first video sold within two hours. Last month, video licenses were bought by individuals and organizations in nine countries around the world. The LeFevers report that their customers include Fortune 500 tech, chemical and services companies, school districts and Universities, government agencies, individual consultants and educators.

The store isn't operating in the black yet, but it is covering their business expenses and "a nice chunk of our living expenses." We hope Common Craft can go all the way and support themselves fully with this work. An ad-free business model, developed by two independent creatives, is very inspiring.

Though the videos seem simple, each one takes days to prepare. The hardest part of making them, Lee LeFever says, is really nailing down clear, effective explanations of these concepts. It's a powerful skill set that Lee and Sachi bring to an interesting new market.

We love the fact that there are enough people willing to pay for this kind of content that Common Craft has decided to make it their sole business strategy. We've written here about the most awesome freelance producers of custom screen casts we know but when the LeFevers told us they'd left those ranks we were very curious to hear the details about what they are doing next.

We think their story can inspire anyone who dreams of making a living doing good work and exploring new ways to do business on a changing internet.

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 study was written up on Robin Good's excellent blog Master New Media.

According to the study's authors, "26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. It is clear that this group of fast-growing companies considers the use of social media as a central part of its strategic plan."

Social networking is the most familiar of the technologies. In 2007, wikis were the least familiar but they have since leapfrogged over podcasting.

It's notable that the study's authors found much more extensive use and growth in use in the fastest growing 500 US companies than they found in the Fortune 500, the largest companies. It would be a logical fallacy to argue that the fastest growing companies are growing fastest because of their use of social media, but it could be a factor. It could also be the case that insurgent companies have a greater incentive and proclivity to experiment than incumbent industry leaders.

Three interesting charts from the study can be found below, followed by links to related studies and a few thoughts.

Related recent studies include Universal McCann's findings that half of adults in the US now use some form of social media online and the April prediction from Forrester Research that "Enterprise 2.0" will become a $4.6 billion industry over the next 5 years.

What does this mean? It means that when you tell people you write, read or listen to blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and online video - if they give you a funny look, it is now officially them that's a freak, not you. Are these tools really as useful as so many people appear to believe they are? That's another question, but at least we're getting a healthy number of people and businesses trying them out.

Another relevant data point to keep in mind might be analyst firm Gartner's "Hype Cycle," though. If this graph accurately expresses business sentiment then adoption doesn't equal satisfaction. Qualitative analyst studies like this are always very controversial, though.

See Master New Media for the full write up on the Inc. 500 report.

Top image from Robert Sanzalone.

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.

Going Open Source

In open-sourcing its application, Grou.ps is following in the steps of a growing number of formerly closed source online services that have decided to go this route lately, with Reddit probably being the most prominent one. Grou.ps argues that this move will allow them to commoditize the Grou.ps platform and give them a competitive advantage to hire the most talented programmers from the pool of open source contributors.

However, opening up the code is not a panacea for developers by any means - while some programs flourish once a lot of developers get their hands on the code, others have a hard time developing an active developer community around their open source offerings.

Grou.ps' closest competitor, Ning, has a considerably larger user base and offers a very similar service. However, while Ning has advertising on its pages, grou.ps does not - though you can add your own AdSense code to the site. Ning, so far, has raised about $104 Million in four funding rounds.

Disclosure: Grou.ps founder Emre Sokullu has been a contributor to ReadWriteWeb in the past.

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.

Next Gen Apps Won't Be Pushed Around By the Browser

The invention of the browser was a huge boon to the internet and a substantial amount of computing now goes on through that interface we've grown to love. The internet is not a place where innovation takes a break, though, and a new generation of applications are emerging that have a different relationship with the web browser.

From taking control of the browser to connecting to the web outside of it, there are a number of new strategies being implemented by startups these days. In the following post we discuss seven different ways that new apps are telling browsers "you 'aint the boss of me now!" Some you'll be familiar with, but some you may not be.

Wikis Are Now Serious Business

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.

How to Make Facebook Useful Again

Oh the heels of some of Facebook's missteps (ahem, Beacon) and the proliferation of a myriad of useless, silly, and time-wasting apps, some former Facebook users decided to quit the site for good this year. However, a handful of early adopter angst doesn't have Facebook worried. Why is that? Because Facebook has a whole generation of users who grew up using their site for everything social back when it was just a way to network with their high school or college friends. So what are the everyday Facebook users doing that keeps them engaged in the service? It's not throwing sheep, apparently. For many Facebook users, there are still useful apps to be found and ways to use the service that the rest of us could learn from.

See also: Why There Should Be Web Search on Facebook and Facebook Censoring User Messaging: Spam Prevention or Unaccountable Control of Conversation?

Google Health Launches - Cautious, Non-Innovative Entry into Health 2.0

This week Google announced the public availability of Google Health, after initially launching as a closed beta back in February. It is described as "a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage [your] medical records and health information online" and is being positioned as a way for users to control their own medical records.

Google Health is a decent entry into the game-changing (and potentially hugely profitable) world of health 2.0. But in comparison with other health startups, Google Health has a limited scope and is not as innovative a service as we've come to expect from Google...

The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Recently we discussed some of the problems plaguing mobile social networks. These problems include location, marketing strategies and compatibility issues. Our readers also contributed their thoughts on hardware compatibility and GPS. While no network is perfect, in this post we profile some of the key players in the market. Here's a look at four mobile social networks that may have what it takes.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Report: The Mobile Web is the New Hangout

According to Opera's survey of the more 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking -- up to 60% in some countries, including the US. Compare that to about 6% of total web traffic for social networks outside of the mobile web. That's not overly surprising, though, given the recent proliferation of new smartphones aimed at consumers (or at least phones that can view the full web), made ultra-chic over the past year by Apple's iPhone. Says Opera, 3/4ths of mobile web traffic is now to the full web, rather than WAP or .mobi sites, which are quickly becoming out-moded.

See Also: To Beat Google, Beat Google to the Mobile Web

Do you use the mobile web? Remember to vote in our poll below.

Social Media U: Take a Class in Social Media

Social media. Web 2.0. You know what these things are and you take advantage of them every day on the net. Whether you're socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter, or just adding a new bookmark to Ma.gnolia, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, that doesn't mean that it's something that everyone innately understands or knows how to use - especially when it comes to using it for marketing, PR, or other business-related purposes. That's why many of today's colleges and universities are now offering "social media" classes as an option for their students.

How to Use Social Media for Social Change

Did you participate in the Twit-Out this week? Do you even know what that is? To get you up to speed, a handful of Twitter users, fed up with the regular outages of their favorite service, decided to band together to show Twitter some tough love by boycotting the service for a day. (Unfortunately, despite having fewer users on the service, Twitter still went down). However, in light of recent world events, it's a shame that the cause the tech community has chosen to rally around is that of Twitter's instability. Aren't there more important things going on right now?

The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search

Last week Josh Catone was watching TV and saw something that really caught his eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product's web site -- SpecialK.com -- it advised people to search Yahoo! for "Special K" instead. He started to wonder two things: 1. is Yahoo! paying Special K for tack-on advertising? and 2. has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?

SemTech Panel: Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses

How will the Semantic Web make the jump to the mainstream? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that happened this week in San Jose. The panel was moderated by Carla Thomson from Guidewire Group and featured Josh Dilworth from Porter Novelli, Tom Tague, who heads the Calais initiative at Reuters, and Mark Johnson, who is a product manager at Powerset. This post is based on notes from that panel.

See also: SemTech Panel: Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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.

Wetpaint in particular features a whole lot of pop-culture crap, but that's where the money is and a return must be secured on $40 million worth of investors' money. Around the rest of the web, though, wikis are used for more than just teen-age starlet fan clubs and rehashing TV show minutia.

Wikis are some of the first online social software that many people in the enterprise come in contact with. They can be very popular for project management work. A recent report from Forrester estimated that enterprises spent $63 million on wikis last year, meaning that the consumer wiki provider Wetpaint has now raised 2/3 as much venture capital as the entire enterprise market spent on the medium last year. Forrester predicts though that by 2013, that spending will grow to $451 million - more than will be spent on blog software, podcasting or widgets.

When thinking about wikis, here are ten use cases that may be useful to consider as you ponder the possibilities. We'll go from the most obvious examples to the most interesting.

Very Simple Publishing

If you've got something that you want to throw up on a web page, to see how it renders or to share it with others, a wiki is one of the easiest and fastest ways to do so. Some people use wikis as personal notepads with version history, as well. If it doesn't have to look fancy and you might want to change it quickly later, try putting it on a wiki.

Check out Liz B. Davis's wiki called Integrating 21st Century Tools into Your Teaching, where you can find slideshow and video tutorials about how to start using tools like Del.icio.us, GMail, Ning, Google Docs and more. It's a great example of using a wiki to quickly and easily share some personal knowledge through a very simple publishing platform.

Building Text for Common Communication

Everyone knows that wikis are good for collaborative writing, but what kinds of things might you write collaboratively? Creative asset management company Extensis uses an internal wiki to craft agreed upon replies to common email inquiries. That sounds like a great time saver and a good way to make sure that day-in-day-out email communication stays helpful, professional and up to date even if it's a snoozer for the people who happen to be sending the replies.

A solution like the SproutIt Mailroom might be more sophisticated, but sometimes you just want something quick and dirty.

Structured Information

Wikis are generally presumed to present nothing but an empty box and a WYSIWYG editor, but that's not always the case. The online community for book readers Shelfari, for example, recently added a section for author wikis. These author wikis are a combination of free text space and a structured, biographical section.

The software used is called DekiWiki, from Mindtouch. Shelfari doesn't use the DekiWiki interface, though, it just ties its pages into DekiWiki services. While Wetpaint Inject is getting some press this week, DekiWiki's API offers more seamless, more powerful integration into partner websites.

Notes for After a Performance

A number of popular podcasts have experimented with setting up a wiki for listeners to fill out show notes about each episode of their shows - but that hasn't worked out very well. If you really want a wiki about a performance to be populated, you're going to have to do it yourself.

No one has done a better job of consistently putting up notes from conference talks than Beth Kanter, one of the most respected nonprofit tech consultants on the web. Kanter posts all of her notes here and makes sure everyone in the audiences of the many good talks she gives knows that URL. A particularly good example can be found in the page she set up for a recent talk about using social media for people in the arts. That one includes several examples of live video broadcast from the presentation using Qik.

Beth has blogged extensively about best practices in using wikis, as well.

Event Organizing

The widely viewed CommonCraft video called Wikis in Plain English uses event organizing, in this case planning a picnic, as its tutorial example. Sure enough, there are any number of organizations around the world using wikis to organize events.

The Toronto Transit Camp is one example of an attractive event wiki. All of Barcamp, an event organized like a wiki and now spread throughout the world, is organized using wikis.

Even the campaign of President-to-be Barack Obama is using a wiki to organize volunteers for his campaign. See also Clinton Attacks Obama, a unofficial wiki created by Baratunde Thurston to track and analyze the race-based attacks against Obama made by the Clinton campaign.

Disaster Relief

When talking about Presidential politics these days, it's hard not to talk about disasters both literal and figurative. Wikis come in handy there too. KatrinaHelp.info got better press for being helpful than FEMA did during Katrina.

Now a new group of people is starting to work on a new wiki to gather resources to send to China to aid victims of the Sichuan Earthquake . That project is just in its formative stages but it could use your support. If you haven't been following the quake in China much, there's an interesting perspective on the event in a series of photos taken by a wedding photographer before and after the quake hit.

News Writing

Can wikis be used to write the news? Only in some cases, but when those succeed they are a real inspiration. The LA Times' infamous experiment turning a 2005 editorial about the Iraq War into a wiki was absurd, but the far more well-informed Wikipedia project called WikiNews appears to be near death as well. If you want to find a good example of a thriving news wiki community, check out the sports site ArmChairGM, one of a number of active sites over at Wikia. The point is, news can be written by wiki - but it's easier said than done.

Discussing Public Policy

For all the hot air offered by democratically elected governments about incorporating citizen input into decision making, wikis are emerging as an interesting way to try to make the process of gathering such input real.

The city of Melbourne, Australia launched an official wiki today to discuss the future of the city. I'd love to see the Mayor of my city on the front page of a wiki asking for contributions!

Likewise, the Dharavi Redevelopment Project is using a wiki to gather resources for use in planning redevelopment of one of India's largest areas of hyper-poverty. Wikis don't have to be a privilege touching only the world's wealthiest people.

Exposing Research Publicly

While wikis are usually thought of as available for public collaboration, they can also be useful in showcasing content developed by a closed group. The Democratic National Committee today unveiled its McCainPedia, a collection of information it's gathering about presumptive Republican Presidential nominee John McCain. Early feedback has included some criticism that the wiki isn't publicly editable, but on the other hand isn't it better to do this closed research in the light of day than not?

Stockholm University's Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry launched a new website this week with the same strategy. The wiki isn't publicly editable, but its members get to use a wiki interface to add content and anyone can view it.

Revive Archived Content

Finally, possibly the most interesting serious use of a wiki that we've seen of late is today's announcement that legacy web developer community WebMonkey has been acquired by Wired.com and is turning all of its archived content into wiki pages. That's a great way to enable a community of users to breathe new life into archived content that is less timely than news stories but could still use some updating.

This is Serious Stuff

Wikis are no longer just for fringe articles on obscure topics and they don't have to just be for pop-culture fluff that over-invested companies can run Adsense next to. Wikis are ready for serious work use, if you're ready for them. That's easier said than done, though. Now that we've shared with you a list of examples illustrating the possibilities, we'll leave you with consultant Stewart Mader's excellent recent video tutorial series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

We hope you've found this informative and inspiring - we'd love to learn about some of your favorite examples of serious uses of wikis. Check out Mader's tips below and then let's go out and wiki!

Wiki bus photo by CogDogBlog.

The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage "precinct captains" -- volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. The campaign started using the software during the run up to an earlier nominating contest in California -- the nation's most populous state. "The Web-based collaboration platform combined with a strong organized grass-roots effort, created unprecedented public involvement that is revitalizing politics in America," said Patrick DeTemple, the California Data & Systems Manager for the Obama campaign. "Not since Bobby Kennedy has there been such an extensive Precinct Captain operation for a presidential candidate in California."

Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals' Basecamp (to put it in some perspective). Though most users are business clients who utilize the software as a private intranet, the Obama campaign is using it to power a public facing wiki to organize information for precinct captains in Texas. According to Garcia, the campaign is using the software on their own without much input beyond basic support from Central Desktop -- or in other words, the campaign has been savvy enough to figure out how to utilize an existing tool for a completely new use case.

In fact, Garcia told me that Central Desktop was actually unaware that the campaign had planned to use their software for additional states following California until they noticed an influx of traffic on their servers going to the campaign's new Texas site. Further, according to Garcia, the idea to use collaboration software to manage precinct captains was actually something that bubbled up in the campaign from the grassroots volunteers who were out in the field.

That the Obama campaign is so tech savvy and so open to using social software is unsurprising. They have run one of the most comprehensive online campaigns in recent memory -- perhaps ever -- generally outperforming opponents on nearly every social network or social media site, and according to a recent post from Ning's Marc Andreesen, Obama has long been very interested in social networking and how it can affect politics.

The specific appeal of Central Desktop's wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. The Texas effort, some of which was cloned over from the previous California site, was literally launched a couple of weeks ago in mid-February.

In 2004, the Howard Dean campaign famously used Meetup.com to mobilize supporters. But Dean's use of Meetup was mostly about bringing supporters together to share a common experience. It was not so much a focused and organized campaigning effort, as Obama's use of Central Desktop's software has been. Garcia was hesitant to say for sure, but he thinks Obama's may be the first campaign to make heavy use of collaboration software to help manage on the ground organization (though, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul both utilized Salesforce.com in their campaigns).

Update: Jason Fried pinged us to let us know that the Obama campaign is actually using Basecamp as well. The new media team at the campaign's national headquarters in Chicago (where 37Signals is based), for example, used Basecamp to collaborate while building BarackObama.com. Basecamp is also being used by some parts of the campaign in New York City to manage events.

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.

Today the company's product, called Dekiwiki, gets an application platform based on its own simple language called dekiscript and a new execution engine. Additionally, a newly organized infrastructure will now allow thousands of wikis to be run with a single multi-tenant install. This should make management of multiple wikis in one organization far easier than ever before.

Also new is easy integration outside data scraped by Dapper.net and displays data using the new Google Charts API wrapped in Dekiscript for easier mashup creation. I really like Dapper a lot - see our most recent coverage of this paradigm changing tool here. This is really what motivates me to write about this release. Nn open source wiki integrating the screen scraping power of Dapper and displaying the data using the Google Charts API is just plain cool.

The company claims it sees 30k free downloads each month and most public discussion of the product is very positive. This past month, the company added open source industry journalist Matt Asay to its board of advisors and released versions of Dekiwiki translated into 9 different languages.

Below is a video from the company showing off all the new features in today's release. There's a lot going on for MindTouch - the company's outlook seems to be getting brighter all the time.