March 2009

Wiki Turns 14 - Thanks Ward!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
I?m a day late on this, I know? it?s been a crazy week. The AboutUs blog posted a happy birthday message to wiki technology yesterday and launched WikiBirthday.org to celebrate. The first wiki created by Ward Cunningham (who went on to start AboutUs) went live 14 years ago yesterday. The commemoration got lots of attention on Twitter, and a NYT syndicated post in ReadWriteWeb.

Boston Needs a Calagator
Monday, March 23, 2009
Perusing session notes from Recent Changes Camp 2009, I came across a mention of Calagator, a unified calendar for the technology community of Portland, Oregon. The site is a custom Rails application that serves as an events calendar with wiki-style open posting and editing. The data model is simple: Events and Venues. The site?s narrow focus, open access and simplicity make it a great resource. It also shows that Portland has a very active technology culture.

Wikipedia Revolution
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
A book released today by Andrew Lih chronicles the story of Wikipedia. The timing is great - it seems more and more like Wikipedia is almost ?finished?. Not that it will stop changing and growing, but the bulk of steady content it needs to be great is there. It?s the 9th most visited web site on the Internet (thanks in large part to Google bumping it to the top of most search results) and there?s talk of publishing sections of it with real paper.

TV Show Wikis: A Perfect Marriage
Monday, March 16, 2009
One of the most prolific categories of wiki use is the TV show fan wiki. Freebie wiki hosts Wetpaint and Wikia have practically built their business on them. All of the eight sites highlighted on Wetpaint?s home page are TV show fan sites, and Wikia has made an art of Top 10 entertainment mashup lists as pointers into various TV and movie wikis. As somebody who doesn?t watch much TV, I am amazed at the devotion and time fans pour into these often gargantuan sites. It appears that having an active fan wiki has become a marketing must-have for network television.

New Amazon EC2 Pricing - Discount Calculation
Friday, March 13, 2009
Amazon has lowered their EC2 instance pricing with an annual commitment. The deal is you pay a fixed price up front for 1 or 3 years. For that, Amazon significantly lowers the cost per instance hour (you still only pay for the hours you use) and guarantees that an instance of the type you reserved will be available whenever you need it during your 1 or 3 year period. This is great for customers that run full time servers on EC2 or want to know that their 50 backup instances will be there in a pinch when they need them and are willing to pay for that assurance.

Sound Pedagogy Makes Classroom Wikis a Success
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I had tagged a post on classroom wiki techniques from educator Jon Orech weeks ago and forgotten about it. This is a great post for teachers considering using wikis with their students. He covers the basics of what kinds of programs wikis are suitable for, common pitfalls, and concrete examples of successful wiki use in his own classes. Then he follows it up with a solid list of resources to check out on the topic. It?s an excellent read.

San Francisco Post Chronicle
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Newspapers around the country are closing their doors, stopping paper printing, in bankruptcy or some combination of these in the face of online competition and dwindling advertising revenue due to the economic downturn. This problem has effected many smaller local papers as well as major urban papers including The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (the Boston Globe of the Northwest), Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Is TheOfficialBoard.com a wiki?
Monday, March 9, 2009
A TechCrunch post today announced the launch of a new org chart site that aims to document the management structure of the world?s 20,000 largest corporations. Normally I don?t read TechCrunch, but the use of Wiki in the title brought it up in my Google News fetchermajiggy. The title of the post is ?TheOfficialBoard Launches With Wiki Org Charts For 20,000 Companies?. Is TheOfficialBoard really a wiki?

10 Things To Consider When Choosing a Wiki for CMS
Friday, March 6, 2009

Recent Changes Camp 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009