April 2009

Does PBworks Work?
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Earlier this week PBwiki changed its name to PBworks. Changing the name of a company with the kind of mind share PBwiki holds is significant. I?m sure there was a lot of hand-wringing over there about this decision. The move is clearly to establish more credibility in the corporate arena, where the term ?wiki? is soiled with connotations of insecurity and communism. This change happens at the same time that the company launched a Legal edition with special intranet features aimed at legal firms. You can see a business model emerging where PBworks will be the intranet software vendor of choice for their targeted markets and their software will move further and further from what is commonly considered a wiki. Framed that way, the new name makes sense.

BarCamp Boston 4 - Wrap Up
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
BarCamp Boston 4 was a great time. Being my first barcamp, I was amazed at how thoroughly the event was self-organized and how smoothly it ran. If a conference could be implemented as a wiki, it would be a barcamp. Truly an eye-opening experience. This image is the schedule board at the end of the event. It shows both Saturday and Sunday with a column for each of the rooms (holding between 60 and 120 people each) and a row for each of the half-hour time slots.

BarCamp Boston 4 This Weekend
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
This weekend I?ll be attending my first BarCamp at MIT in Cambridge. I?ve heard great things about the previous years from folks I know who have gone.

Fun with Wordle
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Wordle is a fun web toy that creates an attractive tag cloud from either pasted text, an RSS feed or a Delicious account. Here?s the tag cloud it created for the Delicious account that houses EditMe?s Site Directory. It?s an interesting way to visualize the kinds of sites customers create with EditMe.

AboutUs - A Wiki Content Business Model
Friday, April 10, 2009
AboutUs.org is a wiki-based directory of web sites. They dedicate a full wiki page to each domain on the Internet that hosts a web site. When I first heard that the company had reached $5 million in VC funding, I thought to myself, ?what is the point, and how on earth do they make money?? My initial thoughts about the site were similar to the rather belligerentent post on Center Networks. But they claim the site gets 7 million unique visitors per month and the CEO says the company is profitable. AboutUs has some serious wiki-cred with wiki Grand Poo-Bah Ward Cunningham on the team and several big Wikipedians on staff. I figured it was at least worth investigation to see what the buzz was about.

The Importance of Good Original Designs for Wikis
Thursday, April 2, 2009
I have a new guest post on Future Changes about the importance of design for wikis. Blogs have been pretty since the start, but somehow wikis are allowed to have boring, generic (if not downright ugly) templates. Time for that to end. Hire a local designer today and spiff up your wiki!