EditMe Blog: Staff Lounge

November 2009

Intranet Organization: Focus on Tasks, Not Departments
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The goal of an intranet site is to centralize knowledge within an organization and let employees find the information they need quickly. Traditional intranets tend to be organized by department. Here are some reasons to organize your intranet around tasks and projects - not the organizational chart.

Wiki Tools Are Not All the Same: Six Key Differentiators
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
While wikis have become commonplace - almost ubiquitous - wiki software has hardly adopted a cookie cutter set of features. Here's where EditMe stands, philosophically and feature-wise, on six key areas of differentiation among wiki tools.

Trend Micro is Blocking All Mail from Amazon's Cloud... Just 'Cause
Monday, November 16, 2009
Internet security and spam blocker Trend-Micro has decided, for no apparent reason, to block all mail from Amazon's massive EC2 cloud hosting service. As a result, some EditMe users aren't getting mail from their sites. Read on for the whole absurd story.

Ways to Wiki: Business Process Documentation
Friday, November 13, 2009
The key to every successful business is identification and communication of the repeatable processes that make the business go. Using a wiki to document and improve business process can drastically reduce the effort involved and increase the value provided to your business.

Open Space Technology & BarCamp - The Wiki of Meetings
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Open Space Technology and BarCamp provide a decentralized wiki-style meeting format. Here's the low-down on how to run one.

Why You Shouldn't Generate Your Wiki Content
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Two articles last week illustrated perfectly a lesser-known wiki aphorism: don't generate wiki content. Many a wiki concept has started off with a large existing data set. The idea is that if the data set is converted into a wiki, users will build upon the data set and add value, transforming commodity data into something more valuable. But does it work?

An Anomaly, Not an Archetype - How Your Business Wiki will Differ from Wikipedia
Friday, November 6, 2009
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit and the one wiki almost everybody knows about, is often considered an archetype for all wikis. If you're considering implementing a wiki within your business or organization, you'll need to know how and why it will likely differ from Wikipedia.

Five Reasons Why EditMe Isn't Free
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
One of the themes of Web 2.0 has been the expectation of Free. EditMe has always bucked this trend and, while offering what is certainly an inexpensive product, it has never been free. Here are some thoughts as to why.

Google and Yahoo: Don't Spend Time on Meta Keywords
Monday, November 2, 2009
Last month, both Google and Yahoo! came out and said they (all but) completely ignore the venerable <meta name="keywords"/> tag in determining suitability of a page for a search on a given keyword.

October 2009

When Introducing an Internal Wiki, Don't Lead with Change
Thursday, October 29, 2009
I was talking with a customer the other day about change. He's trying to get his team on board with a wiki to cut down on the flood of email chains and bring some order to his small firm's file server. "How do I push through the organizational changes needed to make this work?" was his question. The need for change and how to affect it is a fairly common line of thinking for somebody trying to implement an internal wiki.

Find Designers At Haystack
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Customers looking for custom designs for their EditMe site have a new resource for finding designers whose work they like, work locally and fit their budget.

Google's New Web Collaboration Tool: Where Wave Fits
Friday, October 23, 2009
Which web collaboration problems are targeted by Google Wave? Where and how does it fit into the existing landscape of email, forums, instant messaging and wikis?

Wiki Fundraising & the Kiva Model
Thursday, October 22, 2009
A post on Philip Tom&eacute;'s personal blog titled Wiki Charities got me thinking about why EditMe supports Kiva and how the Kiva model relates and compares to charitable giving organizations. Can charitable giving be transformed the way Kiva has transformed lending?

Amazon vs. Spamhaus - Where are my wiki notifications!
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
You may have noticed some emails from your EditMe wiki site didn't come through last week. If you follow EditMe on Twitter @EditYourWeb you probably know why. Here's a detailed look at what happened and why.

What Is A Browser - Part 2
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Google has posted an interesting follow-up to their "What is a browser?" viral video that I posted about not long ago. The marketing strategy behind that first video becomes clear, as Google attempts to insert Chrome into the standard set of available browsers.

Survey: Corporate Wikis / Enterprise 2.0
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A doctoral candidate at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands has asked that I share this link with EditMe's customers. It's a quick survey about wiki use at work. If you use a wiki at work, please take a moment to respond.

September 2009

Edit Your Web: Don't Use A Wiki
Friday, September 18, 2009
From Matt's Edit Your Web blog: Wiki technology is a great tool for resolving information and communication quagmires. But don't get stuck on the wiki concept itself. Remember that the wiki technology is but a cog in a more complex mechanism - how the wiki is actually used to solve a real world problem.

Wiki is a Technology Term
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
At the end of the day, wiki is a technology term. When I talk about EditMe with people who aren't in technology, the wiki term inevitably comes up. It usually means little or nothing to them, and the blank stare on their face and vague nod at the mention of Wikipedia is proof.

August 2009

Wikipedia's Content Moderation: Proof that Wikis Work
Friday, August 28, 2009
Wikipedia started implementing its Flagged Revisions policy on Wednesday. Let's consider what this really tells us about the wiki model.

Edit Your Web: Wikipedia's Content Moderation is Proof that Wikis Work
Friday, August 28, 2009
Wikipedia started implementing its Flagged Revisions policy on Wednesday. Rather than hang our heads at the ultimate failure of wiki collaboration, let's consider what this really tells us about the wiki model.

Associated Press to Reign In Web Content
Thursday, August 20, 2009
An article in the Raw Story last week spills the beans on Associated Press plans to centralize their content on the web rather than allowing licensees to publish AP stories on their own web sites. Licensees would print AP stories as they always have, but would have to link to the AP web site for stories that are unique to the AP such as special interest and investigative reporting pieces.

Army Jumps on Board as Government Increasingly Embraces Wikis
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The NYT reports that the Army has started moving its field guides, traditionally written by theorists and strategists, to a Mediawiki site. The goal is to get more real-field examples and experience from active soldiers and consolidate the vast collection of printed field guides into a single source.

Digital Textbooks In California
Monday, August 17, 2009
A story on WBUR's Weekend Edition caught my attention with an alarming fact: the average public school text book costs $100. When is the last time you spent that much on a book? I don't think I have, ever - even in college. The fact was slipped into a story about California's recent vetting of digital text books for use in its public school system, a change that is hoped could save the state $200 million annually.

Word Processing Applications Increasingly the Wrong Tool
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
A great post from Ars Technica on why desktop word processing apps are hopelessly obsolete for much of the tasks they're still used for. Sure, if you're creating a long document that will be delivered to its audience in print form, Word (or your desktop word processor of choice) is a great tool. But how many documents created in the business world today really fit this description? When everyone in the audience for your document is online, why not author your content online?

July 2009

Usability Lesson: What is a browser?
Sunday, July 19, 2009
What is a browser? A friend on Twitter recently linked to this video from Google asking people on the street in Times Square this very basic technical question. You may be surprised at the answers they got.

Survey Report: Why Businesses (Don't) Collaborate
Thursday, July 9, 2009
In May, Stewart Mader and Scott Abel conducted a survey of 523 content professionals about collaboration within their companies. The survey contains 12 questions around use of email and how meetings are organized within companies. The picture drawn from the survey results supports what Stewart has been writing in his blog for years: Email is a terrible collaboration tool.

June 2009

Web Content 2009 - Day 2
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Here's my day two wrap-up of Web Content 2009 conference sessions.

Web Content 2009 - Day 1
Monday, June 15, 2009
I'm in Chicago today and tomorrow for Web Content Conference 2009 and Day 1 is a wrap. After such a great experience participating in BarCamp Boston several weeks ago, I was interested to return to a more traditionally formatted conference for comparison. Essentially, BarCamp's collaborative round-table style is replaced with considerably higher quality presentations from impressive speakers who really know their stuff.

Why Wave Is Important
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Casual Internet users will likely see Wave as another neat web tool from Google, but a technical analysis of its makeup indicates that Wave is a significant paradigm shift with enormous potential. It's my sense that Wave is a major evolutionary step for Internet-based communication. Here's why.

Why Wave Is Important
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
From EditYourWeb.com: Last week Google announced a new set of technologies called Wave at a developers conference. Casual Internet users will likely see Wave as just another neat web tool, but a technical analysis of its makeup indicates that Wave is a significant paradigm shift with enormous potential. It's my sense that Wave is a major evolutionary step for Internet-based communication. Here's why.

April 2009

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.

Web Content Conference 2009 - Chicago
Friday, April 17, 2009
I'm excited to be going to the 2009 Web Content Conference in Chicago. It's happening June 15-16 and will be host to some of the web's leading thinkers on web content strategy and management.

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.

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.

How Secure Is EditMe?
Monday, April 6, 2009
Prospective customers frequently ask us this question. They want to use EditMe to store top secret information about their new business idea, sensitive internal process documentation for their company, or customer information that they've agreed not to share. The question itself is difficult to answer objectively, kind of like, "How good is the pie over at Village Pizza?" But its definitely something we can talk around, which is the purpose of this post. There are a number of areas that, combined, make up the relative "security" of a web-based service. I'll cover where EditMe stands on each of these.

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!

Staff Lounge: Goodbye Planet, Hello Cloud
Thursday, April 2, 2009
EditMe has completed a move of all services to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform. This post explains what that means, discusses the reasoning behind the move and benefits for EditMe, and finally, what it means for EditMe customers.

March 2009

Wikipedia Revolution
Thursday, March 26, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Recent Changes Camp 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009

February 2009

Per User Pricing is Detrimental to Adoption
Saturday, February 21, 2009

Wikis & CMS Provide Value in a Down Economy
Thursday, February 19, 2009

Does Your Wiki Need a Spring Cleaning?
Monday, February 16, 2009

Is ReadWriteWeb Reliable Enough for Wikipedia?
Friday, February 13, 2009

The Personal Wiki
Thursday, February 12, 2009

Wiki Content Is Not Sacred, and That’s OK
Monday, February 9, 2009

Staff Lounge: Wiki Content is Not Sacred, And That's OK
Monday, February 9, 2009
My latest guest post on Future Changes discusses how web content has become sacred and how wikis challenge us to rethink this notion. Organizations implementing wikis need to promote a culture where content posted to the wiki is considered a work-in-progress, and make light of innocent errors and omissions. The only appropriate response to an error or omission on a wiki is to fix it!

January 2009

Staff Lounge: EditMe Sponsors Future Changes
Monday, January 26, 2009
EditMe is now sponsoring Stewart Mader's blog, Future Changes. Stewart is a highly regarded wiki consultant, the man behind the seminal Wikipatterns project and editor of a new book, Wiki In Education. Reading Stewart's blog is a great way to keep up on wiki-related news and best practices. I will also be guest posting on the blog and sharing some of the lessons I've learned running a wiki company for almost 7 years now. Coming up with the brief ad text for this spot helped solidify the new mantra for 2009 and crystallize what makes EditMe a unique value proposition in the wiki hosting space: "Pay for what you use, not per user. Customize everything. Affordable professional services."

Staff Lounge: EditMe's Plans For 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Yesterday's task was to put together plans for EditMe in 2009. It was a constructive session resulting in a development plan to carry EditMe through the next year. Some themes emerged as over-arching goals for direction of the product and service, and I thought it would be nice to share those here.

Staff Lounge: Wikis In Plain English
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
A customer recently turned me onto the Common Craft videos. Common Craft creates short, low-tech training videos on common head-scratchers that get right to the point ? and they're very well done. I wouldn't mention them here, except that their "Wikis in Plain English" video is the most succinct, accurate, informative and entertaining explanation of wiki technology I've ever seen.

December 2008

Staff Lounge: Wiki Adoption & Patterns
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
For those customers using EditMe as a wiki, this post highlights an indispensable resource for making your wiki a success. EditMe cancellations are carefully tracked, and the #1 reason customers give for giving up on their site is lack of adoption. Whether your wiki is intended for a small internal audience at work or hopes to gather the intelligence of the masses around a particular topic, getting people to come, read and contribute is always a challenge.

Staff Lounge: Eating Our Own Dog Food
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Here is an overview of how EditMe uses it's own product to solve its business (and other) requirements. I give examples of the various EditMe sites we use internally and externally, for business and personal use. Of course, we eagerly welcome customer feedback, but our own use of the product provides more real life feedback and valuable experience than any other source. We've built a product that solves our own prob lems, and in doing so hope to have solved your problems, too.

The Classroom Wiki
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
When the topic of wiki use in classrooms comes up, many teachers assume this means using Wikipedia with their students. Teachers become rightfully concerned with their inability to control and/or verify Wikipedia's content and how to protect the privacy of their students. But wiki technology is much bigger than Wikipedia, and many teachers are finding success with private classroom wikis. Read the full post for tips on selecting and using a private wiki in the classroom.

November 2008

Staff Lounge: Forrester finds “Good evidence” that wikis are transforming collaboration
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Wiki guru Stewart Mader recently posted about a new Forrester report about the growing success of wiki use within enterprises.

September 2008

Staff Lounge: New Directory of Customer Sites
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Today we replaced the old monolithic customer-generated list of EditMe sites on our wiki with a new dynamic site directory. The most recently added sites are listed at the top, and each site is added to one or more categories to make it easy to find sites around a specific topic. A tag cloud navigation makes it easy to browse through the various categories. Getting your site listed here will help boost its search engine visibility.

EditMe For Business: The Value Proposition
Monday, September 8, 2008
Many of the most successful EditMe sites are used for business purposes, and for good reason. During my many years at a mid-sized interactive marketing agency, I learned a lot about what businesses need on the web, and have built EditMe with these lessons in mind. In this post, I will share some of these lessons, explain how EditMe responds to them, and prompt you to ask yourself some questions about how your business gets what it needs done on the web today.

July 2008

Follow EditMe On Twitter
Monday, July 21, 2008
I've created a Twitter account to track EditMe events that occur between these blog posts. The Twitter posts will contain announcements, development status updates, minor maintenance updates, tips and other information that customers may find useful but that don't necessarily call for a post here. If you have a Twitter account, I encourage you to follow along. Don't worry, you won't get notified about what I'm having for dinner.

Staff Lounge: A Survey of Custom Development Projects
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A few prospective customers have asked what kind of projects EditMe's Custom Development team has done. It's a good question, and one that I thought warranted an answer on the web site. Here are a few of the more interesting projects we've completed within the past several months, grouped by project size.

February 2008

EditMe One the Fastest Wiki Farms
Friday, February 15, 2008
According to web traffic analyst Alexa, EditMe is one of the fastest sites in our category (Wiki Farms), with an average page load time of less than 1 second. See where EditMe stands among its peers, most of whom are working with a heck of a larger IT budget than we are.

November 2007

EditMe: Not Just For Wikis Anymore
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Most content management systems are fraught with complexity. They make heavy-handed assumptions about how content is managed and organized, and too often cost an arm and a leg. Let's go exploring outside the wiki box. How do you maintain your non-EditMe sites?

July 2007

Staff Lounge: Wikis For Dummies
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
EditMe is featured in the new book Wikis for Dummies from the #1 best selling computer book series. I spoke with the author, Dan Woods, several months ago while he was writing the book, and am glad to finally see the results in print. This is an excellent resource for enthusiastic newcomers to the wiki phenomenon.

Staff Lounge: The Personal Wiki
Monday, July 2, 2007
Wikis are most often billed as collaboration tools. But considering what makes the wiki a great collaboration tool points to some other often over-looked wiki applications. For example, a lot of customers (including myself) use EditMe for a "personal wiki". It was a personal need that I originally developed EditMe to fill, and it's the way I use EditMe most frequently today. Put simply, everyone should have one of these.