Cal Jacobson’s Blog

I’m a big fan of the wiki concept.  I have used several different wikis in the past and all, to varying degrees, have helped me keep track of information that I otherwise would have forgotten or lost under a pile of paper.  I recommend their use to any person or organization struggling to organize a mountain of concepts, ideas, how-tos, lessons learned and many other types of information that otherwise wouldn’t properly fit into a database or spreadsheet.

If you haven’t already, go visit Wikipedia; it is the largest and most successful example of a wiki in action.

If you want to set up your own wiki, there are a ton of choices available.  Their features vary, but all should at least permit you to create new pages of information and link them to other pages.   I have two favorites: MediaWiki and ConnectedText.

MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia.  It is free, Open Source, and very robust — Wikipedia has millions of pages of content, thousands of users and billions of hits per day.  Along with full-text search capability, users can upload graphic or audio files and associate them with the appropriate topics.  All changes to pages are tracked, so both vandalism and honest mistakes can be quickly and easily dealt with.  It is, in my opinion, the standard by which all other wikis should be judged.

I’ve written about ConnectedText before.  It differs from MediaWiki in that ConnectedText is a personal wiki — most of the frills of the former but intended for a single, all-powerful user.  Whereas MediaWiki is great for centralizing information for a large number of users (who may or may not contribute further), ConnectedText is ideal for an author or researcher who is unwilling or afraid of making their notes public but enjoys the features of a conventional wiki.  It is a commercial application, however.

ConnectedText’s greatest advantage over MediaWiki is that it can be set up very easily: as a Windows-only application, ConnectedText has a installer that takes care of all the messy details.  Unless you’re comfortable with PHP and MySQL, setting up MediaWiki can be frightening and frustrating experience.

At least, up until now.

About a week ago I stumbled upon this page which takes the user gently through a painless installation process with the end result being a version of MediaWiki that runs on a USB stick with less than 100MB of storage.  The key component here is WOS Portable (Small Edition) by CH Software, which is a self-contained distribution of Apache, PHP, MySQL and a few other useful applications that can run directly from a USB drive without requiring any installation on the hosting system.  In about 15 minutes I had my own version of MediaWiki up and running off of my thumb drive without a hitch.

If you’re joined at the hip to a laptop, this may not be that incredible…but for college students who are dependent upon lab and library computers or anybody who has to shuttle information between their home and work systems, this is hot.  Got USB?  Then you’ve got access to your own data warehouse.  Worried about security?  Install Portable Firefox on your USB drive as well (to ensure local system browsers don’t cache your wiki pages) and use TrueCrypt to lock it all down.  They’re both free, too.

I’ll continue to use ConnectedText — it has quite a few unique features that I like, such as Python and Ruby scripting and the ability to export everything in a self-contained Microsoft Help file.  I’d love for there to be a portable version, but due to prior problems with Chinese hackers stealing his software, Eduardo Mauro (developer of ConnectedText) has had to tie his software to a particular processor ID.  I encourage anybody interested in having a wiki for their personal use to at least give CT a shot if they can afford the $30 (US) fee; Eduardo’s support for his product has been stellar and there are certainly fewer things that can break compared to a MediaWiki + WOS solution.

Joe Kraus of JotSpot announced today that his company is the latest acquisition by Google.

I’m not a JotSpot user — in fact, I’m not certain I heard of them before today. But after checking their site out I’m not surprised they were snatched up by the big G. Look at this page, which contains a bunch of wiki applications that JotSpot offers. Compare with some of the web apps Google has come out with in the last couple of years. See anything familiar?

One thing Google didn’t have up until a month ago was a product that enabled users to create their own communities online. Now that they’ve acquired YouTube and a wiki application that supports forums they have all the tools to create the next MySpace if they wish: post your photos in Picasa Web Albums, videos on YouTube, chat in real-time with your friends in Google Talk (or a next-gen version of GTalkr in a web page), use Gmail for your e-mail needs, create a knowledgebase about your favorite topic using the JotSpot wiki and Google Base, provide a real-world context by linking things to Google Maps and access everything through your mobile device via dodgeball and some of the other technology Google acquired in 2005.

Geez, now all they need is to purchase some machine translation technology so these communities aren’t limited by language….whoops, looks like they’ve already got that covered.

So what the hell is Microsoft doing? By the looks of things, they’re stuck on the desktop.

Update: Scoble describes the wiki market as “white hot” and says the MS Office team should be asking themselves what Google is up to. I disagree, Robert…they should be asking their managers what Microsoft is going to be up to. Google’s plan is clear: to dominate the field of web-based applications so it’s no longer about where you are or what OS you’re using.