Lower your geek radar detector. You got me. I am a tech blogger. I also have a degree in library science. Guilty as charged, just put me on a cell block with wireless and a supply of graphic novels.

I am a librarian who is really okay with wikis. Would I accept every entry in one as gospel? No, but questioning is good in print, too. I believe wikis are, by and large, a decent starting point for further research, like any encyclopedia. If you're writing your doctoral thesis using only wikis, we seriously need to talk. Now.

Wikis, online open encyclopedias, I can deal with. The Kids Open Dictionary Builder makes me fear the future, and not because of all the talking monkeys and flying robots, either. Yes, I said The Kids Open Dictionary Builder, and I typed it just as the name appears on the Creative Commons blog. The blogger there typed it as it appears on the project's home page. Grammatical structure is not the writing skill that comes to me most naturally, but, guys, when you're educators pushing an open dictionary, it is comforting to see the name punctuated correctly.

A few months ago, Google launched Google Sites, a hosted wiki product built on JotSpot technology. But until this week, Google Sites was only available to Google Apps users, which basically meant you needed to have your own domain name to set up a wiki. Now Google is opening Google Sites up to everyone.

If you've been living in a cave for the past few years, a wiki is basically a page that's open to collaborative editing. While Google doesn't call its new product a wiki, the service lets you create and customize pages, and share access to those pages by inviting a group of people to view and edit the content. In this way, you can plan trips, meetings, or other activities.

You can sign up by logging into Google Sites using your Google ID, or by registering for a new free account. Your page will be created at sites.google.com/sitename. If you want a custom domain, you can still sign up for the service through Google Apps.

Check out Google's Demo video after the jump.

[via Official Google Blog]

Nearly a year and a half after acquiring Jotspot, Google has finally opened the hosted-wiki service back up to the public. Now branded as Google Sites and packaged as part of Google Apps, the service aims to help users create group collaboration tools that can be easily edited and changed. From within Google Apps, administrators can control which users can access a specific site and what, if any editing levels they can have. Right now Google Sites has only a few default templates to choose from, but we expect those options to increase in the coming months.

The best part of Google Sites is its instant integration with the rest of Google Apps and services. YouTube, Picasa, Google Calendar and Google Docs can all be embedded into Google Sites templates, making sharing and collaborating information easier than ever.

At the time of this writing, we were unable to try Google Sites out for ourselves (it has not been activated on our Google Apps accounts, nor on a new Google Apps account we just created), but the examples shown on http://sites.google.com and in the video above look promising.

Like the rest of Google Apps, Google Sites is free and can be linked to a domain name. Premier service, which includes support and additional storage is available for $50 a year per user.

[via TechCrunch]

Checkser is niche application of the wiki concept: users create/edit checklists for topics ranging from "What to look for when buying a home" to "Things to do before leaving for a vacation." The checklists are useable (you can click checkboxes to mark items), and editable anonymously or with an OpenID signature.

While editing a checklist, you can drag/drop list items in whatever order you choose. You can also provide a "Read More..." link in case you want to offer a preview of a more extensive list found elsewhere.

Like any good wiki, you can view the history of edits for the checklists. Our favorite list so far is the Web 2.0 checklist.

[Thanks Marijn Deurloo]

If you're new to the whole Twitter scene, and your friends have yet to climb on the bandwagon, your Twitter page might be looking awful lonely. You might have no one to stalk, er, follow-and no one is following you. Enter the Twitter Pack Project, a wiki where the community recommends fellow Twitter-ers by topic of interest or geographical area.

The Twitter Pack Project has lists of all shapes and sizes. For example, if you're an Apple nerd, you can find a list of Twitter-ers whose Tweets are more or less related to Apple. Like having a good belly laugh? Visit the laugh pack and become a follower of your favorites. Want to follow fellow Twitter-ers in the same city? Packs exist for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and more; basically every major metropolitan area is included.

If you don't find a pack to suit you, you are encouraged to sign up for the wiki and create your own (the invite key is: project). You can add new lists to existing packs (say, a new geographical location) or create an entirely new pack (for example, packs by birthday dates, and so on).

So what are you waiting for? Get to following.

If we were Jimmy Wales, we'd have bought a bullet proof vest long ago. Google has just set Jimmy up the bomb; Announcing 'Knol', a human powered index of knowledge which seeks to rival Wikipedia in accountability, and thus accuracy.

Knol will focus on credit for authors who "own" pages within the system. Write a bad page, lose your reputation. Write a better page than one which currently exists, and knock it out of the top spot. It's free market dynamics and modern credit reporting all rolled into one and applied to encyclopedia style information. Google, for it's part, seemingly intends to be hands off in the management of Knol, foregoing any oversight structure similar to that in place at Wikipedia or Mahalo.

While we find this all super interesting, we're going to stop short of prognosticating about the death of Wikipedia. Other industry pundits are calling it "a game changer" and "huge"; We've decided to wait until Monday to predict Wikipedia's imminent death. It's called journalism, look it up.

Oddly enough, there is no current Wikipedia entry for "Knol". Maybe we should pitch in and create one?

[via Paris Lemon]

As the shift towards online applications grows strong, so do the conferences and events that promote working online.

The Office 2.0 conference is just around the corner in San Francisco, September 5-7th 2007. The event is aimed at the discovery of future online productivity and collaboration efforts brings together leaders and visionaries in the field to discuss innovative online services, and ways to get things done both at home, and in the office. Speaker's sessions include: The Future of work, mobile productivity, death of the app., and GTD with Office 2.0.

A very cool part of the event is that conference attendees will get an Apple iPhone, or PS3 running on Firefox with Linux, to play with and connect during the event. The iPhone experiment will allow conference go ers a way to easily check out the conference schedule, map the area, utilize the facilities WiFi and to lookup conference speakers and biographies. Of course the device is built in to the $1695 registration fee, and users are responsible for activating the iPhone with an AT&T plan. Nonetheless a very intuitive idea from conference organizers.

There is also word that Google could be announcing Google Presentation, and Google Wiki at this event.

The word on the web is that Google could be transforming JotSpot into a Google Wiki.

Google acquired the WYSIWYG wiki website creator last October, and there have been numerous discussions about what they could be doing with it. From making it into the GDrive storage location for storing and sharing spreadsheets, calendars, files and photos, to integrating it into Google Apps as a business wiki. With the moving of the JotSpot help and support pages being transferred under the Google name this April, there is now a Google Apps service code name for 'jotspot'. This all means that Google is most likely building JotSpot into Google Apps accounts, and could be in the final testing phases before its release.

Stay tuned for news from the Office 2.0 Conference being held in San Francisco next week, Google could be dropping some news on this as well as the launch of Google Presentations.

You can't trust everything you read on Wikipedia. Of course, the same is true of the newspaper or pretty much anything else you read. But since pretty much anyone can edit Wikipedia entries, readers really have to take entries with a grain of salt.

Computer engineering associate professor Luca de Alfaro at the University of California, Santa Cruz has developed a tool that help you relax your skeptical genes a bit. His program color-codes phrases in Wikipedia entries based on the author's reputation.

de Alfaro's program will analyze 40 million edits on Wikipedia's 2 million English language pages. The text on those pages in then colored in varying shades of orange. You should pull out the salt shaker before reading the deepest orange phrases.

How does it analyze an author's reputation? By determining how infrequently someone has bothered to change or correct your article. The longer your original text stays up, the more reputable you are deemed. This works great for a large site like Wikipedia where users from around the globe are regularly reading and updating. It probably wouldn't be nearly as effective on a smaller, less active wiki.

Right now there's a demo page up and running that has scanned 1,000 pages.

[via Boing Boing]

Social networking sites have become an increasingly popular way for people to connect professionally but, once you've added someone to your contact list, what then? 8apps is one of the first sites we've seen that answers that question. It goes beyond just connecting people and actually gives them tools to develop whatever brainstorms happen to come up once they get to know each other.

Like other social networking sites, 8apps brings like-minded people together, but then it takes the concept a step further by offering tools to help shape the ideas that take root between members. Wikis offer the same collaborative tools as 8apps but start from the premise that all the users already know each other. 8apps puts the horse before the cart and helps you meet people, then develop a project together.

After completing the very simple sign-up process, find members by searching for groups or individuals in the Handshake section of the site. Map out your big idea in Blueprint, a virtual whiteboard that works a bit like a mind-mapping tool. Next, break down projects and assign tasks with Orchestrate. If your group decides that a face-to-face meeting is in order, use the Pinpoint map and scheduling tool to find your real-world middle ground.

While the four remaining applications are still under wraps, this new site is still useful even though it's technically under development.* It also has an outstanding, beautiful, and intuitive interface that makes navigation easy and painless.

While the world might not need Yet Another Social Networking Site, it does need a way to corral all those brainstorms between members so the ideas have a chance to grow up and become -- who knows? -- Yet Another Social Media Tool. 8apps is just the ticket.

*Note: As we were preparing this post for publication, we learned that the creators of 8apps have just put the site up for sale. Although further development has been temporarily put on hold, the site is still fully functional, and there are still private invites available. Want to know how you can score one? Stay tuned.

WikiMindMap takes a pleasant visual approach to the text heavy Wikipedia, showcasing additional relevant content that you may have never searched for.

If you've been getting tired of entering a search term in for Wikipedia and feel like there might be additional information that you are missing out on, WikiMindMap will change that. This tool can help users browse Wiki content quickly and efficiently, giving a clean structured understandable overview of the search topic.

Start by specifying the version of Wiki, and then enter your topic. You will be presented with a 'mind map' of the topic that branches out each realm of the instance, clickable through to the Wikipedia entry. For instance, a search on 'California' returned some higher marked pages, along with breakdowns for additional sections such as history, economy, cities, towns, newspaper, and geography. This is extremely relevant when searching for such a broad term.

Intel has collaborated with six software companies to build a next generation collaboration software suite for the productivity of businesses.

SuiteTwo is the name, and the six well known companies participating are piping in their advanced applications to create one single powerful application. NewsGator is supplying RSS, SimpleFeed, Six Apart's Movable Type has the hold on the blogging platform, Socialtext adds in a searchable wiki, SpikeSource provides the hosting, and Visible Path has integrated new social networking capabilities.

Competition for this product can be seen from IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. With their partners in this application, Intel will surely hit the lead spot for this enterprise level business application. The announcement of the release was made at the Web 2.0 conference this week, and the product is available for demo.

[via InformationWeek]

Google acquired JotSpot, the hosted wiki development company, last October, and integration has been a slow process. It initially took a few months to get JotSpot Version 2.9 up and running and integrated with Google systems and released back to those that already had an account, but there has been no news on when it will be publicly available. The last Jot blog entry went over a few changes that they had made up until January 12th of 2007, and said that Version 2.9 was the last JotSpot version produced before migrating.

However, there has recently been news leaked about some new JotSpot help files hosted on Google.com, as well as a new JotSpot group in Google Groups. Could these only be for old Jot users? They don't appear to be linked from anywhere in the current JotSpot version, so they could hold some hope for a new release soon.

What will the new version of JotSpot contain? It could be the perfect location for the rumored GDrive where all of Google's applications, and user's documents could be centrally stored and archived. Only time will tell. But what we do know is that whatever JotSpot is released as, it is expected to be a free service with for-pay upgrades and add-ons.

Want to get a total unbiased report on a new product you are thinking about purchasing? ProductWiki can help.

ProductWiki is a product information site that is based off of a collaborative wiki format. The website is entirely maintained by visitors and users who share information or review consumer products from around the world.

The goal the team behind ProductWiki has is to create a comprehensive information resource that covers all products in depth. All products might be a little hard to get onto the site, but it's overflowing with a range of products already, from LCD TV's, external hard drives, tea cups, games, health and beauty products, cars and a truckload more.

When searching for an item, the site not only will give a review from the submitter, but will also show pictures, key features, and places where it can be bought. Users can choose to tag items, and write additional pros and cons based on experience they have had with the item.

ProductWiki is another great place to go to check out the items that are on your shopping list, getting great first hand results from people that actually own and use it.


[via eHub]