Archive for the ‘Wiki’ Category

According to TechCrunch, Wikipedia has garnered its 10 millionth article which is a biography of Nicholas Hilliard, a 16th century painter. The Wikipedia has entries written in 250 different languages, with English as the most popular, accounting for 2.3 million articles.

The JotSpot wiki service which offered spreadsheet functionality, photo pages, calendars, and file storage, within their wikis has been in limbo since Google’s acquisition of the company in late 2006. According to TechCrunch, Google has relaunched the application as Google Sites, a free service with up to 10 GB of storage. Wiki authors can embed Google Docs and Calendars into their wikis as well as YouTube videos, and make their sites public or private. Like the former JotSpot service, Google Sites’ wikis seem easily adaptable as intranets, team websites, virtual classrooms, or family organizers.

Seth Godin’s Squidoo knowledge community has created a scholar’s entrance called SquidKnol which seems to be a direct reference to Google’s Knol initiative. The interface encourages experts to enter their areas of expertise and credentials in order to create a Squidoo lens which will be indexed all over the Web. Interestingly, the “sample” lens which is linked from this page is the Insomnia Knol originally written for Google Knol and spotlighted in their press release last week. Google Knol is still only open by invitation only.

Click for full image

Google has announced that they have created an online tool called “knol” (short for knowledge) which will encourage authors to contribute signed encyclopedic entries into a massive knowledge base. Social tools such as ratings, reviews, and comments have been implemented as well. So far, this seems to be a direct competitor for existing community-based encyclopedias such as Wikipedia with the distinction that Google’s entries, or “knols”, will not be written by the masses but by one authoritative source.

“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.”

At this time the knol project is available by invitation only.

I will be speaking today at the ACRL/NY Symposium about Social Software in Academic Libraries. My presentation is here on Slideshare.net. Thank you to all of the college and university libraries who gave me great quotes about their social software initiatives to use in my prez. Also, here is a quick guide to all of the websites I refer to in my presentation:

Wikis
Wikipedia
WikiHow
University of Minnesota Libraries Wiki
Antioch University New England Library Staff Training & Support Wiki
USC Aiken Gregg-Graniteville Library Wiki Webpage
Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki
Butler University Libraries WikiRef
ALA 2007 Annual Conference Wiki
Library Success Wiki
Library Instruction Wiki

Social Bookmarking
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Southern Connecticut State University Hilton C. Buley Library
MIT Libraries Virtual Reference Collection
University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ PennTags
Libmarks
LIS901-06
Maui Community College Library
University of South Florida Lakeland Library Services
library2.0 tag
ALA2007 tag in del.icio.us

Media Sharing
YouTube
Flickr
Colorado College Tutt & Coburn Libraries
Arizona State University Libraries
Williams College Library on YouTube
School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Michigan
GeorgiaTech Webcasts
LIS901-06 Webcasts
SJSU’s School of Library and Information Science
American Library Association on Flickr

Social Networks
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
University of Central Florida
StonyBrook University Health Sciences Library
Facebook Applications
JSTOR on Facebook
Library 2.0 network on Ning

Blogs
Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University
Binghampton University Library
Mohawk College Library
Barnard College
University librarian at the McMaster University Library

IM
Ohio University Libraries
American University Library

Microblogging
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
Lunar and Planetary Institute

Second Life
Nova Southeastern University Law Library & Technology Center
McMaster University Libraries
San Jose State University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ohio University

Answers
Answer Board Librarians

Subject Guides
Boston College University Libraries LibGuides
LIS753 on Squidoo

Wetpaint wikis have added fully integrated discussion forums into their wikis so that collaborators can post messages to a central board within their wiki sites. The feature was released last night according to TechCrunch, and will allow forum posts to be tagged and searched, and will offer email notifications of new messages.

I have recently been using Wetpaint wikis and have been really impressed with their ease of use, especially with embedding and displaying RSS feeds within pages. Wetpaint has a clickable widget which lets you simply copy and paste the RSS feed address into it. This combined with Judy O’Connell’s announcement that Wetpaint wikis used for educational purposes can disable ads, makes it more attractive than ever for new projects.

The folks over at Common Craft have come up with a new video explaining how to use a new Web technology in easy-to-understand terms - this time it’s Wetpaint Wikis. Check it out here.

Atomic Learning has created a page with over 40 video tutorials which will teach you how to do everything under the sun with PBWiki. Each about 2 minutes long, these videos cover topics from using wikis in an educational setting to using the PBwiki plug-in features. Some of the videos include:

• Organizing a classroom assignment with a wiki
• Inserting a monthly calendar
• Adding a Google™ Gadget to a wiki page
• Adding a photo slideshow to a PBwiki page
• Uploading a file to your site
• Working with the Point and Click text editor
• Publicizing your wiki

Check them all out here. They’re free (for now!)

From BIGWIG comes The Social Software Showcase - an online unconference occuring around and during the time of ALA Annual 2007. On this wiki, you will find eleven wonderful presentations on cutting edge technology and social software by librarians and leaders in the field. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to discuss the presentions here in this space.

BIGWIG is the blogs, wikis, and social software interest group in the Library and Information Technology Association.