Wiki Showdown at Web SIG

Categories: Enterprise Web, Events, Social Media, Web Marketing, Wireless, Word of MouthPosted on October 25th, 2006

I’m blogging live from Hurricane Electric, a web hosting company in Fremont CA who is hosting this Oct meeting of Web SIG. There are four wiki companies here; JotSpot, Socialtext, Atlassian, and Wetpaint. I was very happy to finally run into Zoli, I’ve admired his thoughts and viewpoints from his blog for quite some time.

Moderated by Peter Theony
Twiki.org and Structuredwikis LLC

Audience Poll
80% are using wikipedia
50% are wiki editors
Ward Cunningham was founder
A wiki is always in motion
Wikis have been around since 1995

Ben Elowitz from WetPaint
Rich user experience, niche communities, aimed at consumer space.
Many of the wikis encourage embedding of images, and code snippets to YouTube and other video sites

Jon Silvers: Atlassian Software Software
First: The Ending

Sharepoint is the leading indicator
Believes that open source will continue to grow
Real time collaboration
Consumer social networking
Evolve or perish

Why is everyone talking about Wikis?

Thousands of organizations now use them
Before Web 2.0 there were wikis
Traditional enterprise software models are broken
Killer App

Primary Product is called Confluence

~~18000~~ customers (correction: 1,800 customers)
IBM Developerworks runs on confluence, SAP Network, Accenture
Growing at 20%

Dr. Jonas M Luster: SocialText

Downloaded model to download from sourceforge.
Gave kudos to the other wikis on the panel
Metaphor of Cars and Wikis. Like cars, wikis help to power movement and transportation.
Social text is trying to be the car, the middle ground of really good collaboration.

Scott Johnston: JotSpot

~~Purchased by Mercury Interactive~~ (Update: This is out context, Scott’s previous company was acquired by Mercury, thanks Scott for the comment)
How to make a mainstream wiki
The core principle is the edit button!
Office 2.0 = Collaboration
Has page types/templates
Has a family template (I’ll have to check that out)

*Panel Discussion*

Discussing Challenges: Wikis in the past, a shared workspace

Ben: Consumer Space challenges: Awareness is an issue, which is the foundation for adoption

Jon: Workplace issues: the challenge of getting wikis adopted at the workplace is key as you may need privacy and permissions. They discourage folks from segregating information as it’s not natural to the whole purpose.

Barriers is that IT must install it. Now with this bottom up install approach, is that anyone can get involved and start it.

Jonas: Discusses how awareness has arose from etech article. Relates to linux strategy.

Where are we on the hype curve for wiki adoption?
Most folks in this room are wiki savvy. By general business users awareness is low. Where there are self claimed wiki experts suggests hype.

What are the reasons for wiki consolidation?
When wikis are small it’s easy to garden them. As wikis grows moderations will be needed.

What challenges can wikis fix?
Email is an awful way to perform collaboration. Version control is a standard feature., tracking makes it easy. The next evolution will be putting workflow into wikis

Case study for wikis are used to replace wikis

What about wikis for the intranet?
Wikis enable anyone to contribute value without being a developer or coder. It can self regulate

What kind of challenges need to be solved in the future
Awareness is now an issue but websites now can change. Great experiences need to happen.

Question and Answer

1) Discussion about legal usage of changing webpage.
2) how many wikis vendors will survive? It’s unknown.
3) Outdated information is out on the web, and overflow of information.
4) Group participation to define a “Wiki”. The best answer, as voted by the 4 panelists was the answer involving “by the people, for the people”. My answer would have been “Community Knowledge

Event Format
I would love to see the next web Sig have more focus on web presentations with a richer and deeper involvement with the vendors.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Enterprise Web, Events, Social Media, Web Marketing, Wireless, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

thanks for the run-down Jeremiah, especially helpful for those of us who did not make the event.

one *minor* correction - while we are certainly on our way, atlassian’s confluence customer count has one too many 0s.

thanks again!

Posted by William Anderson on October 27th, 2006 at 8:29 am

I’ve made the corrections, thank you for your honesty William

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on October 27th, 2006 at 8:46 am

[...] Wiki Showdown at Web SIG [...]

Posted by That Girl From Marketing » Plinking (Say what?), Spamming Spurs MySpace Exodus, Microformats, Targeting RSS to Your Market & TGIF on October 27th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

Thanks for the write-up Jeremiah.

In my talk when I said “acquired by Mercury Interactive” I was referring to my first start-up, Kintana, which was acquired by Mercury Interactive.

Jotspot was not acquired by Mercury Interactive.

Posted by Scott Johnston on October 30th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

Scott

I’ve updated the text above, thanks.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on October 31st, 2006 at 7:29 am

[...] I just met Scott Johnson at Web SIG last week, another attendee just emailed me and let me know that Jotspot just announced they got acquired by Google. Wow congrats to both JotSpot and Google. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Jotspot acquired by Google on October 31st, 2006 at 9:13 am

[...] Apparently some users message the hosts and asked “What are Wikis?”. In this recent Wiki Showdwn event I live blogged at that hosted the major wiki vendors we also came to the conclusion that awareness is very low. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Web 2.0 How to Measure Social Engagement: Blogs Podcasts and RIAs on January 19th, 2007 at 7:29 am

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