Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal wrote a story [password protected] on Wikis and their potential impact on how employees work together. Let me first disclosue to you that my PR firm, Voce, represents, Jot, one of the companies referenced in the article.
I strive for objectivity. A true consultant must remain objective to have a clear view of the issues, opportunities and challenges facing the client. At the same time, I get excited when we get close to a new product or announcement that has the potential to shake up the market. In this case I'm not drinking the corporate kool-aid but there has definitely been some sugar added to my water. Jot has taken a unique approach to wikis and it'll be interesting to see how the developer and enterprise communities adopt this new form of collaboration. I am a proud PR consultant and even my own blog is a source of visibility for our clients - but I won't count this as a hit!
Here is an excerpt:
'Wiki' May Alter How Employees Work TogetherBy KARA SWISHER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 29, 2004; Page B1....This is a big leap from the way the Web is used now, especially within corporations, where static digital documents basically are broadcast from on high to the many over intranets. "Most information is hidden in plain sight, because the way people collaborate using technology is not designed to respond to the way people actually work," says Joe Kraus, a co-founder of the once-popular consumer Web portal Excite, who is now working on a business-focused wiki company called Jot. "What a wiki does is codify the paths people are already making themselves."
Getting average people to think about controlling the Web as comfortably as they might an e-mail or a Word document has not been easy. But the rise in popularity of Web logs known as blogs and other "social software" is changing that. Blogging, say wiki proponents, has revived the idea that a Web site can be an ever-changing organism that can be linked with other Web sites to create a larger and more informative picture.
But if the blog is a soloist, a wiki is an orchestra. Not surprisingly, its sound can also be cacophonous if managed incorrectly and can be open to those whose changes are unwelcome or even damaging. That's why features such as access control, saving of revisions, stressing accountability and encouraging peer review of postings come into play. In addition, most users say an effective wiki must be pruned and weeded regularly to remain manageable.
Jot's Joe Kraus says that to make wikis more widespread, companies like his and Mr. Mayfield's must make wiki software simple to integrate into existing applications that workers commonly use, add more features beyond document editing and make it even more enticing for people to deploy them. "People have to perceive that they only need to add a little information in order to get a lot out of it," says Mr. Kraus.
The prospects of moving wikis into the office are good, especially since they are already working well in nonwork situations, such as the well-known Wikipedia. This free online encyclopedia, compiled since early 2001 by volunteer writers, now has hundreds of thousands of entries, making it bigger than any other encyclopedia...
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