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Behind this, I’m sure there is a long story that people who know — and, perhaps, actually care — may report. However, I just received this email regarding a test wiki I had set up at wiki.com (the domain currently redirects to the clever URL wik.is):
Dear Wiki.com User:
The migration of wiki.com sites has been completed. You can access your site by typing in your address and replacing wiki.com with wik.is. For example: mysite.wiki.com is now mysite.wik.is
If you have any technical issues, questions, or comments please feel free to contact: wik.is@mindtouch.com
Thank you for your patience during this migration. We look forward to serving you. Please tell your friends about the new site and ask them to register at http://wik.is for new sign-ups, which will happen shortly.
Sincerely,
Team MindTouch
Background: Wiki.com is shutting down by January 25th, 2007. In an agreement reached between MindTouch and John Gotts, owner of Wiki.com, all Wiki.com sites will be transferred to wik.is and will be controlled and monitored by MindTouch. We agreed to take over on such short notice because our technology powered the site from the beginning, our user interface is very intuitive and easy, and we are intimately familiar with the backend operations of the site. The sites will retain all of their original content that was intact when they were Wiki.com sites.”
For several weeks, the domain wiki.com redirected to wikia.com, leading some to speculate the wiki.com domain may end up with the “for-profit” company started by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. The sub-domains, however, continued to direct to the sites set up by those who received today’s email. (Or at least, the one I set up did.)
Technorati Tags: wiki, wiki.com, wikia
Michael Dell on whether or not Dell would put the Mac operating system on a PC (as quoted by Fortune senior editor, David Kirkpatrick): “If customers wanted it and Apple would license it on reasonable terms…It’s Apple’s decision.” The article contains other interesting things about Windows running on a Mac (and vice versa).
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza just blogged that Patrick Ruffini has signed on with Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign as an e-campaign adviser.
Disclosure: I met Patrick through blogging, and like many others I’ve met that way, we’ve become good friends over the years. We’ve never really discussed or debated “issues,” (he’s a Republican, I’m a former bi-partisan), although I have spent many hours discussing with him the mechanics of using web-based tools and strategies in the context of campaigns and advocacy. He’s been helpful to me in thinking through some projects that have nothing to do with politics. I didn’t know this new role was in the works, although we’ve talked recently about his tech blog called Overclocked that has nothing to do with politics, but is filled with wonkishness about RSS — stuff I can fully endorse, in other words.
Technorati Tags: giuliani, gop, politics
From Search Engine Journal and SEOmoz Blog comes this news: “As of now are all outbound links from the english Wikipedia Site using the NOFOLLOW attribute, no exceptions.” If you have no idea what this means, that’s a good thing — as many of the people who know the ins-and-outs of the nofollow attribute are obsessed with getting around it. This new Wikipedia practice is supposed to discourage link-spammers from uploaded links to Wikipedia for the Google-juice that may accrue from the link appearing there. Without getting too technical, the search index “bots” of the major search engines do not “count” links that fall within “nofollow” tags, thus making “comment spamming” and “Wikipedia link spamming” of little importance in moving a link up in their results. Again, if that makes no sense, congratulations. You have a life.
I’m not so sure this decision by Wikipedia regarding the NOFOLLOW attribute is very beneficial. Why not? It is a feature of most blogging platforms’ comments tool (links appearing in comments are not “indexed” by search engines, in other words) but that does not seem to slow down the attempts by link spammers to clog comments.
Also, from my experience of maintaining a rather large and robust wiki, I think one of the reasons individuals participate in helping to create such resources is to pick up some link-love. In other words, I won’t be instituting the nofollow attribute on any mediawiki sites with which I am associated. However, we will continue to be vigorous in several ways already used to block link spam from our sites. (In is a massive understatement to say our challenge is nothing on the level as that faced by Wikipedia.)
I don’t know how this may be related, but I think Akismet is a modern marvel as it has nearly obliterated comment spam from this blog — something the NOFOLLOW attribute did not even make a dent in. Perhaps Akismet can come up with a version that plugs into the MediaWiki platform.
Bonus link: One of the people I respect most when it comes to all things wiki, Ross Mayfield of Social Text, does not like the nofollow decision by Wikipedia.
Technorati Tags: akismet, search
For those who have followed the knowledge management “space,” and, more recently, the enterprise-wiki “space,” the news ( via the NY Times) that “IBM today plans to announce a set of social software tools that will bring the kind of blogging, idea sharing and war-story swapping typically asstociated with MySpace and Facebook…to the corporate world” certainly sounds like deja vu all over again. As a sideline observer of this topic, it seems to me Social Text and others have solutions that have thousands of installations in some large corporate environments and, in some cases, are making use of software that is open-source or free. Perhaps I may be out of line and am comparing Mars and Venus here, but legend has it that Josh Bancroft has some pretty cool social networking things (a wiki, primarily) running behind the firewall at Intel using the open-source software mediawiki and wordpress.
I’ll admit: Despite my experience a few years ago of leading the development of a massive knowledge management system created by a team of 25 programmers, DBAs, network administrators, taxonomists, etc., I’m still not sure of what I know and don’t know about the social life of knowledge behind a firewall.
Technorati Tags: blogging, businessblogging, enterprise wiki, knowledge management, sociatext
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I’ve turned off the rexblog feature that gives a thumbnail preview of every link to another website. However, I will continue to use it selectively. If you use the Snap service, this link will tell you how to limit the feature to the ones you add a ’snap_
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