wikiSquared

a (minor) grondswell in a travelogue wiki

I'm continuing to make a pitch to the local auto club (the California State Automobile Association - CSAA) that their members would enjoy a site where fellow travellers could add notes of especially interesting 'finds.' 

It would be inaccurate to say people are lining up to add comments...

Still - the unofficial CSAA wiki travelogue now has small pieces about (1) a vision for a whole new city being built in Arizona, (2) a set of cascading waterfalls in northwestern connecticut, (3) a second california article -- this one on the famous Big Sur Nepenthe/Phoenix restaurant (4) a college town north of Chicago (5) Crane Beach in Ipswitch MA and (6) a Grand Old Hotel in western massachusetts that boasts a block long hotel verandah  - with 50 or 60 rocking chairs that anyone can settle into to watch the world go by...

Anyone interested in contributing interesting places?

sloppy desks and clear thinking

ruminating about this ... more soon

I was invited to take part in an online conversation.  About 5 minutes into it I realised that what I needed to do was create links, add a picture, insert a diagram, link to a powerpoint slide AND add a comment (parenthetical) within an earlier posting.  Of course, the software allowed me to do almost none of that....  hmmmm

what do I do when I GET there?

To follow up on the idea (above) about offering a traveller-community created wiki for a large membership organization - the California State Auto Association. (the CSAA - this state's branding of the AAA)

I've spent some time talking with different CSAA offices - to learn what I suspected.  I'm told that a lot of people regard AAA as a store-front service .. you go in, get maps, booklets .. maybe some other services .. and drive off.  My pitch to them is that a 'wiki-travel'-ish addition to their site would bring a younger/more hip crowd than (what I suspect is)  the typical member demographic.

no nibbles - yet..

So - a related idea is to approach various online travel/booking services. Expedia/ Travelocity / Orbitz - the argument being that *their* customers - who are clearly web-comfortable - use their services to make/purchase all their travel plans.  And then they *fly* off.

WHAT IF these travel agencies could make their sites more of a destination rather than a site for transactions

.. what IF these companies could offer a kind of  fellow-traveller created "WHAT DO I DO WHEN I GET THERE" environment?   

And - my bias is showing here - what BETTER mechanism for self-created and group-edited material than wikis?

Anyone with solid contacts in any of these companies??

and how about adding a wiki to .. well, ANYWHERE

And if that isn't cool enough, check out what Seedwiki offers:

Just about anywhere you have enough control to insert a few lines of html code, you can insert a wiki.

In the case of my "architecture of information" stub of a blog at blogger  (http://ArchitectureOfInformation@blogspot.com), you get the blog AND you get a window into a fully functioning wiki.  (The wiki, by the way, associated with THIS blog:  wsSandbox.seedwiki.com )

This isn't just a VIEW into a wiki, it's actually the real thing -- you can log on, make comments, add images and edit text.

Suddenly, wikis and blogs may not be all that segregated...

Bravo WikiSpaces !

Two items here. 

Schools tend to love wikis -- they're (wikis) simple, thery're understandable, and they're sufficiently maleable to allow the creation of useful stuff.  And, far from least importantly, they're cheap.
To be *slightly* picky about last point - schools often choose low cost or free wiki hosting services and sometimes the price they pay for that service is sidebar advertisements.  From my own work delivering wikis to schools, occasionally there's a bit of push-back when I mention that the wikis that'll be used have ads that support the service. 

Well, WikiSpaces has heard this from teachers as well -- and they're doing something about it.
For schools - WikiSpaces is offering a hard combination to beat:  free and ad-free.

ah...

But there's more.

WikiSpaces is also doing something remarkably cool. 

It's allowing a kind of integration between one's wiki space AND one's typepad or blogger blog.

So?

This is important.  Blogs and wikis co-exist in the world but they serve very different ends.  'problem is, being forced to select one or the other kind of platform shortchanges our ability to take advantage of the one we didn't select.

Blogs give us voices.  They are the ethereal equivalent to the soapboxes at Speakers' Corner. 

Wikis give places for groups to rub ideas together.  They're often rabble-y and irreverant - but they are just as often the place where new ideas are sired. 

WikiSpaces is doing something valuable by offering us windows from one world to t'other.

Check out  WikiSpaces blog (http://blog.wikispaces.com) in general, the the following entry on this integration in particular.  http://blog.wikispaces.com/2005/11/wikispaces-integration-with-blogger.html

the 5000-th How-To on WikiHow

This is something of a milestone.  It's one thing for online zealots to froth about 'user created content' .. and have little more than verbiage to back them up.  It's a whole 'nother story when a small new site generates enough interest to pull in thousands of people.

WikiHow has just announced its 5000-th How-to-do-Something posting; "How to do a frontside 360 on a snowboard."

Lest we tut-tut this as the result of some narrow clique of 'friends of WikiHow' -- here's another statistic to be impressed with.

In January 2006 - alone - 886,510 different people read wikiHow.

This number makes it one of the most widely read wikis after the Wikipedia and related Wikimedia project sites.