e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Wikipatterns: A How-To Site on Driving the Adoption of Wikis Within Your Organization

What a great resource. A collection of patterns and anti-patterns (or actually resistance patterns) for moving forward with Wikis within your organization. Each entry begins with a short descriptor: "Most people want to see the upcoming meeting's agenda. Many would like to influence it or have material to add. So rather than sending email (attachments) to all your colleagues with the details of an upcoming meeting, you should send them a link to the agenda within your WIKI System."

Then proceeds to lay out usage, examples, common problems, etc (the site itself is a wiki so that you can contribute to it yourself.) The site also includes people patterns and forms (anti-patterns) that resistance can take, like "Manager Lockdown" "This pattern refers to the situation where a manager takes ownership of certain wiki content which is particularly visible and unintentionally discourages people from changing their content. The result can be that other wiki users who wish to contribute become hesitant about what content can and cannot be edited."

Wikipedia Founders Starts Wikiversity for the Sharing of Learning Resources

Wikiversity: "a center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities." Oh snap! Jimmy Wales did NOT just step into this when BB patented the delivery of anything that can teach anyone anything over the Web! Here is the page that explains how Wikiversity supports learning. As I understand it, Jimmy Wales just made this announcement today. It will interesting to see how this announcement of an admittedly unproven but undeniably noble gesture will provide some excellent contrast with the proven and ignoble actions of BB.

How geeky is this? I'm stoked because Wikipedia has added RSS feeds!

Picked this up from Chris Anderson - if you click on the "history" tab at the top of any Wikipedia page, then look on the left-hand side, you'll see you now have the option of adding an RSS feed from that page so you can get RSS notices anytime someone changes that page. I know that other Wiki packages had already included that capability but it's exciting to see it happen in the world's largest encyclopedia.

My New Addiction: Ross Mayfield's Photo Stream

For those of you who don't know him, Ross Mayfield is the CEO and founder of SocialText, a company focused on enterprise versions of collaborative technologies - which largely means blog and wikis. Of course Ross has his own blog but my favorite way of exploring Ross's world is through his photostream on flickr.

Let's go into this with our eyes open - Ross is no Ansel Adams or Herb Ritts - and yes there are plenty of the obligatory conference and hotel photos but given that you are now officially required to take these photos and post them, one can hardly blame Ross for those. So back to the photostream...

I love trolling through Ross's photos because they are great bread crumbs leading to very interesting places. These places include not only Ross thoughts but he catches a lot of other items that are flying through the ether as well.

Some of my favorites include:

• The Business Blogging Penetration one
• The Google Trends of Wikis and Blogs one
• The Power of Participation one (classic!)
• The Web 2.$ is Money one
• The Virtual Screen one
• The Cable Capacity one
• The McKinsey on Web 2.0 one
• The Law of Two Feet one (classic!)

(These are my favorites in like the first 10 pages, there are something like 70+ pages overall!)

Free Wikis - If you have a large audience

Wikia is an effort backed by Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia. It offers the ability for anyone to start a wiki if:

"A wiki must have a large potential audience and be likely to attract enough editors to maintain the wiki. Personal wikis and wikis for very small groups or individual schools are not generally permitted; try another wiki host for these. If your proposal is too narrow in scope, you will be advised to broaden it and add your idea as a sub-section of a larger Wikia."