Krishwords

Few people have asked me about a reliable hosted wiki platform. I thought I will put my thoughts in the form of a post in this blog. Before I discuss about hosted wiki platforms, I want to make sure that I convey my bias towards Mediawiki as the Wiki platform. In my opinion, it is the most powerful of all the wiki platforms. However, Mediawiki has a reasonably steep learning curve and I cannot recommend it to newbies. Also, Wikimedia foundation, the home of Mediawiki, doesn’t offer a hosted version of MediaWiki. Many people prefer to have a hosted version instead of going through a geeky installation process. There are many third party MediaWiki hosts but they are not from the original developers and hence people’s (especially business community’s) reluctance to go with them.

In recent times, I was playing around with many hosted Wiki sites like Wikidot, Wik.is, Pbwiki and Wikispaces. All of them have features that will help you get your Wiki running without any problems. Compared to MediaWiki, these hosted Wiki platforms are much more “user friendly”, making it a cake walk even for newbies. In fact, you can do a comparison of various Wiki platforms in the Wikimatrix website. Frequently, I come across questions about the best hosted wiki platform from my company’s clients, my friends and my social networking contacts. I often refer them to sites like Wikidot.com or Wik.is. In fact, I use Wikidot.com for a couple of projects and Wik.is for the third project. Both these Wiki platforms are extremely good and they are very user friendly, with good “mashup support”. Deki Wiki, the wiki that powers Wik.is, is very well integrated with the web services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. Both Wikidot.com and Wik.is can solve your Wiki needs without any difficulty for the users. My support for these two Wiki platforms doesn’t mean that Pbwiki and Wikispaces are a bad choice.

I will explain why I selected Wikidot.com and Wik.is over Pbwiki.com and Wikispaces.com here. When I consider the options for a hosted wiki, whether it is for personal purposes or business purposes, I have to take into account the long term stability of the platform. Some of the hosted Wiki sites have very good financial backing and these companies might be there for a long haul. However, this is not the case with every company that offers Wiki as the hosted platform. Sometimes, it is difficult to ascertain the stability of a company on which we are going to trust our personal or business data. There is always the danger of the hosted Wiki company shutting its doors and vanishing in thin air. How can we foolproof our personal wiki or business wiki against such eventualities? There are two ways in which we can achieve this stability. One approach is to ensure that your Wiki company offers you a way to export all your data in open formats. Now a days, many Wiki companies allow this export of data. We can then take the data to another hosted wiki company and get it imported. The second approach is to find a hosted wiki company that also offers the Wiki platform in one of the open source licenses. Suppose if the wiki company goes out of business, you will still have the application available to install in your own servers or in the computing cloud. You are completely safe even if the company that hosted your wiki is out of business. Since the wiki is released under open source license, there will still be developers working on the Wiki development. This offers you continuity with your wiki platform and your investment, both financial and time, is completely protected.

I prefer the second approach over the first and this forms the basis for my recommendation of Wikidot.com and Wik.is. You get a long term stability with your wiki platform irrespective of what happens to the company behind the wiki. I consider this to be very crucial in everyone’s wiki strategy.

Do you have a favorite hosted Wiki platform? Do you have an underlying reason to choose the platform. Feel free to share your experience here.

I posted this comment in one of the ReadWriteWeb posts. Since the topic fits well into the theme of this blog, the concept of open web, I thought I will also post it in my blog.

The death of Readburner brings into focus a very important question. How can we rely on a web service offered by a small startups whose longevity cannot be ascertained. Readburner is a different kinda web service where we do not upload huge amounts of data. What about those two people web services where we invest our time and upload all our data? How can we rely on such companies with our valuable data? Should we wait for some big companies like Google to acquire the service before we start investing our time?

These questions bring to forefront two of the important ideas in the technology world, Open source and Data Portability. All the web services should offer a way to take your data with us using open standards. This will ensure that we will have our data in the event of a web service shutting its shop. The second important point is that these web services should consider releasing their code in one of the open source licenses. Right now, some of the web services release their code under open source licenses. For example, if wordpress.com or wikidot.com or wik.is is going to shut the shop tomorrow, nothing will happen to me except a few hours of downtime. I can take my data from these web services in an open format, use their released source code to install the software on one of my servers or somewhere in the cloud and, more importantly, my life will not get affected. How cool is that? I hope that all the mom and pop web services startups take the option of data portability seriously and consider releasing their source code to public, at least, when they shut their shop.

Technorati Tags: Dataportability, Data Portability, Opensource, Open Source, Open Standards, Readburner, Web 2.0

If you have an Ubuntu Laptop (with bluetooth enabled), you can use any Bluetooth enabled phone to lock and unlock the software without even touching the Laptop. Blueproximity is a neat open source utility to secure Laptops running Linux. Here is a howto on setting up Blueproximity on Ubuntu.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.

I seriously don’t understand the tech journalists and bloggers. First, they don’t understand what opensource means in the first place. Second, they somehow seem to think that opensource needs Microsoft in one way or other. Opensource doesn’t need Microsoft to legitimize its existence. Opensource doesn’t need Microsoft to gain acceptance. Opensource approach and Microsoft’s proprietary approach are two different approaches to solving problems (People, try to understand diversity please). It is for the users to decide which approach suits better for them. There is absolutely no need for Microsoft to support opensource. If Microsoft wants to attach the opensource label with their company, all they have to do is to release their full software product under one of the OSI approved licenses and thatz all. Anything other than the release of their software product under one of the OSI approved licenses is just meaningless and it is not even worth talking. Fred Wilson talked about lack of standards in journabloggers. This pissed off Mike Arrington (Well, I can understand it because Fred has linked to one of the articles published in TC). Today I saw a post on Techcrunch (through techmeme discussion) titled Microsoft Sings a New Tune - Wants to play nice with open-source. This title brings into focus the standards which Fred Wilson was talking about. The TC blogger should have made some research before he came up with a title like this. It is pretty evident that he hasn’t put in any efforts to even understand the meaning of the term opensource. All Microsoft has done is to release some openAPIs and making certain documentation available to public. Knowing the secretive nature of Microsoft’s business practices, this is a Techmeme newsworthy item. I am not debating the importance of the news. But it has nothing to do with Opensource. We can quote Microsoft and Opensource in the same sentence ONLY IF Microsoft releases one of its complete products under the OSI supported licenses. As long as it doesn’t happen, using Microsoft and Opensource in the same sentence means nothing. The title, like the above Techcrunch post, is just childish and shows the author’s ignorance about the term opensource. I just hope journabloggers do take up Fred Wilson’s call and put in efforts to do some ground work before they report.

Chronicle.com reports

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

There is lot of chatter going on in the tech blogosphere about the $54 million lawsuit filed against Bestbuy for losing someone’s Laptop.

Six months after bringing a damaged laptop computer into a Best Buy electronics store for repairs, and three months after the firm admitted losing it, Campbell filed the whopper of a lawsuit recently in Washington, D.C., Superior Court.

Best Buy has told Campbell that her demands are unreasonable, and has tried to settle for far less. But Campbell said she didn’t start out making astronomical demands. Months of stalling and brush-offs by the company led her to the drastic measures, she said.

I feel that Bestbuy deserves this lawsuit and I hope that the judge offers the victim the full amount (if not more). A similar thing happened to me too. When I bought a SLR camera several years back, they convinced me to get the extended warranty plan and told me that the plan also covers for cleaning. After a couple of years, I saw a spot in the mirror inside and I wanted to get it cleaned. I gave it to Bestbuy for cleaning and they promised me that it will be sent to my home within 2-3 weeks. I didn’t get it for a month and every time I went to Bestbuy, they will look into their computers and told me that it will be delivered soon. After almost 6 or 7 weeks and after ten visits to the Bestbuy, one day I lost my patience and shouted at them. Only after I drew the attention of fellow customers through my voice, they took me to someone who they told was the manager. I am pretty sure he was not the manager because he was in Geek Squad uniform and, as far as I know, the managers don’t wear Geek Squad uniform. My earlier attempts to talk to a manager didn’t work and only my shouting inside the store brought the so called “manager” out. The “manager” told me that he would offer a new camera and refused to offer me any reason for not giving back the old camera. He offered me a new camera (of the same model) which was $50 less than what I actually paid. They had the next model for the same amount I paid. He refused to give me the camera that had the same price tag as I had paid earlier and I had to shell out the difference to get the new model. He also said that I will lose my remaining one year of the extended warranty for which I paid. He told me that the warranty is for that particular piece and they cannot extend it to the new piece. When I argued that my old piece was working ok and I gave it to them only for cleaning and not repair, he refused to budge repeating the same sentences. I pointed out that his argument will hold true if I had given it for repair and they coulnd’t repair it (offered the new camera) but it will not hold true for their mistake (I am sure they have lost the camera somewhere). The arguments continued for another hour and when I started shouting again, he came around and said he will extend the warranty on the new camera for the remaining period of my original warranty. It was a frustrating but similar experience with Bestbuy. I just hope the courts will put this monster in its place and teach them an expensive lesson.

Letz not forget about Jeff Pulver’s experience in the past.

New York Times reports

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

In this guardian article, Nick Carr says

That would be nice, but I have my doubts. When we all have equally precise, equally up-to-the-second information on traffic conditions, the odds are that we’ll all respond in similar ways. As we all act in unison to avoid one bottleneck, we’ll just create a new bottleneck. We may come to look back fondly on the days when information was less uniformly distributed.

This is plain rubbish. The technology that informed people to move from the first bottleneck due to real time traffic information will also inform people about how traffic is diverging away from the first bottleneck. It will help drivers make an informed decision about their route and, in fact, an intelligent system may even help the driver route better based on instantaneous analysis of traffic divergence from the first bottleneck. The above statement is just nonsense. Technology doesn’t work selectively. Period. He shouldn’t be making such statements just to fill up a column that is due.

I posted my thoughts on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL on TechBizMedia. Feel free to add your comments on the topic.