watching business sell wikis

Posted in General, New Media, Wikis - 24 February 2006 - No comment

My Google Alert for wiki is telling me that more and more businesses and organizations are discovering wikis and blogs and rss, and more software developers are creating systems to manage them. The latest is Stellent’s Wiki, Blog, RSS Organizer.

The Stellent Universal Content Management helps customers integrate wikis and blogs in multi-site Web content management.

The curious thing from a rhetorical angle is how Stellent describes the system’s functions. This is what a wiki looks like through marketing eyes:

Stellent Universal Content Management lets wiki contributors create hyperlinks in both pattern-matching and wizard style formats, which in turn allows users to link to other topics and pages within a wiki site, as well as other Web sites.

When an author creates a new hyperlink about a particular subject, the Stellent system will automatically link to a wiki page about that topic. If the page does not exist, it will automatically create a new page.

Those are basic functions of any wiki: if the page exists, link to it (pattern-matching). If it doesn’t, create it (wizard style). And here are described, in turn, Recent Changes and Diffs:

The Stellent technology also records a history of wiki activity, so readers know who writes or changes content, how many times content is revised and if there are certain topics currently under heavy debate. A locking and revision control feature ensures only one user may change content at a time, and it also keeps an audit trail of all revisions which is then available for records and retention management purposes.

The concerns and values of the corporate world are clear: tracking who changed what, revision control, audit trails.

What interests and concerns are embedded in Ward’s original definition of wiki as “The simplest online database that could possibly work”? Discuss.

Listening to Everytime We Live Together We Die A Bit More from “The Magnificent Tree” by Hooverphonic

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