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Jeffrey Walker, the President of Atlassian Software, wonders if Razorfish should have started with MediaWiki as the base for their new enterprise wiki.

It strikes me that if Razorfish invested all this effort and money, then the question needs to be asked: Is Mediawiki an enterprise wiki? Certainly not out of the box. One full-time intern and two part-time developers is at least $50-100K for one year! Probably the latter number. Mediawiki in this instance became an enterprise wiki but only after considerable work.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish's Enterprise Solutions lead, responds:

... Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

I commented on his blog, but thought I'd post here as well:

Shiv - not sure I agree with you... I think you're lucky (or unlucky) in having bench resource available - a lot of companies aren't in that situation and have a constant battle to get developer time. So, faced with that situation - what is the cost of having 2 developers available, part time, to develop and look after your mediawiki instance over 18 months ? Secondly, would spending the relatively small amount on an unlimited license for Confluence ($8,000) or Socialtext, and getting out of the box AD integration, search and granular permissioning, represent better value than developing it from scratch ? Also, developing inhouse commits you to a codebase that with an audience of just yourselves (until you release it out to the community ?).

I should disclose that the company I work for - Headshift - does a lot of work with Confluence. [tags]confluence, atlassian, wiki, mediawiki, socialsoftware, enterprise, enterprise2.0 [/tags]

Just seen this over on Ross Mayfield's blog - Google have acquired JotSpot. So, Google now have a blog and a wiki platform, as well as things like Google Notebook which is a pretty good online notes, clippings and sharing platform. They don't have a good social bookmark / tagging service, so could that be next ? Or maybe some API glue to start connecting them all together ? [tags]google, socialsoftware, wiki, jot, jotspot[/tags]

Adriana Cronin-Lukas points to a CNET piece about the recent Wikipedia incident. If we assume that the Wikipedia model isn't going away, then we're all going to have to assume a lot more personal, and active, responsibility for checking how we're perceived by the world, and correcting anything untrue. However, even "corrections" aren't so easy - as Adam Curry recently discovered.

I often don’t think of Google Ads as advertising, but almost a form of recommendation engine - the blogs I'm subscribed to are in my area of interest, and the ads in the feed are much much more likely to be of interest and relevance than general advertising. And here's an example: reading (I think) Jason Calacanis's feed, I saw a Google ad for Free Hosted Wikis, and found: schtuff.com. I've taken a quick look, and it looks interesting if your needs are fairly simple - there's also a permission model to allow or prevent viewing and editing. RSS feeds and file uploads are also part of the mix - it's a pretty good feature set. Shame they don't use Markdown or Textile for the mark up though (actually it's a shame they haven't integrated a WYSIWYG editor). Don't know anything about the company behind them, how stable they will be, and what their ongoing plans are. This is one of the biggest problems for small providers, and even more critical when the service provided is online (and hosted) - how do you establish enough credibility to get users to entrust their private data ? Companies like 37Signals and Flickr have managed it, but what did they do apart from create great looking applications and communicate with the user base ? Is that all it takes ? Technorati Tags: wiki