Technology is getting more and more complex, but at the same time, amazing technological benefits are available to us average Joes without too much fiddling around. That is what this column will be covering. Every Monday, right here at BloggingStocks.com, I'll feature an easy-to-use hack, gadget or service that really can make your life better. Geeks, technophiles and early adopters have plenty of other places to look for hot new technologies to try. Here you'll find technology for the rest of us.A wiki is a web page that anyone can edit. You can set up a wiki so that anyone coming across can see or edit it. Or you can set up a wiki so that anyone who logs in to see it can edit it, or you can set up a wiki so anyone can see it, and make changes, but only a moderator can accept those changes. There are a lot of ways to set up a wiki, and it makes for an incredible tool. Businesses can use it to let their own customers create help documentation, or keep their website up to date. People can use it to plan projects or run a team.
Wikis are starting to hit the attention of the mainstream. This is in large part thanks to Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but wikis are also being used for a variety of other things, as people think about how they could use a web page anyone can update and thus use the wisdom of their team, or the crowds around them.
A wiki can vary in complexity, and in how you access it, and in how easy it is to mark it up. A bare-bones wiki requires that you install the software on your server. Classic wikis also use a custom sort of code for you to manipulate your text. Want to bold something? You'll have to learn the code you tag the word with to bold it. As a result, as wonderful as wikis are, to the uninitiated they can have a bit of a learning curve. However, there are wikis with 'What You See is What You Get' (WYSIWYG) editing, which lets you press buttons to bold an item and make it pretty easy.
And while rolling your own wiki on your own web server is a time-honored tradition, this is Technology For The Rest of Us. We just want to get up and running quickly, so some sort of wiki service online would be what we're interested in.
Fortunately there are a wide variety of online wiki services that are easy to get going on and have WYSIWYG editing that makes using the wiki easy.
Easy to use
I like introducing interested people to the bare-bones WYSIWYG wikis. They do one thing only, and they do it well: create a simple wiki. The real standouts in this crowd are EditMe, PBWiki, SeedWiki and Wikispaces. Of the four I find Wikispaces and PBwiki to have the easiest user interfaces with the least amount of clutter, and were the fastest to load and edit.
PBWiki is very popular, and I like that its toolbar when in edit mode of a page isn't too cluttered, so new users aren't completely overwhelmed. The ability to control access to the wiki page on PBWiki is easy to find using the 'wiki information' box under the page. You can save documents as pdfs, tinker with the template, even add features, the basic functionality is pretty easy to play with and not intimidating.Wetpaint is a very slick website using web 2.0 ajax technologies that deserves mention, but could be slow to load on a slower computer, and the flashiness was somewhat distracting. The large ajax pop-up toolbar took up real estate, and for newer users, it isn't obvious you're now editing the page, which can lead to some confusion when first trying to edit a document there.
Stikipad was currently unreachable the day I wrote this column, though some users do highly recommend it. The one time I did host a project on it, my fellow wiki users and I were not as satisfied with Stikipad due to some slowness and occasional hangups.
My favorite web wiki these days is Wikispaces. The user interface is very well thought-out, with tabs on the top of the page letting you access the history of the page, discussion about the page, and letting you sign up to be notified if the page changes, as well as how to protect or let people sign-up to manage the pages. Even wiki first timers find they're able to get up and running on Wikispaces without too much trouble. And Wikispaces has yet to hang up or slow down on me.All of these are solid and easy-to-use wikis for people interested in no-fuss experimentation with wikis. All of them let you demo out the wiki or get a free plan easily enough.
Find the wiki you need easily
Now there's no excuse for you not to try creating one of these to see if maybe it could come in handy for your organization. In fact, there's a very handy tool you can use to figure out which wiki might be the one you need for your organization or needs: Wikimatrix.
Wikimatrix lets you compare all the wikis out there and their different aspects and features, it even features a wizard you can use to walk through the process. I really wish I'd found that before I started looking for and signing up for all these wikis as research for this article. I could have gotten through that part a whole lot quicker!
Tobias Buckell is an author, freelance writer, and professional blogger.
Previous Technology for the Rest of Us columns:
Entrepreneur's Journal: Putting together a solid sales contract
The week in preview: Earnings from Walmart, Macy's, and other retailers
Six top trades for the rest of 2009
