myspace civilized
phidias showing frieze of parthenon to his friends
a new home for the myspace 95 thesis?
Google announced yesterday that they have acquired Jotspot (which they promptly shuttered). I've been waiting for a nice, free, easy-to-use Googlesque (can I use that term?) wiki. I like pbwiki, but free accounts have only a master password, which chills collaboration. Wikia offers all the power of the wikipedia mediawiki framework, but requires their approval to create your own wiki {unless you use the scratchpad, which is sorta cool.)

Still, could a new home for the thesis be in the works? We'll see.

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What could we better do at PBwiki to aid collaboration?
Fair enough. Let me first note what I really like about pbwiki:

1. clean, uncluttered design with nice logo
2. good short domain name (important as this will be part of your wiki's url)
3. easy registration
4. simple, well-designed interface
5. easy to edit
6. wiki syntax very similar to wikipedia's
7. allows file uploads and generous storage space

What I thought could be better:
Admin control over user management on free accounts. As far as I can tell (and it's been a couple months since I last check so maybe it's changed), you cannot set up a wiki and then open up for anyone to edit (even anonymous unregistered users as with wikipedia) without sharing with them the admin password giving them control over the wiki. This necessarily limits the collaborative potential.

I've found pbwiki great for setting up web pages to either edit with a few people you trust or just share with others. But without group-like access settings (i.e. admin gets to control everything, others only get to edit), it wasn't a truly collaborative document.

I believe this feature is available in premium versions, so I should also note that I'm a cheapskate that has been corrupted by google into expecting this for free. Besides, pbwiki does get to run google ads on any free wiki.

That said, I do recommend pbwiki if you want an easy way to set up a public web page or run a easy-to-set-up wiki with a few friends. I've yet to see anything better.
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