Weblog/CurrentPosts
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We're Launching Three New Services!
10 January 2008 We're excited to announce the availability this afternoon of three new services for the AboutUs community. You may have noticed already that there are three new tabs up in the top right corner of each page on the wiki. Some of these services may be more useful for you than others, but we hope that you'll be as excited as we are to see what we've got to offer.
Here's a quick description of the three new services available:
1. Free monitoring. Any article on the AboutUs site can now be watched automatically for changes - no account creation required. Just click the "Get Page Alerts" tab and enter your email.
2. Premium Service Package. Our new "Promote My Company" package includes in-house design of your business' AboutUs page and personalized wiki coaching for a one time fee of $99. Many companies take the time to learn and design sophisticated AboutUs pages on their own, now you can also get professional design and training services to take it to the next level. Here are some examples of steps that we can work with you to improve your page.
3. Portal Sponsorship. Companies can (and are) now sponsoring topical portals that aggregate business listings and functionality like calendaring and maps for cities around the world and industry verticals. Our showcase Portal right now is the PortlandTech Portal - but there are more in the works and we'll soon launch a technology that will make sophisticated Portals easy for any anyone here to create for free. If you'd like to sponsor one of these fabulous Portals, you'll be glad you did.
Here's how we explain the relationship between individual articles and Portals:
In addition to heavy traffic from search, people also navigate through AboutUs by category - to discover and learn about web pages and companies that are related to each other. These categories of pages can be turned into full-featured portals, which can then be built upon further for events, sub-topics or other collections.
See for example the well-developed AboutUs page for Portland attorneys Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, which looks great as a part of the PortlandTech Portal - a collection of topical pages that also served as the foundation for the Venture Northwest 2007 event page where all the participants, including Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, can be found listed with links back to their detailed AboutUs pages. AboutUs is a great place to compile detailed company profiles around any topic - so it will benefit you to make sure your company profile page is as effective as it can be.
$99 is a great price for a company to put their best foot forward on this platform, both aesthetically and with assistance from AboutUs in relating to the world of wiki users who will be visiting their page. When you're ready to take it to the next level, consider sponsoring your industry or city's portal. It's a great way to add value to your community and win the admiration that comes with such a contribution.
Those are our new offerings! We hope you'll find something there that's useful for you and your organization. As always, please feel free to contact us any time if you've got any questions or feedback.
Sincerely, RayKing and WardCunningham
Inventor Asks for Your Contribution to Wikipedia
04 January 2008
AboutUs CTO, Ward Cunningham, authored several posts for the Wikipedia fundraising blog. This is one that didn't run, but is still good advice.
We buy a computer and we expect it to change the way we live. Sometimes we know exactly how that change will happen. But more often we make the purchase with only a vague notion that life will be better with the new machine. We expect something good and the machine delivers.
The computer industry exists because computers, the network, and the people who use them have delivered on a promise that we only vaguely understood as we paid the bills. Did we know there would be a Wikipedia? Probably not. Still, there it is. Enjoy.
Enjoy, but understand that we are not done paying. I ask you to give to Wikimedia because this investment is necessary and will be even more positively leveraged than your hardware purchase. Your machine sits before you ready to transform your contribution into good in ways that neither you nor I can fully predict. I say this with all the confidence I had when I chose to devote my life to computing. I remain excited by our possibilities. I hope you are too.
Ward Cunningham invented the Wiki style of collaboration in 1995. He has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board since its founding. Ward's previous request, Contribute in honor of teachers. This post is a personal opinion, and does not represent an official statement from the Wikimedia Foundation or AboutUs, Inc.
Don't Role Your Eyes
21 December 2007
- MarkDilley: Look Ted, this 1 million deaths per day on Duels.com looks interesting.
- TedErnst: What the heck is that?
- MD: It sounds pretty cool, like a lot of people are using Duels.com.
swishes hand around in air
argh
- TE: It's just a basic starter page.
- MD: That doesn't matter. What are it's categories?
- TE: They're all redlinks
telepaths to you, the reader, the page doesn't yet exist
- MD: That doesn't matter.
clicks out all the categories to see if there's anything in them. click, click, click
- MD: Ted, Category:Role-playing Games has 74 pages in it, Duels - 17, Dualist has 23, Duelling - 9, Dueling - 9 and Duals - has 14.
- TE: Cool. Let's look at the RPG one and see if there's something interesting there.
- MD: That's cool because I like Role Playing Games. And, look at Category:Role Playing Games. 296 pages!
- TE: Sounds confusing.
- MD: It's a folksonomy! It shows the inherent quality of AboutUs as the folksomony of the web.
- TE: Rockin!
magically creates the page by typing text and saving
- MD: Sweet!
checks the specific recent changes for those categories
- MD: Cool, 4 people other than myself have edited pages in this category. Well, that's not quite the 1 million deaths per day Duels.com is getting, but we can aspire.
- TE: Mark, let's build one of those cool new news boxes you've been showing me.
- MD: And it's more than that. Once we get it put together, it's a whole new Role Playing Games wiki!
- TE: What do you mean?
- MD: Let me show you.
creates the news box and adds it to the two categories
- TE: Great, what's next?
- MD: You'll see!
writes three news items
- TE: Wow, a whole new wiki!
- MD: Yea, let's go duel
next turn
contributors: MarkDilley and TedErnst 20 December 2007
Apple & Rumors: Yin & Yang
Rumor has it that Apple is going to release a bunch of fixes to Leopard next week. This is fabulous, because most of the AboutUs office uses Mac. Thinking about writing this post, we went to the the AboutUs WikiPage for AppleInsider.com, and saw it wasn't that good. We then went to Google and found out AppleInsider was part of CNET's Blog 100, so we added that to the page and reformatted some and it looks a little better. Then we thought, "what other rumor blogs are out there?", and added Category:Apple Rumor Blogs to the page. Turns out, that category didn't exist, but we added it to a few other pages and now it does exist. The category isn't much yet, but since AboutUs is a wiki, others that know more about the subject can make the category better.
Good thing we started the category because today a legal battle that has raged on for a few years between Apple and the ThinkSecret.com settled. ThinkSecret is shutting down, and even though they say it was amicable, the chilling effect is troubling.
AboutUs acquires 1-800-AboutUs
For the next few months, the 1-800-AboutUs number will be shared with the former owner of 800-226-8887, BasketAndFloral.com, as they transition to a new number. BasketAndFloral.com is a Florida-based floral and gift shop providing a variety of services and deliveries to the greater Orlando area. Their new 800 number is 888-855-0003.
Community News
26 November 2007
Alex rocked out on his site and the WikiPage ActiveFind.net. This is the kind of beginning collaboration we like to see. He has learned a lot of basic wiki tools in the process and has helped himself in search engines. Now he will be able to work with the site if his community shows up!
Nathan made an interesting technical edit by moving the logged in people to the top right of the page. Vartan also helped in the technical arena by helping us focus on a long standing task of making images linkable - as an example our Values image.
Finally, for a bit of fun, Saad made the WikiPlane!