According to Google, it is official, “wiki” is now searched more than “blog”.

That Thing Got a Hemi? Zero to Wiki in Under 5 Minutes | SE-Ogre Swamplog
If you want to see the future of software deployment and distribution step right up. The fellas over at MindTouch are on the leading edge…

…Deki Wiki is fast and painless why else should you try it out? Well, it is the easiest wiki I have ever used and comes with a lot of really superb features. One feature in particular is just begging for a “sleep with the fishes” letter from Bill Gates; the file attachments feature. With Deki Wiki you can attach Microsoft Office and PDF documents PLUS you can search them AND you can view them from within the wiki WITHOUT Office or Acrobat installed. Goodbye sharepoint! Well, probably not, but this sure does open a lot of doors for Deki deployments. Of course all other standard wiki features are present plus you get some slick widgets and web services plugins that extend the capabilities to flickr, interactive google maps and about 3 bazilliion other cool integrations that you could probably live without but now have no excuse not to use. Don’t go another day without this highly addictive application. If you do, you will miss out on the new beta Desktop Connector and their latest alpha Outlook integration. If you really can’t find 30 minutes to install it, you still have no excuse not to use it because MindTouch is now offering hosted services - for those that prefer to let the experts handle things.

Shared hosted service: http://www.wik.is

Port 25 : MindTouch DekiWiki: open source, cross-platform wiki…
Since we last talked MindTouch has managed to propel itself into the pole position of our space. Specifically, MindTouch’s Deki Wiki is the most popular commercially supported wiki there is. Our rate of adoption outpaces our most well-known competitor by a factor of 30x. Our software is currently being downloaded and installed more than 700 times a day and growing.

Jamie Cannon does great work at Port25. It’s always a pleasure to see him at conferences. He’s a smart and funny guy that I enjoy chatting with. Thanks for the guest blog post Jamie.

I wrote this guest blog post for Jamie a few weeks back. At the time I wrote it I stated that MindTouch’s rate of adoption out paces our most well known competitor by a factor of 30x and that our software is being downloaded more than 700 times a day. Actually we’ve been seeing an average about 1,000 daily downloads for a while now. This puts the aforementioned factor closer to 50x.

Fun facts: MindTouch adds as many new users in one day as our most well known competitor adds in two months. The gap seems to be widening. MindTouch’s growth:

Our most (and very) well known competitor’s growth rate:

I’m not beating up on this “other guy”, I’m making a point here. The point I’m making? MindTouch’s growth is entirely attributable to you, the user. The community of Deki Wiki users is spreading the word! Thank you! When I tell people what MindTouch’s marketing, advertising, and PR budget is they scoff: that’s not a budget! I’m often approached at conferences by consultants who court MindTouch for business. They want to represent us in marketing, PR, or whatever else. When I tell them what we budget for these things they very quickly lose interest. Well, what do you know, if you engineer a fantastic product and listen to your users the word will get out because the community will bare the standard and spread the word. Again, thanks to all of you, please continue to blog and tell friends about our work and we’ll continue to engineer software to the best of our ability.

In previous posts (here and here), I introduced the building blocks for asynchronous programming in MindTouch Dream. In this post, I want to introduce the Async class, which provides common methods for asynchronous programming.
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As most of the MindTouch staff gets ready to relax over the extended Thanksgiving weekend (a major holiday here in the US), we have also much to rejoice about. Today, we broke the 100,000 download barrier on SourceForge.net. Wow! Deki Wiki has come a long way since its humble beginning just 18 months ago.

I’m excited about the road ahead. We have lots of great innovations in the pipeline for you. Some of our own devise, but many inspired by your comments and suggestions. Frankly, Deki Wiki wouldn’t be half as good if it weren’t thanks to the community that has gathered around it and I’m proud to be part of it.

Thank you for your help, your support, and your involvement. Wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm long overdue in blogging about DefragCon and BlogWorldExpo. My apologies to the organizers, both events were great.

DefragCon was in Denver, Nov 5-6. Eric Norlin did an amazing job putting this together. The event had quite the attendee and speakers list. You couldn't spit and not hit an industry notable. The sessions were mostly interesting. I spoke on a panel about socializing the enterprise alongside Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems and Dawn Foster of Jive Software. I attempted to attend the speaker's dinner, but was…errr…shall we say persuaded not to by the competitor who was sponsoring it. I met Alex Iskold in person. He's the guy who's been writing the informed articles at Read/WriteWeb about the semantic web. He's also the founder of AdaptiveBlue. I was present at the time he conceived the very innovative and provocative ClosedPrivate Initiative. I've since contributed to the initiative's blog. I facilitated an Open Space session on joining disparate pieces. I intended this to be a discussion about why open APIs, open standards, and surfacing (approved) user data is a good thing. Dawn was present, a guy from Me.dium was there, as was a the CTO from CollectiveX. I don't recall who else, sorry. The Open Space sessions really didn't work at DefragCon. If only Kaliya were there.

BlogWorldExpo was in Las Vegas, Nov 8-9. Rick Calvert and Dave Cynkin are the guys who organized this. They are wonderful. They too managed to organize a long list of notables. MindTouch powered the site wiki. Some highlights? Lijit, AdapativeBlue, Pajamas Media party, Pajamas Media booth masseuse, meeting Leo Laporte, drinking with the dudes from WordPress, and the fact that MindTouch's rabbits were everywhere. 

Both were great events. Both were inaugural events. I plan to attend both next year.

Ed’s Tech Tips | Which Wiki?
To make a wiki work in the average office it has to be easy to use as email. Unfortunately, the open source wikis, while feature rich and flexible, ease of use is not a hallmark feature. …

I then saw an article on a CNet blog that mentioned that DekiWiki from MindTouch was one of the fastest growing commercially supported open source wiki software programs on the market. …

“Ed’s Tech Tips” evaluates the most well known commercial and open source enterprise wikis and says: “which wiki? DekiWiki from MindTouch”. Thanks Ed! I’m looking forward to reading how you’re benefiting and using.

Google Wiki, Where Art Thou?
Moreover, open-source wiki specialist MindTouch will soon trot out a new wiki hosting service for creating mashups and composite applications.

While he wouldn’t publicly speculate on what Google is doing with the JotSpot assets, MindTouch co-founder Aaron Fulkerson did his part of an open-source torch bearer, claiming that he doesn’t put much stock in proprietary wiki solutions.

Fulkerson told eWEEK the proprietary approach will ultimately prove fatal for wiki providers—even Google—because customers don’t want to use closed systems for collaboration.

Well, that’s kind of what I said. What I actually said was that software buyers are becoming increasingly discerning when evaluating closed source software. Open source makes a lot more business sense than closed source/proprietary. Take JotSpot for example. They were, of course, closed source/proprietary. When Jotspot was acquired by Google their users were left without any support, updates, or bug fixes. It’s been over a year now. The software is basically withering on the vine and the users were left out in the proverbial cold. Now look at Zimbra. They were recently acquired by Yahoo!. Zimbra is open source. Zimbra’s users have a thriving community to turn to for support, updates, and bug fixes. Also, users have access to the source code and they can fix bugs and make improvements themselves. Or hire a third party to do the development. It’s most likely the case they won’t have to though because the community will continue to improve Zimbra and release these improvements to the public. My point was/is that open source makes a lot more sense and software consumers are starting to catch on to this. JotSpot perfectly embodies the pitfalls of closed source.

As for Google’s Wiki. I spoke on this topic previously when it was last rumored that it was going to launch. I’ll not repeat the hearsay I’ve been privy to, because it’s just hearsay, but my presumptions echo those of the other person in the article.

The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs

To have a true community of social, communal applications, we need open source, open APIs, and open standards.

Hell yes, we couldn’t agree more! We’re not just nodding our heads and smiling, we’re actually doing this. MindTouch delivers: 100% open source, open standards, and the most robust open API in our space.

Open Source

Deki Wiki (gpl2), Dream (lgpl2), Deki Wiki Desktop Connector (gpl2), Xihna HTML Editor fork (BSD), and the Deki Wiki Microsoft Outlook Connector soon to be re-released (gpl2).

Open Standards

We store in XHTML. Sorry, no wikitext. Actually, you can use wikitext for some things, but we convert to valid XHTML on save. Wikitext is non-standard and it simply does not make any sense. When it becomes as useful as HTML/CSS it will be HTML/CSS, but something crappier and different. No offense intended. Also, it makes no sense to build on wikitext editors because you’re lessening your positive impact to the software ecosystem. Instead we’ve devoted an enormous amount of time to building a fantastic web-based HTML editor that we’ve maintained under the original BSD license (no we weren’t obliged to do this).

RESTful design. Unlike others who claim RESTful design because they bolt on a couple REST-Based API methods I’m confident in claiming that we’re one of the strongest adherents to this design pattern. MindTouch consists of card carrying RESTafarians. Don’t believe me? Look at the Deki Wiki API. You’ll find it’s all standard HTTP verbs and the entire platform is built on this. Every resource has a human and machine readable URL and Deki Wiki is stateless. API output is JSON, XML, and Serialized PHP.

Now, my buddy Schepers at the W3C recently gave me some grief about id attributes, which we’ll need to look into, but take a look at the markup for our interface: it is tableless and semantically rigorous.

Open APIs

Deki Wiki’s API has 99 methods each with documentation and code samples.

Open source, open standards, and open APIs have powered all Internet booms. Everyone benefits from sharing. How could MindTouch have been successful if we hadn’t had Linux, MySQL, Mono, PHP, Mediawiki, and dozens of other libraries to build on? Sharing is not just a morale issue. It’s about good engineering and it makes great business sense. Open source allows you to spend your money on engineering rather than wasting a disproportional amount on sales and marketing. I can explain this more in another post. Standards should be open and followed because it allows you to easily interop, integrate, and extend. APIs should be open and REST based because it makes it easy to build on and when people build cool stuff on your platform you will benefit. "Free knowledge" and "Sharing is good" isn’t just a slogan we wave often at MindTouch, it’s an internal mantra.

I was recently asked by a competitor who licenses only portions of their software under the new badgeware license he pioneered what has MindTouch "given back". He really disdains us and, hey, I do push his buttons. My answer was: Well gee, 100% of the code we’ve written in developing Deki Wiki, some desktop utilities we’ve developed, an amazing API with which anyone can build on, it will be lots easier once we launch our shared hosted service, and we’ve provided countless bug reports and code patches to other projects like MySQL, SGMLreader, and Mono. Oh and of course, one of my personal favorites is that we are a host of the Free Software Sticker Book

MindTouch doesn’t just mouth the "openness" party line. We live, breath, and will win by it. Deki Wiki is now the most popular vendor supported wiki engine. I believe we’re now also the second most popular wiki of any kind, second to Mediawiki (powers Wikipedia). These claims are evidenced by our downloads and our rate of adoption. Why? Certainly, we’re bringing a significant amount of value to our users; so much so that many hundreds are active in the development of MindTouch’s products. But it’s also about MindTouch believing and contributing to a culture of "openness", listening to our community, and adhering to standards. Adhering to standards not just to prevent data lock-in to our platform, but to help people out of data lock-in created by other applications or platforms.

Increasingly the most successful software companies (maybe even hardware companies, I hope) will be those who deliver value around open source, open standards, and open APIs.

Great post Matt.

WikiCreole is an attempt at standardizing wiki-text. I had heard of it a while back, but figured it wouldn’t go anywhere since wiki-text is destined for obsolescence. Yet, somehow, the WikiCreole group pushed ahead and has now published its 1.0 spec. While I appreciate this attempt to standardize wiki-text, which differs wildly from wiki to wiki I have to say: WikiCreole is an exercise in futility. There is already a wonderful mark-up language called HTML and it has a wonderful layout and styling facility called CSS. The problem that WikiCreole is addressing is one that doesn’t exist anymore: the ability to create formatted text in the browser. Now we have a healthy choice of good WYSIWYG editors, including Xinha, TinyMCE, FCKeditor, and others.

Truth be told, the real culprit isn’t WikiCreole, but the archaic wiki engines that still rely on wiki-text. Deki Wiki was built with an XML page processing engine since the get go. It allowed us to leap over this whole wiki-text nonsense and immediately integrate with all other systems that use HTML as their representation (i.e. the rest of the Internet).  With our mesmerizing adoption growth, it appears we made the right decision.