Business blogging tips and news for professional bloggers

Note by Easton: I'd like to thank Stewart Mader for offering these thoughts on wikis. This special guest post is part of the Know More Media Guest Blogger Week effort.

In the online world, I'm in someone else's shoes this week. Thanks to Easton for inviting me to be part of Know More Media Guest Blogger Week!

My usual blog is Using Wiki in Education, which includes interviews, example wiki uses, profiles of new wiki products, and updates on The Science of Spectroscopy collaborative curriculum development wiki.

Now on to what I really want to talk about - the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates...

I just realized the basic difference between the two - when Gates gives a keynote, he shows you what you might be doing with technology 5 years from now. Jobs, on the other hand, fills his keynote with the coolest stuff that you can use right away. A perfect example of this is the CES 2006 keynote (Video - Windows Media) - Gates demos a scenario that he says will be reailty by the end of the decade - in today's world, can you really predict what's going to be reality next month, never mind four years from now? Conversely, in Steve Jobs' Macworld 2006 keynote, everything he announces is available either "Today" or within about a month, at most. When something is delayed a little by longer shipping time, like the MacBook Pro, it's because of overwhelming response. Rumors went around for a while that some new products were absent from 2006 Macworld Keynote because they weren't ready, and that's a good thing, in my opinion. Why tell people about something that they can't actually get their hands on for a while, which leads me to Windows Vista. Steve Jobs joked in his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote that Vista has taken so long to release, Apple will likely release the fifth version of OS X at the same time as Vista becomes the second OS offered by Microsoft in the same time period. With the announcement this week that Vista is delayed until January 2007, it's looking more and more likely that OS X 10.5 Leopard will be available before Vista. Now, some are asking if the delay will give Apple a critical opportunity to make inroads with computer buyers this holiday season - this seems quite possible, and maybe the watershed moment where Apple will dramatically increase its share of the PC market. (Here's an article on the big events in Apple's history, since we're just days away from its 30th birthday.)

I'll spend the majority of this week's posts talking about the wiki, and its unprecedented usefulness as a business and education tool. Most people recognize Wikipedia as the most famous wiki, but a growing number of organizations are finding that the wiki can transform and simplify how they organize information, because of its ability to let users edit web pages right in a browser, and its extreme simplicity. When you look at the design and content of Jobs' presentations, they're very simple and obvious - slides aren't cluttered with lots of text or unnecessary items like extra images or bullets. Garr Reynolds has a really good post about this zen aesthetic on his blog, Presentation Zen. Wiki software is the same way - unlike so much other software, the wiki is becoming famous for not adding lots of features. When someone comes along asking for a specific feature, wiki developers are more likely to tell them to find another tool that does what they want, instead of adding complexity to wiki software. The advantage here is that the wiki retains its "walk up" ability - that is, the ability of a person to walk up to a wiki having never used it before, and know exactly what to do.

by Stewart Mader