Holtz Communications + Technology

While there’s ample reporting these days about the blogging backlash, I’m not reading much about the concurrent backlash against wikis. Yet as the blogging skeptics and critics find their voice, wikis are getting bound up in the discussion. For example, a post expressing dismay about IBM’s employee blogging initiative, “The PC Doctor” also takes a swipe at the wiki IBM used to set its employee blogging…

Wired has an interesting piece today about the problems Wikinews is experiencing that its parent, Wikipedia, never had to deal with:

“In Wikipedia, the writing style of an encyclopedia is more timeless. You can get it right eventually. It’s going to be the same article for many years,” said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder. “With a news story, the actual story has a limited lifespan. If it’s…

Microsoft’s Encarta must be feeling the pressure from Wikipedia. As traffic to the open-source, wiki-driven encyclopedia increases, the folks at Microsoft must be wondering what it takes to keep people coming to its mainstream encyclopedia with its professionally written and edited articles.

In what must be an effort to compete head-to-head with Wikipedia, the folks at Encarta have decided to let readers be…

Companies seem to be less nervous about deploying blogs and wikis as tools for internal communication and collaboration than they are about introducing outward facing channels. The Gilbane Report for March—Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?—finds companies are introducing these tools internally for a variety of reasons, including easier-to-use bulletin boards, documentation, record-keeping, and departmental intranet sites.

Wikis in the workplace have become so hot an item that two companies that offer commercial wiki services are duking it out in the marketplace. The battle got visible when The Walt Disney Company, which has publicly voiced its support for Socialtext, suddenly dropped its contract and signed one with rival JotSpot. It’s JotSpot’s first major customer, although thousands of people have…

Neville Hobson reports that a wiki has been established to ensure coordination between broadcasters and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) following the Asian tsunami disaster. Using the Wikipedia wiki format, the site aims to…

...get an overview of how various organisations around the world have reacted to help broadcasters affected by the December 26th Earthquake and Tsunami. There is the immediate need to replace stations…