Happy Baby Jeebus Day!!

Cross Post

Roy Kim: Merry Christmas from MindTouch!!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holi…wait…holy &#$%, wtf? LMAO…yes, I know this photo is hysterically funny. Well, you haven’t seen anything because this is only one of the photos Roy had taken to send out for Christmas cards. If you would like a Christmas Card from Roy he’s willing to mail you one. Roy is MindTouch’s lead developer and founder of Tabulas. Yes, this guy is a lot of fun to work with. Check out that sweater! The sweater and scarf were actually borrowed from Guerric, the latest addition to MindTouch’s development team, who purchased it for use at a Christmas Sweater party he attended.

Seriously though, Happy Holidays from MindTouch. We really appreciate all of your support this last year. To show this we have some very cool new products we’re releasing in the beginning of the year (most of you are probably already aware of one of these). 2008 is already shaping up to be a break out year for MindTouch and this is entirely attributable to you, the community. Thanks for blogging, talking, providing testimonials, giving praise, translating, filing bugs, writing install guides, submitting code patches, writing extensions, hosting user conferences (you can even invite us if you like 🙂 ), buying support, and yes even complaining about Deki Wiki. Because of all these actions by so many of you MindTouch has become the most popular vendor backed wiki. Sincerely, thanks. 🙂

Please continue to provide your feedback in the forums. Good, bad, or otherwise. Also, you should know there is a section to author specs at the wiki. Yes, really you can spec out a feature, we will review it, we have implemented many of these. If you review the release notes of each product release you’ll notice the community is the predominate driver of the product releases. This is your product, we’re the facilitators. Keep the goodness coming.

Wiki.ObLogN.com, a Christmas wiki

As you might suspect, given my affinity for wikis, I’ve a personal wiki. This is running at the un-announced shared hosted site that I won’t mention by name, but I will provide a link to it. I plan to do a complete write-up about this at the work blog in the new year when we announce the service, but by then this gorgeous Christmas theme Damien built will be obsolete. I’m using the Pro version of this service, which gives me 10GB of storage, a custom domain, and custom HTML regions that allow me to injects ads, widgets, Google analytics, whatever into the site. It’s a killer service. I use it a lot for taking notes, sharing files, aggregating content in one view from all over and for keeping private communications. The Pro version is only $60/year. The free version is ad-free and limited to 100MB of storage, but I think we’re going to drop that down to 15MB of storage. I suspect this service will cut into some of the competitors’ market in the shared hosted/software as a service wiki offerings that are charging several thousands of dollars for a weaker feature set, user limitations, and quite frankly an inferior wiki. This is the best damn wiki you can find, you can do mashups, you can run your own ads, and you’ve got the richest enterprise wiki feature set available. For free…or $60/year.

We’ve intentionally kept this service quiet since the Holidays crept up on us while we were still working out some last minute kinks in the service. Announcing it now would be pointless because it would just get lost in the Holidays. Moreover, we’ve still got some minor kinks to get around and we’re already getting a lot of traffic to the site just through the word of mouth of the community. In fact, we’re all pleasantly surprised by the number of Pro registrations we’re getting a day. I’ve seen lots of churches, schools, Universities, orgs, and some businesses going Pro in the last few weeks.

This wiki service is a great extension to a blog because it provides a fully customizable, persistent and collaborative authoring tool. For example, let’s assume you blog about online marketing. Well, your blog is a tool for you to publish time sensitive information on the subject. However, frequently there is the need for a more persistent information architecture. Also, the wiki can provide a medium for building a community around your blog by which you allow your audience to participate in the conversation in a more meaningful way than allowed by comments. It’s important to note that this particular service also allows you to easily and automatically aggregate content from all over the Internet on particular topics. Moreover, you can easily create rich application mashups to serve as interactive extensions to your blog posts. These can include interactive maps, charts, graphs, forms, countless widgets, flickr, news feeds, video, search tools, and more… I’m certain it will soon be the case that all bloggers with a community they’re looking to engage will have a wiki extension to their blog sites to facilitate a richer engagement with their audience and to provide persistent and more robust information sharing.

ScribeFire, a firefox addon for blogging

I’m writing a blog post using ScribeFire, a Firefox addon for blogging. With ScribeFire you can setup multiple blogs to publish to. It has WYSIWYG, markup, and preview modes. That’s pretty cool. It seems like a more usable interface than WordPress’ publishing interface. Specifically because of the tabbed edit and preview modes. I’m not certain what editor it’s using, but I don’t really care because I’ll happily markup my posts. I’m not certain this auto-saves though. I don’t believe it does so beware. You can tag posts, see and edit recent posts, pages, and create notes. I’m not sure what a note is though. There is a lack of support for WordPress tags. It labels WordPress categories as tags and does not provide an interface for tagging using the new WordPress tag feature. Although, it does provide an easy way to inject Technorati tags and provides an interface for Del.icio.us. Not that I care about technorati tags. Overall, I’d say this is a keeper and I’m pretty sure it’s going to save me time while I blog between both my personal and work blog.

Technorati Tags:

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Tweets for 2007-12-21

  • Holy moley! MindTouch Deki Wiki may actually win this. Less than hour left in voting, PLEASE HELP GET CLICKS: http://tinyurl.com/yvwfjb #
  • Oh dear…less than 30 mins remain, we’re leading by .02% Can we pull it off?!?! #
  • oops I mean .2% barely hanging onto first place #
  • 8 mins remain…tick tock tick tock… baaaaarely haaaanging on… #
  • @chesh2000pro thanks for the shout!! #
  • @whurley you should be using MindTouch Deki Wiki man. It’s better and open source #
  • friends in russia are reporting they can’t and haven’t been able to vote for Deki Wiki at OWA…weird. #
  • OH OH OH leading by .3% OH OH 1 minute remains… #
  • Holy crap!! WE WON!!! Dude, I’m seriously shocked. #
  • Official votes as of 9:01 PM pacific: MindTouch: 34.9%, Widgetbucks: 34.6%, Quintura: 30.4% Thanks everyone!! #

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ValleyWag: Celebritards: Fake Bono draws real pitches

Celebritards: Fake Bono draws real pitches
I finally got the story behind Bono’s alleged appearance at the Demo tradeshow last year. MindTouch cofounder Aaron Fulkerson recruited the singer from a U2 tribute band …

Ugh, the E-Entertainment TV of the tech blog-o-sphere. I think I just puked in my mouth.

Ok, so you eavesdrop, you write it up…ok fine. Whatever. At least you actually got the facts straight and did the research, found Pavel, etc…but wtf, no link love for MindTouch?

Update: Dude, shows you what I know. This wasn’t eavesdropped I actually took the time to talk to Mr. Valleywag himself? It wasn’t until I saw Solis’ post that I realized this. Here’s a photo of me from the Stirr event (credit: Solis):

Aaron Fulkerson