I’m kind of jazzed on this one, at least the free part. This is essentially an online personal wiki system that appears to have a lot of workgroup, personal and family uses. For example I set up a family calendar so everyone can access it at any time to see what conflicts with each others calendars exist. You can also establish a family bulletin board and photo storage among other uses. So I invite the readers to check out and test this software and post your thoughts. Thanks.
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
Subscribe to Main Blog feed here:
Subscribe to Comments too (below):
Bad Behavior has blocked 5334 access attempts in the last 7 days.
don’t blame them for charging, but the free version is kind of limited. there are a number of open source wikis out there.
What’s the best one?
Generic wiki or specific-purpose? The three most popular general-purpose wikis (with a variety of plugins to add features) are:
1. MediaWiki (Wikipedia’s backend. PHP and MySQL)
2. MoinMoin (The other most popular one for open-source projects. Python)
3. TWiki (Apparently very popular for corporate intranets. Perl)
One thing I like about MoinMoin is that it can run standalone as it’s own web server. For an “install and go” bundle for personal use, try out MoinMoin DesktopEdition.
John, I’ve been using JotSpot Tracker, their online spreadsheet (http://tracker.jot.com), for a while. It’s a pretty cool app, though it needs to grow a little bit. It does a nice job letting you paste Excel spreadsheets right in. It’s more for managing lists than for traditional spreadsheet usage. But the sharing aspect is nice – I have one spreadsheet where I keep a list of events for the next year that I’m trying to coordinate with someone else. Either of us can log in and make changes, or I can let people just have read-only access. There’s a nice new calendar view – if it sees a date field, it will let you view the data on a calendar. Similarly there’s a map view if a column contains geographic information. It’s somewhat similar to Google Spreadsheet, but it’s built on a wiki platform – any cell can have notes or attachments, though there doesn’t seem to be infinite versioning.
You only get two spreadsheets for free. Past that, as I recall it was a little pricy, but the pricing page, http://tracker.jot.com/pricing/, is down right now.
I just pasted my JotSpot Tracker spreadsheet into Jot’s spreadsheet template but it would only accept 20 rows, apparently because rows correspond to pages and you only get 20 pages per wiki for free. that seems very limiting. If you want to have more, use Tracker, but I wonder if that won’t be around much longer.
I love http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ I keep a copy of it on my thumbdrive and keep it updated. Also don’t forget about protopage — it offers alot of the same functions as a wiki.
I wasn’t terribly impressed. I signed up, it worked, but what they call a calendar is more like a day-timer, IMO. Every entry has to be tied to a time (which is displayed more prominently than the entry title itself), and there are no calendar-based formulae such as “every week”, “every year”, “every third Thursday of the month”.
There is a nice “click-and-go” simplicity about it all, though. If one needs to know whether the software requires Squirrel or Python, that isn’t going to leave a huge menagerie of users.
I’ve been using the paid version of Jotspot for the Berkeley research center that I run with considerable success. My biggest complaint is their terrible customer service where most questions on their Questions forum go unanswered, and irritating functionality glitches like the sudden inability for anyone to delete their comments. Their pricing scheme is screwy as well, charging by the number of pages that are creating which counting each comment as a page!
I just implemented a corporate-wide wiki by Confluence that has lots of enterprise functionality. More mature than Jot with a useful features such as Spaces which allow segregation of wiki pages for permissions control. Jot looks much nicer.
Are we getting paid to advertise web 2.0 crapware ?
tell you what. Until your photo sharing junk can help me get a real job in the real world with real problems, I might be interested. Otherwise, just put the website on the shelf somewhere. Is there web 2.0 software that can install a new government ?
“Is there web 2.0 software that can install a new government ?”
No, Tim. That’s your responsibility.
I just love wiki! I like Wikipedia and the other wikis but I love the software.
Today’s wikis reminds me of the early days of the internet when Average Joes just dove in and were hand-making web sites and messing round.
Then, of course, Flash and Java and all that crap came in, making the work of average people seem second-rate.
I suppose wikis will go that way, but for now I’m really enjoying it.
Phillip
I checked out http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ and it really looks great! From initial impressions, it is more what I want than Jot.
Thanks for the heads up! I’ve been looking for something just like that.
Greg