From the article -
"Starting a Wetpaint site is as simple as picking a name and design, creating a few pages, writing something in them, and deciding who can edit them. The company's CEO, Ben Elowitz, says he hopes everyone from neighborhood watch groups to Cub Scout leaders will warm up to Wetpaint and start using it to collaborate on projects and manage group information.
Elowitz believes that online collaboration is a largely unexplored market. "Message boards are good for dialogues, blogs are good as soapboxes, and social networks are good for meeting people, but none of those really let you manage relationships," he says. "For people who are online now, the technology is there to give them a chance to connect over their common interests."
What is a wiki?
Type it in Merriam-Webster OnLine and you get nothing. Well not exactly nothing - you do get these suggestions for wiki:
1. whacky
2. wacky
3. wick
4. wickiup
5. whisky
6. Wicca
7. which
8. Wick
9. withy
10. witchy
I think wiki might have come from the Indian word wickiup.
Wikiup as defined by Webster Online -
Etymology: Fox (Algonquian language of the Fox, Sauk, and Kickapoo Indians) wi.kiya.pi house : a hut used by the nomadic Indians of the arid regions of the western and southwestern U.S. with a usually oval base and a rough frame covered with reed mats, grass, or brushwood; also : a rude temporary shelter or hut.
In other words a wiki has an oval base and a rough frame covered with reed mats, grass or brushwood and is used as a temporary shelter or hut.
Note to self - I really could use an editor (not a word processor...a real live human editor to keep me from filling the internet with the digital equivalent of hot air).
What is a wiki you ask?
A wiki platform allows collaboration by multiple "editors" and tracks changes. A wiki can be about anything or in my case nothing.
I created an easy Wiki at Wetpaint and you can edit it.
It's all about Nothing
I'm going to leave it for anyone to play with until it gets filled with links to male performance enhancement products, miracle diet plans, refinance offers, links to porn sites or whatever else the professional spam/junk creators put on it. After that I'll probably limit edit capability to a select group (me) or maybe you if you write something or paste something that has any redeeming value. I hope my wiki about nothing has a longer creative life than the Banjo (Testing the Gami) site I created at infogami.com.
