JotSpot Live

In the last year or so at EduTech, I’ve taken it upon myself to evangelize the wonder of wikis as a means of storing our organizational knowledge. After testing out several different open source wiki packages, we finally settled on the php-based DokuWiki, which is powerful yet easy to use.

Wikis are great for a lot of things, but their design prevents them for working well in specific situations. Specifically, because anyone has the ability to edit any page at any time, wiki engines will temporarily “lock” a page while it’s being modified so that changes won’t accidently be wiped out. This is usually a Good Thing, but what if you’re in a situation like a meeting, where everyone wants to tweak their agenda items and add notes? It doesn’t work so well.

JotSpot Live, a new service from JotSpot, was created to put an end to this problem. Multiple people can log into a page at once and all make changes simultaneously (hence the name Live). This really creates a new context for wikis, so it’ll be cool to see how people use it.