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Never heard of wiki? If you're choking on e-mail in your rich-media, real-time, time-strapped work environment, it may be just what you're looking for
A wiki is the ultimate collaborative tool for a group of users, even on a global scale, especially if they want to create and edit content on the fly as a project moves forward.
Why should anyone in their right mind pay attention to an oddly named phenomenon called wiki? As a communicator, you probably have the same feeling as when you first heard about "that h-t-t-p-colon-forward-slash-forward-slash thing," extranets or hypertext, or, more recently, Bluetooth or even blogs.
Wiki is not described with the same passion as blogs, but it appears to have inhaled the same oxygen. It's as if the people on the fringes, sick and tired of corporate communication, went ahead and designed a product-slash-platform that was democratic, dynamic and not managed from the top. Blogging, says PR practitioner Mike Manuel, helped "to psychologically acclimate people to publishing content online, which has in turn really primed the pumps for wikis." Manuel works for Voce Communications, a PaIo Alto, California, firm that represents JotSpot, one of the earliest commercial versions of wiki. Corning from someone who writes about such provocative topics as "Is PR necessary?" when he evangelizes the power of blogs and wikis, Manuel's comments cannot be taken lightly. A wiki, he says, is an essential tool in every PR practitioner's toolbox.
So what's a wiki, anyway? Pronounced "wicky," it refers to an editable web site or document stuffed with content that is never permanent and is marked up by hypertext. You don't need to learn HTML to use it. Wiici, incidentally, is the Hawaiian word for...