JotSpot, Not Your Mamma's Wiki

I've been joking with our client at JotSpot, exaggerating a quote of hers in a recent PR Week story where she says something along the line of "mainstream business users are more likely to use a Jotspot wiki, but that it's not a product for your mother." Thus the headline here, but kidding aside, I've received a handful of emails pertaining to JotSpot and with Keith O'Brien's story on the launch today, I thought it might be a good time to do a quick follow-up post.

First off I'll make the obligatory qualifier that yes, my firm (Voce) represents JotSpot and that this post isn't intended to beat our own drum -- in fact the reality is that I know, for the most part, who reads this blog and it's mostly my fellow flacks, and you my comrades already have finely tuned BS filters, so I'm not sure it's possible to hype this even if I tried, so I'll leave it at that.

I've been using a JotSpot wiki for the better part of the summer and while I'd like to think I've created some cool applications, the reality is that I'm just scratching the surface. For the most part, I'm using the wiki for basic things like project management (tradeshow and press tour scheduling), media list management, status reports, to-do lists, and account management (budgeting, activity reports, etc), among other things.

If I had to pick a favorite feature so far, hands-down, it's the WYSIWYG editor. The lightweight markup language on some of the open source wikis takes some getting used to and don't even try to show that to a client unfamiliar with HTML -- they have a hard enough time getting past the word "wiki," let alone learning a specialized code.

All this being said, where I'm doing some really cool stuff with JotSpot is in the area of news tracking and media monitoring. With JotSpot we have RSS news feeds, Google and Yahoo news alerts and other tracking services all coming into a consolidate wiki page where everyone on the team has a centralized real-time look at the daily news. Additionally, we have similar news feeds paired with journalists on our media list so we always have a historic view of what each is writing about. We have some other things in the works too, but I can't give away all our secrets here...

Bottom line, I know a lot of folks in the PR blogosphere are already using wikis, but some are probably still figuring out where best to jump in. For these folks, I'd recommend you take JotSpot for spin, I think you'll like what you find.

Comments

[Pvt_Idaho]

I've been wrestling with how I can use a wiki enhance collaboration on my own team of system admins. We do a smattering of development but mostly its administration of SAP R/3 systems and we tend to spend a lot of time troubleshooting issues and working bugs out of problems. Sometimes the problems are large enough we make a project out of them. In that case I'm trying to determine how I can use a wiki to improve what we're doing. I got set up as a beta tester for JotSpot today and gave it a whirl and I have to agree that it seems far ahead any of the opensource competition in terms of usability. The WYSIWYG interface is critical to being able to quickly jot things down.

You listed a lot of uses for it. Is a wiki and JotSpot in particular REALLY especially good for ALL those things? More useful than, say, an MS Word document stored in a shared folder?

[Jeremy]

I signed up for the beta, and can't wait to get to use it. I am so stoked, as it will be for a speaking panel that I am on in AZ.

Woohoo!

Plus, I want a Jotspot T-shirt. It's all about schwag.