Jotspot: Wiki next phase
THIS WEEK NetSpeak explores the features of a new Wiki hosting service packed with innovative tools.
Though a normal Wiki site, which allows us to edit any of its pages by anyone from anywhere on the Net, is a good tool for collaborative projects, the Wiki technology now has some shortcomings. For example, as every Wiki has a separate mark-up, to edit a Wiki page, you need to learn the Wiki specific markup language. Rather than forcing the user to learn a mark up language, if the Wiki engine provides a simple `Word' like editing facility, users will find it more easy/comfortable to work with the system. The Wiki application available at the new Wiki hosting service, Jotspot, has been built with many such user-friendly features.
Jotspot
Jotspot (http://www.jot.com/) is a Wiki hosting service replete with many features that enable its users to effectively deploy a Wiki for a wide range of collaborative projects. Here, an authorised user can create any number of password protected Wiki pages and create accounts for other users with flexible rights. With each page, you have a search box, you can attach document files, insert comments, set page permissions and so on. A Jotspot Wiki page can also be attached with a range of external web-based data that includes RSS feeds and Google search results.
Most notable aspect of this Wiki is that for each page you get an e-mail box automatically. That is, you can send e-mails addressed to a specific page. When you create a new Wiki page, the system automatically provides an e-mail id for the page that consists of the page's title and an authentication code provided by the system. For example, if the page's name is `netspeak,' e-mail id of the page takes the form `netspeak+code-given-by-jotspot'@domain-name-of-your-wiki.
This page-specific e-mail id is an extremely useful feature that can be used to collect e-mails for specific documents in separate boxes. If you are organising a seminar and collecting papers from different authors, create a Wiki page for each of the papers. Now, using a page's e-mail feature you can collect mails for the paper attached to that page and get them displayed on it. This will certainly make the paper management rather easy. Also, you can use the page's comment feature to aggregate comments on a paper.
As mentioned earlier, you can upload any number of documents on to a page. If the documents are created using Word/Excel or Open Office, the Wiki system automatically creates an HTML preview so that you can view it with your browser. This feature provides you with yet another way for sharing documents among your team members.
We have seen several free Wiki engines that include TWiki and MediaWiki. Generally, most Wiki tools require a web server with database support. If you want to implement a Wiki without database support, have a look at the simple PHP-based Wiki software PmWiki (http://www.pmwiki.org/). Once the software is downloaded from the source, it will take only a few minutes for you to roll out a customised Wiki service.
A browser toolbar has become an essential feature of almost all popular on-line service providers. Toolbars of services such as Google, Yahoo and A9 are quite famous. A browser toolbar from an on-line service lets a user access its facilities directly from her browser. If you have a web site/blog or some other on-line service, it makes much business sense to provide a downloadable browser toolbar so that your visitor can comfortably access your service directly from her browser. If you need a toolbar for your service, check out `Effective Brand' (http://www.effectivebrand.com/), a free toolbar creation service. The web-based service enables you to create a toolbar tuned to your requirements in a few simple steps. Apart from creating the toolbar, the service also hosts the toolbar executable on its server and provides a link that can be used by anyone to download the toolbar.
One of the amazing features of Google is that it is always pro-active and surprises its users by dishing out new/relevant services regularly. The latest entrant of the Google's service pack is Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), a search service created for spotting scholarly materials easily. The service (pointed out to this author by the reader, Mr. Vyasamoorthy) can be used to spot scholarly literature that includes "peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.''
If you want to get a list of articles published by an author, use the command: "author:name-of-the-author `search string.''' A notable aspect of the service is the `Cited by' feature, which provides links to other articles that cite the selected piece.
In this context, you may also try out `On Google Scholar' (http://schoogle.blogspot.com/), a blog devoted entirely for featuring news related to Google Scholar service.
A job site
Several on-line job services created for helping job seekers/recruiters are in place. The job site `IT Jobs' is one such service specifically meant for IT professionals. The uniqueness of this service is that the job advertisements posted on the site are from real IT professionals. The service enables an IT professional to post new openings available in her organisation. When a job seeker responds to an advertisement, the response reaches the person who originally posted it and if this person finds that the resume suites the job requirements, she will forward it to her company authorities. That is, as mentioned in the site, you, the job seeker, "is getting referred by an employee of the company to which you apply directly.'' For more details on this free service: http://www.itjobsnetwork.com/.
J. Murali
Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in
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