RSS and wikis

I still haven't managed to get my road trip pictures uploaded, so a post on that will have to wait.

To meet my Blue 2.0 requirements, I need to make a post about my rss and wiki learning experience. I'd been doing Bloglines for almost a year now, so I didn't need to do anything new for that. I'd even already added Blue 2.o as one of my feeds.

My favorite non-library feed is boingboing, which is a website of strange and wonderful things. My favorite library feeds are The Uncommon Commons (written by my supervisor, so I am sometimes mentioned :-) ) and The Ubiquitous Librarian, also an Information Commons blog. I read a lot of others too.

Creating a wiki, however, was a new experience for me. Like pretty much everyone, I was familiar with reading wikis from looking at pop culture on Wikipedia, but I had never worked on one at all. My wiki is for my department: The Hub @ WT's Wiki.

Creating the basic wiki was easy. Just sign up for an account and you are given a framework of example templates attached to your new wiki. The only trouble with that was that I had to choose whether or not I wanted a "business" wiki. I chose this option since it is a wiki for my job, and now I am occasionally finding that I'm prompted for upgrades, that I bet I wouldn't get as an individual. Another small issue is that the default notifications seem to be to notify you every time someone makes a modification to the wiki, so at first I was getting an email every time I made a change to the wiki, which was really annoying before I changed it.

I am still having a little trouble navigating around my wiki. I've looked at the wiki several times now, and I just today discovered some pages that I didn't even realize were there. I've tried a few times to do the PB Wiki Tour, but the page had been down every time and just now I found it takes me to an internal "page not found" on the PB Wiki site. I'll need to explore further to get the hang of it.

Of course, the most important part about a wiki is the collaboration, and I have not yet invited anyone to edit the wiki. I wanted to have it be a little more formed before I did that, but maybe I should go ahead and let my colleagues take part because maybe they will have a better vision of the wiki than I do.