07 July 2007

Thing #19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

During the last few months I have been creating wiki articles and learning new ways of displaying and formatting information using MediaWiki software, which is a popular wiki software package also used by Wikipedia and its associated enterprises. I was therefore very interested in exploring Wetpaint which received the first prize for hosted wikis in the 2007 Web 2.0 awards.

Wetpaint offers an 'Easy edit toolbar' with familiar word processing toolbar functionality - tables, hyperlinks, spellcheck - as well as the ability to add images just like in Blogger. All this without needing to understand syntax or minimal html as required with MediaWiki, particularly in the time consuming task of creating even basic tables which require knowledge of html. It was very easy to add a widget to a page in the Sandbox - I inserted a YouTube video featuring a 'Mr Bean in the library' clip. All up, Wetpaint allows the novice user to start creating wiki content very quickly and very easily.

Thing #18 Web-based applications

I was attempting to launch ZohoWriter using the Safari web browser and found that it does not support this browser so I switched over to Mozilla's Firefox web browser.

I created a Zoho userid and tried out some of the offerings including the word processing package which looks and feels as familiar as MS Word, so I would use this type of web based application in future for sharing documents.