Folks from AboutUs are en-route to Wikimania in Taipei this week. Vinh came up with this great idea based off of the version of MediaWiki software that we have had running the last year. We are bringing a bunch as give aways at Wikimania, for folks that sign up on the WikiWear page. We have ~100.

Contibutors: MarkDilley, TakKendrick

Last week we gave a shout out to Wikitravel.org’s four year anniversary milestone of their wiki website launch.

Tuesday the 24th additionally featured another milestone of sorts for co-founder of Wikitravel Evan Prodromou. He announced the launch of a new project, Vinismo.com with Nicolas Ritoux. A wiki wine guide with almost 13,000 articles on wines of the world and wineries, all written and edited by wine lovers. Just as in Wikitravel.org, they encourage people to come visit their wiki and share their knowledge by working on Wine Pages. Check out their project page.

Contibutors: TakKendrick, MarkDilley

One of the major goals of AboutUs is to help deepen the wiki community by knitting as many of the various wiki communities together for learning, teaching and collaboration. As a part of this, we’re happy to announce the first post in a new direction for the AboutUs Weblog.The new weblog is our attempt at a fusion of weblog and wiki, where posts can be contributed, edited and collaborated by everyone. This is inspired by CommunityWiki.org’s WeblogControlledByWiki and recently by BrianKerr’s excellent piece on Weblog Window Shopping.

What to expect

The focus of the AboutUsWeblog.org will not be specifically AboutUs.org, but how the world interacts with the things we as a community care about this means:

• New and exciting things at AboutUs
• Heavy emphasis on things going on in the wiki community and (to a lesser extent) the high-tech new internet / web 2.0 world.
• Wiki practice and theory (mostly specific to AboutUs and applicable to other wiki)
• Information and spotlights on cool and exciting things happening in the AboutUs community, on or off of WikiPages.

A work in progress

This wiki-weblog idea is still in it’s infancy. Right now, we’ll be using the current WordPress format to make posts. Over time, we plan to integrate the weblog with the main AboutUs.org website even more to allow for a richer set of contributions by our community.

In the meantime, we will be posting our entries here, but would also like to open up a space for community members to suggest topics, write potential entries and collaborate with us on shaping this new hybrid. We’ve set up a page at AboutUsWeblog.org/PotentialPosts just for this purpose.

We’ll be keeping our old weblog posts so we all can see our growth.

Contibutors: TakKendrick, MarkDilley