We’ve said it before in a feature, but it deserves to be repeated. When building the WikiPages for your company, one of the best ways to create great brand recognition for your product(s) or services is to provide images. Not only does it punch up your WikiPage, but it allows visitors to AboutUs to start really visualizing what you offer more so than a plain old page full of just text. Here are three very different companies’ WikiPages that really try to encapsulate this idea:

This one is just cool. The folks at Rubberecycle.com produce a “unique granule rubber product” for use on playgrounds as rubber mulch, in landscaping and even in equestrian areas to help horses perform better. The product is made from 100% recycled tires, giving them the “environmental” award for today’s featured pages. The Rubberecycle.com page itself shows pictures of some of the use possibilities along with pictures of the product in the bags you’d buy it in, giving customers a first hand idea of what to look for in the store. (View Comments)

Established in 2006, GlobalFusion.us is a company providing nutritional products, vitamins and supplements, skin and body care products and more in the US, Canada and Mexico. Their WikiPage does a great job of showing the variety of their product line, with images of the various bottles and containers they use. (View Comments)

Of course, things you find in a retail store isn’t the only type of products you can display on a WikiPage, as the folks at BD-Properties.co.uk show us. This UK-based real estate agency offers properties and rural land in Bulgaria and Turkey. Their WikiPage is packed with images of some of the properties, giving prospective buyers (and “window shoppers”) the opportunity to see some of the various houses, apartments, villas and plots of land they have to offer. (View Comments)

Last week, the AboutUs Portland office moved into our new digs at the (still under construction) OMCC building in Portland’s “Inner SE” industrial area.Beyond just being a place for our growing staff to stretch our wings, the new space provides a way to work within an “open space” environment; all our desks are outfitted with wheels, allowing ad hoc pairings on projects simply by rolling one workstation towards another. (This has led to a variation of the WikiWay philosophy LawOfTwoFeet which we call “The Law of Five Wheels.”)

The staff seems to be enjoying the space. Says Kasey, “I appreciate how fluid the space is and how easy it is to collaborate … it almost seems like a metaphor for wiki.”

JasonParmer of our development team also really appreciated the dynamicness of the space, which allows for not just teamwork, but the ability to retreat into a corner if you’re needing a quiet space, “The flexibility of being able to change for current needs is really hot.”

The building, of which AboutUs is among the first tenants, is part of an area that’s just across any of three bridges from the downtown Portland core, but is still developing, something that was a benefit to AboutUs founder RayKing. “We’re in an up and coming neighborhood that is quiet and yet alive,” he said.

Of course, moving offices had one disadvantage — we’ll miss our friends at the old space at River Park Center Executive Suites, who were nice enough to put up with “those crazy wiki people” for the last 9+ months.

For anyone needing to send us mail, cookies or other care packages at the new space, the address is: 107 SE Washington #520, Portland, OR 97214

Contibutor: TakKendrick

In addition to being able to nominate WikiPages yourself as featured pages on AboutUs, our community of hard-workers who patrol the RecentChanges to ensure that every edit on the AboutUs wiki is constructive often finds great content and interesting pages being added daily. Here are a few that we’ve spotted in the past couple of weeks:

Cheers go to the clever eyes of Tanwir Shah in our Lahore office who spotted some great work being done on the WikiPage for ExPrT.com, saying of the work put into the page, “This page in visually pleasing. It catches the eye and retains your attention. The images give a very clear idea of the product and the testimonial enhances the favourable impression of this page.” This very high praise comes for a company that obviously knows the value of catching your eye and retaining attention. ExPrT sells portable trade show displays and banner stands, helping companies to build exciting and interactive displays for museums, trade shows and sales centers. (View Comments)

From the proverbial backyard of the main AboutUs office in Portland, OR is CastorPolluxPet.com. This Clackamas, OR company specializes in organic and natural pet foods as well as pet-approved dog and cat product like collars, leashes, litter, toys and stain remover. A few weeks ago, Kasey noticed this page had been worked on heavily and nominated it with a note: “Wow this page looks great. Adding contact information (email and an address) and where to buy information: physical location, online, other retailers- would be helpful.” since then, more information has been added to the CastorPolluxPet.com page, including a link to their store locator and information on contacting them via phone, email or regular mail. (View Comments)

While not quite as visually dynamic as the previous two entries, kudos should go to the people editing the CeilingDoctor.com page. This WikiPage is an excellent example of how to organize and break up information, as noticed by Blake Hinckley a couple of weeks ago when he nominated the page as a featured candidate: “Great use of tables, links, and images — you have really started this wikipage off strong.” For anyone in the Toronto, Canada region, you might take a look at what this website has to offer, including 20 years of experience in cleaning and repairing ceilings, walls and carpets for commercial, retail and industrial businesses. (View Comments)

Contibutor: TakKendrick

We are honored that Dan G. took the time to write his weblog post: What is AboutUs.org? and that he recommends his readers visit AboutUs.

One of the questions posed was about our connection with Name Intellignece. Jay Westerdal, CEO of NameIntelligence.com, in fact, recently stepped down as AboutUs CTO when the inventor of wiki, Ward Cunningham joined in that role. Ward, like the rest of us, is excited about the scope of this wiki project and the collaboration emerging from it.

We believe that an “About Us” page born from the efforts of both the organization it describes and the people it touches is better than the more typical static AboutUs page seen on many sites today. Wiki allows that collaborative style of writing and incremental improvements. Ultimately, we hope to host continuously changing information about the people of the world and particularly how they choose to organize and relate.

In terms of content on AboutUs, we are intentionally incomplete. Wiki is by definition a work in progress; Wikipedia as an example seeded itself with some of the 1911 Britannica when it first stared. By providing some information with obvious room for improvement we are inviting folks to click on the edit button and experience wiki.

Gratitude to Dan G. for inspiring us to express our vision.

Contibutors: MarkDilley, Julia (photo by Catherine Trigg)

Congratulations to the AboutUs caricaturist, Rhoda Grossman on the publication of her new book late last month. Digital Painting Fundamentals with Corel Painter X is an introduction to drawing and painting using a computer with a graphics tablet. The book includes a CD with source images for projects as well as custom painter palettes. The book can be purchased a local bookstores as well as at Amazon.com’s order pageThe owner of DigitalPainting.com, Rhoda Grossman has created many of the caricatures you might have seen on AboutUs for our active community members. Creating her works in Photoshop and Painter, her work has also been featured on WikiIndex.org, and the ICANNWiki.org. She has authored or co-authored around a dozen books and tutorials for teaching digital graphics and painting applications.

If you would like to have a caricature of you, upload an image of your beautiful self onto your PersonalPage and add the tag: [[Category:NeedsCaricature]]

Contibutors: TakKendrick, MarkDilley

A few months ago we ratified our Adult Content Policy through a consensus poll; yesterday we moved a significant step forward in implementing the plan. Logged in people will notice a new “flag” tab at the far right of their screens while on Domain Pages. Clicking the tab provides a drop-down menu allowing community members to easily flag pages as PossibleAdultContent. WikiPages flagged this way show a splash page warning visitors before allowing viewing of the pages. In order to both flag pages and view PossibleAdultContent, you need to be logged into an account.

In addition to the AdultContentPolicy implementation, the plan for the “flag” menu is to allow community members the ability to mark pages for other reasons, including:

• mark a page because you have a question
• mark a page to have other community members take a look at it
• nominate a great WikiPage as a featured page candidate
• flag a page as spam

We hope to gradually roll these abilities out in the upcoming weeks.

Contibutors: TakKendrick, MarkDilley

After a year of our “Yellow Stick Figure” logo (aka the “listening man”), a new AboutUs Logo was ratified via a Consensus Poll last week. After much discussion of our values, we settled on the emerging properties of a growing leaf to symbolize the gardening of the wiki we have here at AboutUs. This is just the first step in a series of face lifts for AboutUs, but we couldn’t wait to flick the switch on the logo. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks to see some more of the exciting plans we’ve got in store for the visual redesign of the wiki. As is everything wiki this will continue as a process. We look forward to your input.

NOTE: Some community members using Windows-based machines have reported some anomalies with the new logo (namely that it’s “partially chopped off”). Clearing your browser cache should resolve the problem, please add any issues you may have in the ErrorLog.

Contibutors: TakKendrick, MarkDilley

In the wiki community, the first Wednesday of each month is generally designated as “Wiki Wednesday,” with events planned all over the globe in an attempt to get people to chat, learn about wiki, and just generally have a good time.As a rule, WikiWednesdays are co-located in time in a multitude of cities providing events. As it happens today, WikiWednesday corresponds to the first un-official day of Wikimania, an annual conference for the Wikimedia community (including Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Wikiquote and others). Wikimedia is an opportunity for these enthusiasts to gather and report on ongoing research, projects, and just connect and exchange ideas involving wiki culture, free and open source software and other wiki endeavors around the world.

As reported in an earlier post, AboutUs has a contingent of staff on hand at the week’s events in Taipei, Taiwan.

Other WikiWednesday events happening this month include a London gathering for today, as well as one in Kiel, Germany next week on Aug. 8, and a San Francisco Bay Area event also set for Aug. 8. To see a list of upcoming events, check out the Wiki Wednesdays page on Socialtext.net.

Contibutor: TakKendrick