Great WikiPages on AboutUs are informational resources that not only attract readers, but also tell AboutUs readers everything they need to know about a website, company, product or service. Take the WikiPage for Malletsheugh Inn for example. A bar and restaurant in Glasgow, Scotland, the Malletsheugh.co.uk page gives a solid description of the restaurant, a brief history section, pictures and location info, as well as links to other important things visitors to AboutUs (and potential visitors to Malletsheugh Inn) might need to know, including menus, cocktail menus, contact form, and even reviews. This effectively makes their AboutUs page a springboard that then expounds on our informational resource by interlinking to their website for further info. (View Comments)

We at AboutUs think of our community, website and company as being a global enterprise. With volunteer contributors and paid staff located around the world, this isn’t a hard proposition. That said, we also recognize and thrive in our roots in the Pacific Northwest corner of the U.S., a region filled with technological innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. So it’s a pleasure for us to be just one of over a dozen presenters at this year’s Venture Northwest conference, held in our “home” city of Portland, OR.Each year, the Venture Northwest conference is an opportunity to show off the region’s entrepreneurial might, with new and emerging companies in Oregon, Washington and throughout the Pacific Northwest presenting before a collection of the region (and country’s) Venture Capital companies and other sponsors. This gives all in attendance a chance to learn about and celebrate the region’s hot new companies in addition to meeting potential investors.

The Venture Northwest 2007 conference (held this year on Nov. 2), is just a piece of the great work being put forth from the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN), the largest entrepreneur assistance organization in Oregon. The OEN also provides other resources and support for emerging growth-oriented companies in the state, with programs that provide startup services, education for executives, informal presentations and chats, “Angel” and Women’s investment resources, and awards for various area entrepreneurs and companies. The great work, information and resources of the OEN feeds a ton of projects in the Pacific Northwest and is in no small way responsible for some of the innovations in the region over the last decade.Presenters at this year’s Venture Northwest 2007 include: Brammo Motorsports, Brain Candy, Daverci Solutions, Inc., END Outdoor, Escapia, Inc., Formotus, Healionics Corp., iSense Corp., Lagotek Corp., Lumencor Inc., Phoseon Technology, SynerG Software and Versis as well as AboutUs.

Contributor: TakKendrick

Here’s a cool WikiPage. Webmaster and photographer Sahand Sedghi has placed some background information, a sample story and even aYouTube of a Sumo ceremony on the page for TheLongWander.com, his website filled with travel stories, photos and more from his voyages in East Asia. Until someone can figure out how to magically transport our readers via wiki to these exotic places, this is just about as cool as it gets. (View Comments)

How cool would it be if there was a shared symbol on every wiki, where people got to know that any place they see this symbol, they can click it and edit the page? How great would it be if we came to agreement on such a symbol in a bottom-up, wiki-way? We can have such a symbol.

The idea of a Universal Wiki Edit Button began at RoCoCo in Montreal. This inter-wiki project to first adopt version 0.1 involves participants from several wiki communities and wiki engines (more are welcome!). We think version 0.1 will define the metaphor to use, and that subsequent versions will expand on the visual appearance of the icon. If individual wiki communities can come together, with some symbolic unity (a common brand, in a way), intended to makes all stronger. More than that though, through shared actions and decision-making, the larger wiki community can become more self-aware. The strength of this larger community is also demonstrated though our ability to self-organize for a common aim. The following two sections are from the actual work-in-progress UniversalWikiEditButton document. Please join us!

Purpose

Just like the weblog community has the orange “radio waves” RSS icon , we want an easily-recognizable universal Edit This button. This is a movement to start the ball rolling. When this process succeeds, the participating wikis will include this edit button in some way. Just as the RSS icon evolved over time (……), we recognize that the UniversalWikiEditButton will also evolve over time. Rather than struggling to create a perfectly evocative button for version 0.1, we recognize our primary objective is quickly getting to wide deployment of a single icon that is good enough. This exercise will be a success when we can demonstrate the ability of the wider wiki community to self organize for collective action.

Principles

The following principles guided our selection of the 0.1 UniversalWikiEditButton and will inform our selection of version 0.2

• Compatible
• Language-independent
• Wiki-engine-independent
• Evocative of Edit
• Metaphorically Rich
• Professional
• Simple
• Skinnable
• Re-taskable

Sunday, 21st through Tuesday, the 23rd of October is WikiSym, an ACM conference co-located with OOPSLA in Montreal. WikiSym will be an ideal place to work further on the UniversalWikiEditButton, to unleash some wiki-creativity to move the process forward, hopefully concluding with a v0.1 UniversalWikiEditButton that wiki developers can add to their wikis.

Contributors: TedErnst, Obed Suhail

Displaying an artistic touch on their WikiPage (complete with numerous sample images from the artist), the AboutUs page for Yoyita.com is a great reference on the figurative artist Atelier Yoyita. The Yoyita.com WikiPage features biographical information on the Nicaraguan artist and her influences, as samples of Yoyita’s religious works

Here’s a tip: If your company regularly makes “press release” announcements to news agencies, adding a summary and a link to the most recent ones on your WikiPage helps strengthen your company’s WikiPage as well as providing the AboutUs community with valuable news and information about your products, services and more. The WikiPage for Xenonics.com is just one great example of this. Xenonics Holdings is a leader in “night vision” technology used around the world by the U.S. military and more. Their WikiPage includes a great “Press Releases” section that highlights some of their latest orders and products in a (pardon the pun) very illuminating way. (View Comments)

Recently AboutUs started doing something in the vein of Richard K Miller’s post last winter about his Seth Godin inspired plugin which tries to distinguish between new and returning readers to a WordPress weblog. Here is our attempt to help new readers to the AboutUs wiki, heck, really any wiki.

First off, we are in a continuing phase of understanding WhoWeAre and how we exist in this new emergent internet. We realize many of you are discovering wikis and that they initially can be confusing. Hey we are here to help you with that, teach TheWikiWay, and other exciting things about wiki.

To help us explain this, we have set up messages (currently for non-logged in people) at the top of our site, which try to help readers by providing a clearer message.

For example, the message on the AboutUs home page and what folks see when you click around the website:

Another example is the message for people who come to AboutUs via an external site, such as a search engine like Google:

These two sets of messages are an attempt to serve up better messaging based on where you are on AboutUs and how you got here. In that spirit, please check out WhoWeAre and AboutUsTagline for other ideas. If you have any thoughts on possible messages, feel free to add them here: AboutUs PossibleMessages. (until someone follows this FutureLink and creates a page, the link will be red.)

Contibutors: MarkDilley, Vinh Nguyen, TakKendrick

As we’ve said a hundred times before on AboutUs, we like artwork. A picture goes a long way towards jazzing up a WikiPage. While today’s Featured WikiPage certainly has art, what’s exciting is how they apply it to their own business (and your house). RenStyles.com is the website for Renaissance Styles, a Portland-based company providing beautiful art work in the form of marble, ceramic and glass tile murals. Customers wanting to dress up their shower, kitchen, bathroom, floors and cellars can choose from a wide collection of images from Monet, Van Gogh, Michelangelo and more, or even provide their own photograph to immortalize in tile. (View Comments)

We like to pick a variety of things as feature WikiPages on AboutUs. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve featured a company that manufactures filing and storage solutions (ElectroClass.com), one (GeneralFinishes.com) that sells wood finishes, an online travel show (OpenRoad.tv) and more. While it’s great to point out pages that are highly informative about a product, company or service, every once in awhile it also feels good when we can highlight ones striving to make the world a better place. The page for TransformingEnergy.com does just that. Transforming Energy is a documentary film about global warming, renewable resources, alternative energy and sustainable development. With the renewed interest in alternative energy sources, particularly in the wake of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the WikiPage for TransformingEnergy.com provides a great first step for finding out more about the documentary. (View Comments)

Proving that a great WikiPage can look good in any language is the pages for ElectroClass.co.uk, ElectroClass.com.tr, and ElectroClass.se. These pages represent the English, Turkish and Swedish websites (respectively) for ElectroClass, a company which manufactures various filing and storage solutions, including file and storage cabinets, vertical carousels, lifts and more. Their systems include automated classifications systems, electronic filing cabinets, even robot-driven systems that will bring stored trays to the operator using software and bar codes and relayed by computer. The three WikiPages for ElectroClass’s various language websites: ElectroClass.co.uk, ElectroClass.com.tr, andElectroClass.se all maintain a similar structure, allowing the various WikiPages to utilize the same graphics and creating a look and feel that carries through no matter what the language the page is in. Pretty neat. (View Comments)