The other day the Customer Support phone rang and I picked it up. It was a client in New York City, he asked for Ayesha. I informed him that Ayesha wasn’t available, but could I take a message. He mentioned she was working on his article and sent him an email request for feedback. He really needed to speak with her because there was too much to put into an email. He seemed shocked, maybe even upset when I told him it’s not always easy to schedule phone number with her in the States because she’s in Pakistan. I wasn’t really able to read the reason for his reaction, but surmised maybe he was surprised that this “American” company had writers overseas. Further I surmised maybe he just wanted to talk with someone living in a nearby time zone. I wasn’t sure, so I asked him if we could talk.

I spent nearly 40 minutes on the phone, going through the wiki page for his comments and taking lots of notes for things we’d change. I also asked him about his personal history and how he got into the business (the website said online since 1999, but it turns out it’s a family business that his father has been in for 50 years!) Great stuff.

I also talked to him about how we don’t consider our office in Pakistan to be an “outsource” situation, that we have an office in Lahore with full-time employees, with all benefits including health and stock options. He seemed impressed by that and the kicker for him turning around his reaction was when I told him that I spent time there in January. He got more interested and wanted to know how it was over there.

When I told this story to my partner, she said that globalization is a fact of life in business these days and that the way we’re doing it at AboutUs is different than many (most?) other companies, and is a point to be proud of and promote.

A few other points: Both the development team and the Customer Service team are split between Pakistan and the US, with the majority in Pakistan in both teams. This means we’re an “around the clock” company, making us that much more efficient.

I was lucky enough to be included in a podcast set up by Justin Kistner with Ward Cunningham and Peter Kaminski earlier this week regarding the Universal Edit Button.

Rick Turoczy just posted it over at his weblog Silicon Florist, with added commentary. Check out the 20 minute podcast!

Well after many months, (how long has it been?) the wiki community is kicking this thing off and AboutUs is excited to be a partner in the launching of the new Universal Edit Button!

The development of this web icon and edit button is the result of many conversations and contributions over the past two years. Today’s public announcement is a tribute to the collective work by web editors, wiki enthusiasts, and Internet contributors all over the world. The turn around for this project was remarkably quick and intended to coincide with the launch of Firefox’s 3.0 browser. We want to especially recognize the work of Brion Vibber at Wikimedia for his code contributions, and Travis Derouin at wikiHow for building the extension.

For AboutUs users, the Universal Edit Button will make editing pages easier, and promote the concept of editable pages to audiences worldwide.

For me personally, it has been a whirlwind 30 hours and I am so excited to be collaborating with the many fine people in the wiki community, this has come off really nicely!!

See the post at ReadWriteWeb:Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button

John McCain clinched the nomination in early March, but this past weekend, the web was abuzz from NY Times’ article “The Wiki-Way to the Nomination” of Barack Obama.

We think that is great. Not only great, but fantastic! Not only fantastic, but continued endurance for the ideas of wiki on people and our culture.

Let’s take a look at the wiki way, from several different prospectives:

At Ward’s Wiki, the Portland Pattern Repository,(the original wiki), one of the things it says is: “Wiki feels right and that rightness can be applied elsewhere.” (source)

The fabulous Wikipedia relies on the technical side of the Wiki Way… “A wiki is a collection of web page designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content.” (source)

Here at AboutUs.org, we have spent a fair amount of time considering how The Wiki Way impacts us. Check out the values-based work we’ve done on this.

Another great aspect of the NY Times’ article is that they used a photo of Barack Obama in Portland, Oregon – our home town!

Not only was wiki invented in Portland, but the gathering of grassroots wiki folks (RecentChangesCamp) also has its roots here.

Portland is Wiki City, USA

We’re lucky to be here & luckier still that wiki is universal.

See you on the wiki!

A lot has been written lately about the Awesome Power of AboutUs.org to increase the SEO (or search engine optimization, aka “Google juice” or “search juice”) of a site, company or domain. The main point is that using AboutUs.org is a cost-free way to attract attention to your doings and goings-on.

We have previously made much of the “Hoovers on a wiki” element of our site.

The cool thing about what we do, the fact that it’s all-wiki-all-the-time is that the community determines its value. Working both individually and together, you materially effect what this little company of ours is.

So, we’d like to know more. What do you use AboutUs.org for? Either of the above, both, neither? Something we could scarcely imagine? Share your innovations and experiments in the comments below. Don’t forget to include the URL of your AboutUs.org pages.

No one likes being sold. No one. People love to buy stuff that’s going to satisfy a need they have. They love to spend money to make more money.

About 8 or 9 weeks ago I volunteered to change jobs here at AboutUs because we had more people expressing interest in our article-writing service than we could phone back to give them more info. Since then, I’ve been on the phones every day, talking with all kinds of people about their businesses and how an article on AboutUs can help with their visibility and credibility on the internet. It’s hard work! Every day I dial between 30 and 50 phone numbers, leave lots of voicemail messages (busy people out there building their own businesses!), and talk with about 10 people.

So how do I speak with people on the phone in a way that conveys to them how great the service is, that helps them see how it will benefit their business, that doesn’t make them feel like they’re being sold? I find it very difficult. And why is that? I know how much our articles can benefit a small-business. I’ve seen it first-hand …

If you dug Ward at PDX Web Innovators, you might continue the digging at this week’s WebVisions conference in Portland. He’ll be there, getting down, getting (possibly) funky tomorrow (Friday, May 23rd) at 10:30 a.m. He’s a member of the Open Source panel, taking place at the Oregon Convention Center. (Think of it as a quaint village built by outer space fascists.)

Here’s what the WebVisions site says about W the C (as the kids call him).

Ward Cunningham is the Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the AgileManifesto.org. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences which continue to be held all over the world.

Well, lah-dee-freakin-dah.

If you’ve had it about up to here with this Ward Cunningham critter, consider dashing down to glory in the wisdom of Brandon and Stephen, two of our developers, as they yammer on about “Inching from Mediawiki to Rails on a High Traffic Site.” But hurry. HURRY! It starts at 2:45 and ends at 4:00.

Some of you may have noticed that we turned on no follow on our site. Don’t panic!

Not a lot of people have mentioned this, and fewer still have objected, but nevertheless, we should have announced it before we did it and articulated our policy slightly before we enacted it instead of slightly after we did.

For a site as open, as large and with such good search engine juice, AboutUs.org loves to give more credibility and link juice to constructive web publishers rather than bad actors on the web, despite our belief in the essential goodness of all. What we wish, most of all, is to reward the builders of AboutUs.org who have worked over the last year and a half to make this site the locus of good work and the beginnings of a fantastic community. That is exactly why we are modifying our system to reflect the commitment and sincerity the AboutUs community has shown in creating a valuable resource.

As a smarter system of giving leverage to legit contributers, we have placed the no follow tag on our articles as a start. Our next step will be to reward all the good actors by removing the no follow. So if you’ve got a domain page on AboutUs.org, edit it and tell your story. We are sure to pro-follow those. It’s that simple.

We have some ideas that we are excited about and we think you may have some ideas on how to make this fair and sensible, please do share your ideas.

Hopefully this makes sense to you, and we’ve succeeded in communicating how much we want the AboutUs.org community to thrive and endure and for your experience here to be positive.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas leave them below and we’ll respond.

Like quite a few people in the last year, Andreas from Xavier Media took some time out to capture his experience using AboutUs.org, writing about it on his company blog.

We’re always gratified when people, AboutUs participants or otherwise, give our company and our services such a lot of thought and share them with their readers. We were particularly gratified that Andreas had done this, since he has been utilizing AboutUs.org since 2006 and recently took us up on our new “article writing service.” This is where we take a look at your website, assess what will make a great article and work with you to create this article on AboutUs regarding your company and website.

We were surprised by Andreas’s conclusion - that the service was not worth the money - because part of our process is to ensure the customer is happy with the article before we spotlight it on our front page. While Andreas seemed satisfied with his page at the time, it now appears we failed to ask the right questions.

Part of the Wiki culture is learning from our mistakes and work, so, thank you, Andreas, for your comments. We rely on the feedback from our clients to reconcile our own experience and intuition about how to improve our company with the experiences of those who participate in AboutUs. So, don’t be shy, be honest. (And, if you’d like to praise us, be fulsome.)

Andreas was good enough to list out some features he would like to see as we develop the company and the site. They included:

• Advanced metrics
• Members page with SEO tools
• Badge (we have something like that)
• Headline feed
• AboutUs plugin to look up domains

These are all great ideas and are ones we’ve been exploring. In light of Andreas’ comments we’re re-examining these. If you would like to add to this list, or weigh-in, please leave your comments below.

One final aside to Andreas: Could you point us to your site on MillionDollarWiki? We always like to see how we measure up against other service, but were unable to find your company there. Thanks!

Here are some photos and some captions from AboutUs.org at RCC.

“Open Space facilitator Jeff and John Abbe of Wagon work on preliminary organization for the Camp outside Socialtext HQ.”

“As part of the welcoming ceremonies for RecentChangesCamp 2008, we created a circle reaching from the earliest to most recent times of discovering wiki, our ‘Wiki Birthdays,’ spanning 1999-2008.”

“The other end of the WikiBirthdayCircle, reaching through 2006.”

“A participant, between Eugene Kim of blueoxen associates (the wiki host for the RecentChangesCamp wiki) and Wikimedia developer Brion Vibber tells the story of his wiki birthday.”

“MarkDilley listens while Peteforsyth of Wikipedia and the Our New Mind blog elaborate on the story behind his wiki birthday.”

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Check out a few photos on RCC by Steven Walling as well.