Things change at a lightning pace on the Web. That goes double for when a particular destination gets the glaring spotlight of breaking news shone on it.

The hectic pace of the 24-hour news cycle is just one factor contributing to the phenomenon that has been dubbed the “real-time Web.” But how does AboutUs fit into the trend that has captured the attention of the digital pundits?

If yesterday we’d asked you how important it was to have an AboutUs page for Stork Craft Manufacturing, the natural response would be to say that its benefits were minimal at best.

But now that 2.1 million of the company’s baby cribs have been recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, parents have been told to visit StorkCraft.com for information that could protect their son or daughter from injury.

The only problem is that the site quickly cracked under the pressure of the thousands of news stories.

With the official domain down all day and the phone lines busy, the necessity of third party sources of information became obvious. That’s why the Associated Press linked to us as a reliable resource about storkcraft.com while the website itself was out of commission.

The company has now set up a blog hosted with Blogspot and have been using their Facebook page. But these post-driven sites, with new material placed first without context, are an inadequate emergency measure.

When it comes to breaking news, readers prefer authoritative pages with background and context available before the latest news.

Wikipedia has long been a primary example of that fact, and the AP itself has been hinting at creating a similar resource themselves. But the company and its website are not in Wikipedia, and may never meet the stringent requirements for corporations to get in the encyclopedia. It’s also unlikely that the AP’s planned topical pages are going to be in wiki form.

Today’s small firestorm around the crib recall is just one example of why having 15 million fully editable AboutUs pages is a good idea. You never know when you’re going to need one.

This week we’ve already talked about the value of editable lists, on AboutUs and elsewhere. But one thing we didn’t address is that to be truly wiki-like, they need to have a trail of edits that show what has been done and who did it.

As of now, all AboutUs lists have a history page that show edits to the title and description for that list. The button is located right next to the edit button, so it should be very easy to find. Each entry within the history is titled with the person that made the edit, and red or green text will highlight the changes.

For now lists don’t show the edits to summaries or tags of sites within a list. But the history of any individual summary or tag can still be viewed at that domain’s AboutUs page if you notice a change in a list.

For a visual example of list history, visit the site or check out the screenshots below of the Arduino list that our own Ward Cunningham is the list keeper for.

Adding a history to lists allows for faster and more valuable collaboration between AboutUs community members. Please feel free to test out this new feature, and don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve list editing in the future.

It’s now been a few weeks since Twitter released its lists functionality to everyone. It’s given the millions of people a chance to better organize the stream of information that flows endlessly from Twitter, and it’s safe to say that lists have been a big hit.

Twitter isn’t the only one who sees the value in lists. For several months now AboutUs has offered the ability to create topical lists of websites, allowing anyone to summarize and tag sites that matter to them.

Why Lists Matter

Twitter lists are feature that grew out of that community’s need to give order to a huge ecosystem of information. AboutUs lists revolve around websites instead of Twitter accounts for people or organizations, but the goal is the same.

A list is a really fairly boring tool for organizing information. But if you add the ability to edit and share lists broadly, they become a vital tool for organizing a community or a body of knowledge that is too big to handle with search alone.

Making Lists Really Editable

Lists have clearly taken off, but they’re not perfect yet. Dawn Foster, friend and Portland-based mistress of all things community management-related, wrote at WebWorkerDaily about some fascinating suggestions for improving Twitter lists.

Naturally the one that sparked our interest the most was the idea of making lists publicly editable. This public editability would be selective, and might be limited to your followers if you like. Anyone can edit a list on AboutUs by default, but we definitely encourage list keepers to take responsibility for subjects they care about.

Currently Twitter lists are limited to one person’s notion of the most important additions. Part of what makes certain lists important are the people who’ve created them (such as Robert Scoble’s list of tech pundits). But with sites such as Listorious emerging, many lists are becoming important public resources regardless of who curates them.

Who is doing most of the work to curate a list is clearly important. But here at AboutUs, we’ve attempted to strike a balance between letting someone curate a list and leaving room for collaboration. Getting that balance right is the key to making lists a sustainable model for any community, and it’s why we agree with Dawn’s suggestion for Twitter lists.

As one of the newest members of the AboutUs.org community, I’m constantly reminded of the power and diverse benefits of wiki.

There’s so much useful information to discover in an AboutUs.org list or domain page. The lists and links within these pages can help us find anything from technical support in a specified field to a cool shortcut for an otherwise laborious task. Sometimes a list guides us to something that’s just plain fun!

Anyone can edit a wiki. Fresh knowledge added by many people equals a concise list that springs to life.

While you can read a great article on a specific topic in The New York Times online, the links in the article will be limited to whatever the writer decided was link-worthy.

By contrast, a wiki article may contain numerous links and relevant information added by others with expertise in the field. These contributions can vastly enrich the accuracy and breadth of a piece.

AboutUs lists have directed countless people to find new tools, music, films, books, travel tips and more. The possibilities are endless. Collaborative lists aren’t just another technological twist – they’re a way of life.

The wiki “WOW” factor. How can this super-interactive tool enhance your life…?

p.s. Check out a sampling of Hindi DJ music via DJMayur.com

That’s right, we’re looking for several highly talented folks to to join our Portland, OR or Lahore offices.

Here’s a rundown of the position. If you or anyone you know might be a good fit, email your cover letter and resume to jobs@aboutus.org (be sure to include the job title and city in the subject line).

Agile Rails Developer

Top 10 Rails site (Alexa #715) seeking talent for our small development team. AboutUs.org is a structured wiki of all websites. We run much of our site on AWS and are experimenting with other technologies that scale to support hundreds of thousands of people working together on millions of pages. We’re venture-backed, and our founder’s history of leading startups to successful acquisition helped him win the Entrepreneurship Award for Individual Achievement from the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network last month.

Requirements

We are looking for people to join an elite team. To be successful, you’ll need to have already done the following:

• Deployed web applications
• Wielded advanced programming
  • closures
  • metaprogramming
  • distributed computing
  • service-oriented architecture
• Worked with XP/Agile methods

Read more…

Not long ago ProBlogger, the popular site about making a living in the blogosphere, wrote a list of five ways to get your blog indexed by search engines in 24 hours. It was a great resource for bloggers launching their sites for the first time, listing many sites that can help you get noticed quickly when you’re starting a new blog.

But ProBlogger did leave out one powerful tool for getting your site indexed fast: an AboutUs page filled with rich content. Here’s our take on his advice for getting indexed, as well as how a free page on AboutUs.org can augment what you’re already doing.

1. Blog Communities: Blog communities are basically a social network for your blog and for bloggers. These community portals are similar in AboutUs in some ways, but are exclusive to blogging. Getting a profile for your new site that is branded appropriately and is SEO-smart (i.e. proper keywords and tags) is a good way to get Google or Bing to notice your blog. Some top blog communities include, in order popularity: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs.
2. Site Valuation & Stats Sites: This is one area where all the old school site valuation and statistics shops might help you, even if you might never return. Directories like WhoIs and analytics tools like BuiltWith will definitely help with getting indexed.
3. Feed Aggregators: Feed aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, and FeedAdage will take any feed you’ve submitted, track your new posts, and index them in their site. All this creates another way for search engines to index your growing site fast, and it’s free traffic, since the feeds contained on those sites link back to you.
4. Social Sites: Social media is the avenue for getting readers that everyone is talking about these days. Now, treating Facebook and Twitter purely as tools for getting indexed by Google quick isn’t a sustainable strategy. But setting up Twitter and Facebook pages early on that obey SEO best practices will definitely be a big boost for you. More social sites especially relevant to getting your blog discovered are Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.
5. Misc Sites: There are a few other sites ProBlogger mentions that might be appropriate if you really want to hit it out of the ballpark. ChangeDetection is particularly relevant to blogs, since a public listing will track updates to your site and publish them in a news section on their site, which will in turn get them picked up by search engines. A site that traditionally has been very big for getting your blog noticed by both Google and readers alike has been Technorati, the blog search engine. Technorati used to be the premiere site for finding and ranking blogs, but it’s fallen by the wayside in recent years. Some news outlets have reported that Technorati may be changing its strategy yet again, so be sure to tread carefully.
6. With AboutUs: Three key characteristics make AboutUs a powerful resource for getting your blog indexed quickly. First, like many of the other sites listed above, it’s free. All it takes is an account, which you can create in about 60 seconds. Second it’s quick to create and update. No waiting for us to pre-approve updates or verify your account, just hit edit and save, like any wiki. The faster you get rich, original content on your AboutUs page, the more good it does you.

   Last but not least, it’s simple. Improving your AboutUs page with a little original content that is accurate and well-written will not only be useful to those visiting AboutUs.org directly, it will help on the SEO side as well. For some tips on easy things you can do with any AboutUs page, check out our series on Five Simple Ways to Improve an AboutUs Page.

Some of the friends and community members who’ve been with AboutUs since the beginning will remember that we used to be based on MediaWiki, the collaborative software that powers Wikipedia and countless other sites. With 15 million pages and more added every day, we’ve since outgrown MediaWiki.

But that doesn’t mean traces of our software don’t have the occasional positive side. One such advantage is that many of the scripts that power users of the FireFox browser employ through Greasemonkey work on both MediaWiki and AboutUs.

One such user script can create a presentation from your MediaWiki pages. The script also works just fine on AboutUs, which means you can create a slideshow using freely-licensed AboutUs content without every touching PowerPoint.

If you want to try it out follow these four simple steps:

1. Install Greasemonkey for Firefox, if you haven’t already. The word scripts sounds intimidating, but all it takes is a couple clicks.
2. Add MediaWiki Presentation to your list of scripts. To do so just click the “Install” link on the script page.
3. Go to your favorite AboutUs page and click the “start presentation” link. The link will appear automatically underneath the navigation tabs near the top of the page (see screenshot below).
4. Watch as the different sections of the AboutUs page get turned into slides you can click through in your browser.

For AboutUs pages that have been improved even a little bit, this script is the easiest way to get a presentation about a website and organization with all the basic information you might need. If it’s currently missing some information you think is fitting, you’re more than welcome to add it yourself.

Now that you’re a Greasemonkey user, you should also check out the AboutUs Helper script. If you’ve got any suggestions of other scripts to try, please let us know in the comments.

Recently marketing wizard Seth Godin launched a new addition to community site Squidoo. Brands in Public is a shared dashboard of Web activity related major brands, meant to bring brand monitoring into the public eye. So why would businesses want to bring brand monitoring out into the light of day? Godin has a great answer as part of his pitch:

There are already monitoring tools online (like Radian6) that allow big brands to watch from behind the scenes. That’s great, but what are you doing in front of your audience? Is there a low-cost, easy way to let one of your non-technical marketing people lead and engage with people who are already in the conversation?

There have certainly been plenty of people very unhappy concerning the way Godin and Squidoo have gone about Brands in Public. But the ethos behind the site is one we agree with, even if we have a different approach.

At AboutUs we don’t automatically aggregate customer comments about your company, though the new look for our pages does include quick links to brand mentions on Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

More importantly, we believe that it’s not just big name brands like Amazon and IKEA that deserve a place to interact with people and describe their presence on the Web. Anyone with a domain can use AboutUs to promote their organization and start a conversation with customers. We also provide a level playing field for all, and do not charge any fee to participate in a page that talks about your brand.

Every AboutUs page is a digital public square that can help you start a constructive dialog with your customers. We’re committed to being free and open to everyone on the Web, in order to create a useful resource that abides by the values of our community.

Ray posing with his award and some of the AboutUs team

Our throats are a little sore over here at AboutUs. That’s because we did a lot of yelling last night when Ray King, our CEO and founder, won the Entrepreneurship Award for Individual Achievement at the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network’s annual awards dinner.

Ray gave a very nice acceptance speech, thanking OEN, the AboutUs management team, all the employees, and of course, Tom Holce, the veteran Portland entrepreneur and angel investor for whom the awards are named. Tom was one of the early investors in AboutUs, and he’s one of the smartest, most savvy entrepreneurs in town. He’s also one of the kindest, most gracious and gentlemanly people I’ve ever met.

For those of you who don’t know the organization, OEN is the largest group in Oregon assisting entrepreneurs. Established in 1991, the nonprofit brings together investors, entrepreneurs and advisers who are enthusiastically committed to helping startups grow and thrive.

AboutUs is Ray’s fourth venture, if you count the company he started while still in high school, The Computer Workshop. Ray started his second company, Semaphore Inc., while he was a student at M.I.T., creating accounting software for his father’s architecture firm. That company grew quickly and was acquired in 2000 by Deltek. The next Ray King enterprise was SnapNames Inc., a company that created several novel ways for people to acquire the domain names they want. Oversee.net acquired SnapNames in 2007.

As delightful as it was to see Ray win – and to scream our throats raw – it was equally gratifying to see such great entrepreneurs and companies honored.

Winners in the other categories were:

• Jama Software Inc. for Development Company of the Year. Jama, co-founded and led by Eric Winquist, creates software that helps companies manage development of products that incorporate software, from initial idea through prototyping to production. Like AboutUs, Jama started up three years ago.

• Monsoon Inc. for Working Capital Company of the Year. Monsoon, now seven years old, was co-founded by CEO Kanth Gopalpur and Clark Hale on their credit cards. Monsoon sells software that allows small sellers of books, CDs, DVDs and other goods to accurately price and efficiently sell their wares at websites like eBay or Amazon Marketplace.

• Motorcycle Superstore Inc. for Growth Company of the Year. Motorcycle Superstore, located in Medford, is led by CEO Don Becklin, and sells motorcycle helmets, apparel and accessories from its website.

The competition for the individual award was intense. The other three finalists were:

• Bill Kelly, CEO of Learning.com, a 10-year-old company that creates online learning systems used in more than 3,000 U.S. school districts. Before Learning.com, Bill helped start up Sapient Health Network, which became part of WebMD in 1999.

• Steve Sharp, chairman of TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. TriQuint, which is publicly traded, makes communications chips and modules for all kinds of mobile devices and systems, including your iPhone. During his tenure as CEO, Steve took TriQuint from less than $100 million in revenue to $600 million. He’s an active investor in Portland-area technology companies, and a mentor to entrepreneurs.

• Lynnor Stevenson, a veteran biotech entrepreneur. Lynn heads DesignMedix Inc., which is developing drugs to cure drug-resistant diseases, such as malaria.  DesignMedix was nominated for OEN’s development company award, and is the 10th company Lynn has founded.  Six of her companies have gone public.

And now, please excuse me. I need another cup of chamomile tea to soothe this throat.

Last year Google banned the word wiki from corporate headquarters when it released Google Sites.  Google’s focus seemed to be, “wiki is just like any other website, let’s not confuse people, so let’s call our wiki system ’sites’”.

Now it looks like they have reconsidered. Not only is wiki now mentioned at Google Sites, they recently launched two new products with the word wiki in them (Sidewiki launched today). What is jarring is that neither resemble a wiki. Weird, ehh… SearchWiki is not a wiki and GigaOM says that Sidewiki is more like a ‘Universal Commenting System‘ – by allowing anyone to comment about any site. It is interesting that Google Sites is the most wiki-like, yet the one that doesn’t have wiki in the title.

Maybe they are distilling the concept of wiki down to the fact that you can edit anything. This is a great core concept of wiki, but certainly not the only one. For me, these are some fundamental elements of a wiki:

One of the core values in the wiki world, which AboutUs is part of, is AssumeGoodFaith. If we start from that value and look at Google’s pattern with the word wiki and the concept of wiki, what must this very smart company be trying to do? Any insights?