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.”

***

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

Here’s a message we got today from Steven.

Just wanted to send out the message that Mark, Kristina, Pete (Forsyth), Dunbar and John (Abee) have arrived in Palo Alto and all is well. We’re thinking we might do a blog post from and/or about RCC sometime in the near future, we already have a few photos as well (including of Facebook HQ, which is just down the block from Socialtext).

SocialText is the sandbox for this year’s RecentChangesCamp. I’ve encouraged them to post, as well as to use the AboutUs.org Twitter account to keep us informed by proxy of what’s happening. Also, check Mark’s, Kristina’s and Pete’s Twitter accounts for possible updates. The photos will eventually show up on the AboutUs.org Flickr page.