The universal edit button first became a reality in the summer of 2008, initially as an extension for the Firefox browser.  But compared to the grand vision of a truly universal edit button, one limited to Firefox users was merely the beginning.

AboutUs is just one member of a diverse group that came together to create the button. Our ultimate goal is native support across all browsers, just like RSS. That’s still a long way ahead, but another important milestone has been reached with the addition of an extension for Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome and the Chromium open source project its built on are rapidly growing in popularity, but it only recently unveiled support for advanced features like extensions and bookmark syncing.

The universal edit button for Chrome was created by Justin Forest [Thanks Justin!], and it’s working but still fairly experimental. Mac users in particular may have trouble getting it to function.

Even if there are still some bugs to be worked out, the community around the universal edit button is very lucky to have a Chrome extension at this point. 

To download the new Chrome extension, you can either visit UniversalEditButton.org or the project’s home on Google Code.

Update: This afternoon Google announced the launch of an extensions gallery for Chrome. Be sure to watch for the universal edit button there once it’s open to everyone.

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.

WikiWednesday is a free monthly gathering of wiki enthusiasts that AboutUs has hosted for several years now. Usually it’s fairly open in format, but occasionally we roll up our sleeves and all collaborate on something pressing. This is one of those times.

In the wiki world, a gathering dedicated to work on a particular site is called a Barn Raising, and this month we’re devoting WikiWednesday to a barn raising for a Portland city wiki.

A city wiki is a place for everyone to find and share information that matters to their community, and now Portland will have one too. Please join us for WikiWednesday tonight (same time, same place) to help create the building blocks for PortlandWiki.org. They’ll be snacks, drinks, and plenty of wiki experts around to help you contribute to Portland’s wiki in whatever way you can.

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

It suddenly feels like everyone is talking about cycling to work.

First GOOD magazine’s transparency issue declared Portland, the home of AboutUs HQ, to be the number one city in America for riding your bike to work. Check out their shiny infographic to see exactly how Stumptown stacks up against other U.S. cities. Then The New York Times jumped on the bandwagon (or is it the bike?) with a piece about business cycling.

AboutUs has always been a business built by cyclists. Many of our employees get to the office on two wheels, and you can usually see their bicycles parked in our entryway.

Still, having a mere 3.9% of the city’s population bike to work isn’t the pinnacle of achievement. The Netherlands, where more than 25% of all trips are made by bike, is pretty much the king of urban cycling. There’s definitely things we could learn about transitioning to a bike-oriented lifestyle.

Who better to talk about the transition than someone who recently did it for themselves? That’s right, our own Ward Cunningham will be at the upcoming Ignite Portland to speak about becoming bike oriented.

As he says in his proposal, Ward’s car was stolen back in January, and he chose to try and become more bike-oriented then and there. Since that time Ward not only started commuting to the office by bike, but he’s led many AboutUs-ers on office bike excursions.

Ignite is an event where presenters are given five minutes and 20 auto-advanced slides to tell their story. Those of you not in Portland will be able to watch the livestream or recorded talks for Ignite. For AboutUs, we’ll be proud to see our CTO speaking up for cycling.

GeoCities was a pioneering Web hosting service, one that offered millions a place for self-expression for over a decade. Built during the mid-to-late 90s, it was later acquired by Yahoo!, who announced in April that it would be permanently shuttering GeoCities on October 26th.

Like MySpace for 1997

As TechCrunch put it, “Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world.”

Today there are some big advantages to the sites that have replaced GeoCities: social networking sites allow for greater privacy, blogging tools make a writer’s life easier, and photo sharing sites are tailored to photographers. But the importance of GeoCities in the context of Web history is touted by many, even if it has become a backwater of the Internet today.

The GeoCities Preservation Project

So how will all the old school “user-generated content” of GeoCities be preserved?

Yahoo, Jimdo, and others have offered up their paid hosting services to GeoCities users, but there’s a fundamental problem at work there. The same sort of non-technical person interested in GeoCities is unlikely to want to switch to another host.

Thankfully everyone from niche sites like the FanHistory wiki to the Internet Archive has since stepped up to help GeoCities users beat the rapidly approaching deadline. Be sure to check out the resources at FanHistory and the Archive to learn how to help out.

How AboutUs Can Help

As for AboutUs, while we aren’t a Web host, our site is a great tool for describing websites hosted elsewhere and creating lists of connected sites. Our wiki-based site might be a good place to help further catalog the former GeoCities sites which have since been distributed around the Web.

Part of the beauty of GeoCities was the fact that it felt like more than a hosting company: it was a community, an ecosystem of sites. Once the content is migrated, AboutUs might be the perfect place to list top sites according to topic or affiliation with GeoCities.

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.

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.

Since adding a Featured List Keepers box to our homepage in August, we recently added another way to highlight the lists that the AboutUs community and our writers are creating.

If a site is included on a list, its domain page will highlight and link to the lists that it is on.

If you want to add a website to a list you can try adding some tags to its page, which may tie it to a list that has already been created.  Or while on any list you can also add a site directly at the bottom left.  See this page for more details.

You can also create a list of your very own!  See our List Keeping page or email Lists@AboutUs.org to learn more or get started.

Today we also added the ability to link from one list to another within its descriptive paragraph.  Check it out on the Portland startups list that AboutUs’ CEO created.   To see how it works click “edit” on that list, and for instructions see this page.

WikiWednesday is tonight at AboutUs.

We have a Facebook group: PDX WikiWed (which you can join).

Possible topics are:

* Thinking (and maybe working) further on a PortlandWiki

* Thinking (and maybe start planning) next year’s RecentChangesCamp.

Hope to see you tonight! If you are not in the Portland area, join us on IRC at #WikiWed.