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.
For some reason I am now just stumbling across this newish weblog by our own fabulous Kristina Weis
Her latest post is about the new feature on AboutUs called Recent Contributors and is most excellent!
“This new feature on AboutUs is so exciting for me! It makes the history of each wiki page leaps and bounds more transparent and personal by showing a Recent Contributors box to the right with portraits of the most recent editors to the page. (Contributors who have not yet uploaded a portrait are indicated by a question mark, and a page that has yet to be edited invites the person viewing the page to be the first contributor.)
Check it out! Go to any page on AboutUs and see how it looks. Then edit the page and watch yourself get added to the first slot in that page’s Recent Contributors box. (If you aren’t seeing your photo upload it this way.)“
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!!
For power users and new feature daredevils! The AboutUs Bookmarklet will open the AboutUs Wiki Page for the website that you are currently browsing. So if you are looking at the InstituteOfMosaicArt.com website and you want to add something to its Wiki Page on AboutUs, you can get there in the click of a link in your web browser!
Andreas mentioned it a week ago and Pat Cunningham wrote several over the past month and is happiest with this one. You rock Pat!
This is the first in a short series of occasional posts on how to get yourself up to speed in the use of wikis. No time like the present, no subject as elemental as a “WikiLink” or “WikiWord.” Mark has this to say about the relationship between WikiWords and domain names.
The importance of WikiWords in the wiki is paramount. They let you easily link up ideas and information that relate to each other. The fact that we can do this easily in a wiki is one of the best things about it. Here, in this wiki, I can WikiLink any domain and build a relationship. Be it Google.com or GoogleMaps.com - really any domain now becomes a conversation destination, a place for conversation or thought to travel to.
And here’s an outline of the nature and use of links in AboutUs.
A WikiLink is a clickable hyper-link from one page on a wiki website to another page.
To link pages here at AboutUs, place the title of the page you want to link to in double brackets and save your edit.
For example:
[[AboutUs.org]] will give you AboutUs.org upon save. (Note: To work properly, link just the domain, “www” or “http” aren’t needed here.)
[[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]] shows up as Recent Changes.
To begin [[WikiLinking]] navigate to a page you would like to place a link on (e.g. hit your “back” button or search for a page and hit “Find!”, etc.) and hit the green edit link.
So, if you haven’t used this linking function so far on AboutUs, go for it. Experiment with it. One of the things that gives AboutUs, and any wiki, extra value, is the creation of relationships between ideas and pages. Those relationships are established almost solely as the result of your judgment.
The next issue we’ll cover in this series is what is known in wikispeak as a CamelCase word, using something you may be familiar with: Movie Websites. (This is what is known as a FutureLink, so nothing is there, yet.)
You may already know that AboutUs.org has an innovative way to promote your business, our article writing service. An idea came up in the office today that seems to be worth sharing. What if someone else decided to start an article writing service where the articles would appear on AboutUs.org? Would we care? Of course we would care. We would think it’s great! You may be wondering why we would think it’s great to have someone using our free website to make money in a way that could seem to compete directly with our services. The way I look at it, good content serves everyone. Good articles, whatever the source (as long as they comply with our licensing), are good for AboutUs.org the community and AboutUs, Inc. So enterprising writers out there, go for it!
We believe that an “About Us” page born from the efforts of both the organization it describes and the people it touches is better than the more typical static AboutUs page seen on many sites today. Wiki allows that collaborative style of writing and incremental improvements. Ultimately, we hope to host continuously changing information about the people of the world and particularly how they choose to organize and relate.
In terms of content on AboutUs, we are intentionally incomplete. Wiki is by definition a work in progress; Wikipedia as an example seeded itself with some of the 1911 Britannica when it first stared. By providing some information with obvious room for improvement we are inviting folks to click on the edit button and experience wiki.
Gratitude to Dan G. for inspiring us to express our vision.
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