As the largest wiki directory of websites on the internet, we want to shout this out loud!

If you’ve ever made a wiki better, pass along your birthday wishes at the original wiki! Here’s a wiki birthday greeting to wiki lovers from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki:

Best to anyone who ever made a wiki better. Thanks. — Ward

If the simplicity of wiki editing seems scary — “What!?! I don’t have to log in to edit? How will that ever work?”  – Then go ahead and ‘like’ the wiki birthday celebration page on Facebook.

You might even want to post something longer, like Alex William of ReadWriteWeb.com. He wrote a great story of how he was introduced to wiki. Maybe you’d enjoy seeing what people wrote for the past two wiki birthdays: WikiBirthday 15 and WikiBirthday 14.

You might know AboutUs as a resource for great SEO advice. Maybe you didn’t realize that AboutUs offers every website on the internet a wiki profile page, which we encourage you to improve. Kate Ford thinks we are the Slickest Wiki In Town, in part because we provide friendly hands-on help to anyone who asks.

Andreas, who’s known AboutUs for a long time, pointed out in a recent post, “AboutUs.org has developed from ‘just’ a wiki about sites to a good resource for information for webmasters and web site owners.”

We love Wiki. Linking is arguably the most valuable thing on the web, and wiki is the easiest, purest form of linking. You can even link to a page that doesn’t exist yet, creating an invitation for anyone to edit and provide good information. What could be more creative?

Backlinks get you only partway there

Every so often someone writes a weblog post about the top websites to get an immediate backlink from – and we are often included in these lists. This is really great, and an AboutUs backlink is just the tip of the iceberg!

The good folks at Search Engine People included us in their list of backlink sources in Get Your New WordPress Blog Indexed In 24 Hours [checklist].

What we want folks to know about is that you can do sooooo much more at AboutUs.

Firstly, check out our weblog series on how to improve your wiki page.

Secondly, check out our NoFollow policy – I think you will appreciate it.

Thirdly, check out the Website Visibility Report for your website’s homepage.

Lastly, we have a great collection of articles for people to learn SEO – search engine optimization – and online marketing. Best part is, they are written in plain, jargon-free English.

Keep your eyes out for an announcement next week – there is a new product on the way that takes the Website Visibility Report even further!

A tweet about Saul Kaplan caught my attention a few months ago, and it keeps rattling around in my brain. Saul theorizes that innovation comes through connected adjacencies. What resonated with me was Saul’s idea that people, ideas and businesses need to stop opposing the status quo, and start operating adjacent to it.

Instead of going to war to transform an entrenched operating model, create real world sandboxes right next door in which a new generation of transformative operating models can be explored… Innovation sandboxes must be connected to existing models and systems.

photo © 2009 Marc Smith | more info (via: Wylio)
Small businesses in crowded industries have to innovate to get noticed. A small electronics business will never be able to win recognition and customers by out-spending Apple in traditional advertising venues. But small companies can win if they can create connected adjacencies that get them noticed.

AboutUs offers endless scope for connected adjacency.

We are a space where people can connect to people in their industry or idea space, even as they offer more information about themselves and their businesses to AboutUs visitors.

For example, AboutUs community member Matt Stephenson writes about rental businesses on AboutUs and links similar businesses together. Many of these are local companies, not the big players in the rental industry, and when they’re linked on multiple AboutUs pages, that gives each of them more opportunity to be found by potential customers.

Wiki lends itself to adjacency through easy linking, person to person, community to community, wiki to wiki.  We are a place where you can do market yourself, and through connecting to others, create a bigger presence than you can achieve alone.

You can start making connections today at AboutUs. Create a new page, link to others who are like you, and even ask them to link to you. Just look for who’s editing a page that’s related to yours, and talk to them on their talk page.

Hat tip to Seb Paquet and to Saul for his beautiful domain name — ItsSaulConnected.com  ( a play on ItssAulConnected — Its All Connected )

Last week, I met with Lisa Sloan, president of Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest, and community service Wonder Woman.

EFNW, which recently merged with Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, helps its member companies give back to the community. AboutUs is a member of EFNW, having already contributed stock to the foundation. That’s one of the main things EFNW does – it holds a member company’s stock until the company is acquired or goes public. Then the foundation contributes that stock to the nonprofits designated by the company.

Simply put: If your company is overwhelmed by the task of starting a service initiative, EFNW to the rescue! And, in a charitable double-whammy, if your company hits the jackpot, nonprofits of your choice benefit. Cha-ching!

So, I sat down with Lisa. I told her that our CEO, Ray King, wants to find ways for our employees to use their unique talents to benefit Portland.

I found out that EFNW makes giving back to the community so, so easy. Lisa told me EFNW will design an employee survey to find out what our interests and passions are, and will give us recommendations based on the results. Instead of management dictating what kind of community work we’ll do, our involvement will come out of what we all really care about.

But wait, there’s more. EFNW will also give us a calendar of community events, reach out to groups we want to work with, and provide all the forms we need to run a good community service program.

I’m really excited about getting our new charitable efforts up and running – and really happy that there’s a professional group in town that can help us leap the walls of red tape in a single bound!

Thoughts about change are on my mind today as we shut down our office in Lahore, Pakistan.

We’ve worked with our Lahore colleagues for three years. They are terrific people who have done some really good work for AboutUs, and we’ve enjoyed a great relationship with them.

As a small, venture-backed company, we’re constantly evaluating options and tradeoffs. Sometimes we’re faced with a tough choice about where to focus our resources. The decision to shut down our Lahore office is one of those tough choices. We’re moving fast on new product development, and all our time, attention and resources need to be focused on these efforts here in Portland.

We’re grateful for the work and friendship we’ve shared with our Lahore colleagues. We hope their experience with AboutUs will serve them well in the next chapter of their working lives.

In Part I of “How (and Why) to Get Everyone Coding,” AboutUs staffer Ted brought up some situations where there are direct business advantages to having more people with even very simple technical skills. This is the “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow” saying everyone has heard.

But what about the purely cultural advantages of having non-technical staff coding? Would it still be useful to have staff learn to code, even if no one got real access to the codebase?

He said yes, “because whenever I’ve had a conversation with devs when they get any inkling that I understand what they’re saying, they view me differently. I can see it in the way they treat me. It’s just a different kind of conversation when their work is not so mysterious.”

AboutUs community guru Mark was more skeptical about the ROI of learning to code. He said that for people who are in constant contact with developers, like project and product managers, the benefits are clear. But should startups really be paying a CFO or marketing staff to learn to code? Reactions were mixed on this point, with some people enthusiastic about the idea and others skeptical.

Ward Cunningham helped some of our non-development staff to get more familiar with code. Here’s what he has to say about it:

I surprised the world by showing how collective-ownership can empower a community where anybody can edit. What the world doesn’t yet realize is that wiki is a miniature of the development methods I was creating at wiki’s founding. These methods evolved to become Agile software development.

AboutUs is an agile development shop. Contributing to an agile codebase isn’t much more complicated than contributing to wiki. If its a large codebase then contributing can seem mysterious as it is with Wikipedia. But this complexity comes from sociological effects, nothing inherent in the technology.

I hope that as the world comes to understand large wikis they will also understand that a large computer program, like those we are forced to deal with every day, or even civilization itself, must be made through collective-ownership if it is to remain healthy and last. I hope the staff at AboutUs can serve as an example.

Hopefully this has been a useful example for anyone interested in getting non-technical members of a startup into the code. If you have had an experience with this kind of effort, good or bad, it would be great to get your feedback.

Recently, we came across the closing keynote at PyCon by Antonio Rodriguez. In it, he made what he called a “crazy proposition” that caught our attention. Here’s the main thrust of it:

I think every employee in a web startup— or in fact any company which depends on software in any meaningful way— should learn how to code. From the slickest sales guy to the most obstinate operations guy, from the laziest intern to the most professorial manager, if they don’t have their hands in the code, your startup is much more likely to fail.

AboutUs.org is built on Rails, not Python, but this declaration about culture and code in Web startups was very interesting to us nonetheless. We haven’t gotten everyone in our startup to code, but we certainly have had non-programmers dipping a toe into the codebase. Here’s our experience with such an endeavor, and the reflections of the staff involved.

Tip of the Iceberg

The first serious project that got non-technical staff involved in code was a smaller one, not our main site AboutUs.org. It was headed up by Julia and Ted, who work in operations, finance, and organizational development.

The work mostly involved simple front end development, but some of the facts of life for coders became clear to them quickly. One of these points was the need for good source control. Ward Cunningham took a little time to help them get set up with GitHub.

From then on out, they were largely on their own, using online help sources to work their way through it — coding by Google, basically. All of this has been relatively smooth sailing, and Ted said he thinks it could be the tip of the iceberg for us in terms of getting everyone playing with code.

A Little Knowledge

Ted stressed that it was “definitely” a good idea to have people start small and work on what amounted to a side project. Not working right away on our main product afforded us more room for experimentation.

“The idea of pushing into GitHub is in some ways a scary one,” he said, “for mission critical software, if I pushed something that was a mistake that devs didn’t realize was a mistake, it would still be my fault. That phrase, ‘a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing’, it’s true.”

Squashing Small Bugs

So now that some of our staff have tried some front end work and tinkering with code, what about the idea of say, pulling an offsite for non-technical staff to learn to write a simple program?

Ted said, “I think it’s a great idea for a lot of reasons. There are a lot of things that don’t get done because the devs are working on higher priority stuff, and it’s not dangerous. It’s changing wording, for an example. Non-devs can do that and it won’t be a big problem. I love the idea of going even further than that, and learning how the basics of the code work.”

“Even reading commits is a good thing, which some of us have done. We’ve read commits over a period of time, watching what the devs are doing. But if actually we had commit access, even if we didn’t have deploy access, to be able to find small bugs and things that are simple, that would free up quite a bit of the dev time.”

Ted got excited talking about how he and Mark, the AboutUs Community lead, were able to refer to line numbers and other specific features of the codebase when talking with AboutUs developers. Clearly it’s not hard to get some staff interested in learning more about coding.

Read Part II for more, including Ward Cunningham’s thoughts about getting everyone to code.

Judy Shapiro of Advertising Age just posted “The Next Disruptive Tech on the Web? Trust” in which she says:

“Wait a minute — trust is a not a technology!” A decade ago that would have been true — it is not now.

Well – it was true a decade ago – and I suspect even longer – (at minimum I expect maybe close to 15 years ago).

In January 2002 I stumbled upon Wards Wiki, the first wiki. What blew me away and invited me to participate in this online community was something I had never witnessed online before: real people. I checked out the Recent Changes stream and there were real names, and you could click on them to see who was the person behind the name.

Wikis are about trust, they are about people, they are about community. . Wikis are helping to build a culture of trust on the internet that often can’t be replicated in other places.

For a wiki to work, people have to trust that other folks in the community are building upon each other and, generally, engaging in constructive behavior.

Wiki, the disruption I experienced in 2002, motivated me to join wiki culture and participate in building common ideas, and even a few uncommon ones.

If you’ve spent any length of time at the AboutUs Portland office, such as for WikiWednesday, WaveWednesday, Lunch 2.0, or PDXScala (our most recent addition to the events queue), you know about the trains.

We love our Portland office, with its open floor plan and view of the city. But sometimes the trains next to our building are loud enough to hinder conversation for a few seconds. To use what would be lost time for something productive, we decided that train breaks were unofficial stretch breaks at AboutUs.

The Wiki Way often leaches into the rest of our professional lives. Our moveable desks and lack of cubicles were inspired by wiki.

Wikis take what would be a bug in other software — the ability of anyone to edit — and turn it into a solution. Making the problem of a little sound interference into a solution for our health was just another application of that kind of thinking.

Is this on your bookshelf?

In our 2009 wrap-up post we included hiring new AboutUs-ers as one of our top ten milestones for that year. Kicking off 2010, we’re glad to say that we’re looking for another talented Ruby developer with Agile experience to join our team.

AboutUs is one of the top Rails sites, and we work hard to align our company with XP/Agile methods. If you’re interested in becoming a part of our Portland, Oregon office, please read the details on AboutUs or our listing on on startuply.