Google to Earth: Site is the word du jour.
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008A recent article on News.com by Dan Farber (see link below) points out that Google has banished the word wiki from their offices as they rebranded their wiki acquisition company Jot Spot and launched it as Google Sites last week.
Although I do share the vision of an editable web with Google, I am feeling the importance of wiki culture being neglected by them. In their effort to mainstream the technology there is an important loss of culture, TheWikiWay. Are AssumeGoodFaith, Transparency, and other wiki specific collaborative ideals, inherent in the word wiki, to be reinvented as well? Shouldn’t Google embrace wiki fully, rather than recreate the wheel, or is this their vision:
Google is missing a lot of the point by not embracing the thirteen year old culture of wiki. Besides the seven year old culture Wikipedia, you have communities at Wikitravel, wikiHow, Wikipatterns, Wikia, Wikinvest, XWIKI, Wikispaces, fluwiki, WikiIndex and a whole host of others not mentioned here.
I hope that people will just say “Google’s wiki application, they call it Google Sites”. The younger generation knows it:
(via Ikiw.org post via BlacksGoneGeek.blogspot.com post via News.com post)
Other folks have pointed out this issue as well: Google launches its name without Wiki (google translated from French) and Don’t call it a wiki: Google Sites finally launches
What is Google trying to do here? Does anyone have any idea?
