Notes In 9 – Page 19

Before I get to Episode 12 details let me say that I’m beyond excited to announce the community event that Chris Toohey and I have been hinting about on Twitter for a little bit.

It’s called “Wiki Madness”.

Wiki Madness is an event that will run from now until the end March 2010. The purpose of this event is to attempt to raise awareness and visibility of the excellent content that members of the Lotus Community create on a daily basis.

Here’s what happened. I’ve been meaning to get my screencasts cross posted to the Domino Designer Wiki for a while. Not all of them of course, just the ones with the relevant tip or technique. Finally I found some time and with the help of Amanda Bauman of IBM, I got episode 11 posted to the wiki.

Then the most interesting thing happened. I’m not one to watch my stats that much, but since I was playing with this new embedded player for the wiki’s I happened to check my stats and to my surprise, the traffic that I got from the IBM servers quickly eclipsed the traffic I got from iTunes, notesin9.com and YouTube combined. I can only believe that these people are viewers who might not have been aware of my show.

I learned that there’s an audience that knows about the Product Wiki’s but maybe not PlanetLotus. And since I didn’t really know that much about the Wiki’s maybe the PlanetLotus contributors are not aware of this additional audience. So I was talking to Chris Toohey of dominoguru.com about this and we jointly came up with the idea to try and bring the communities closer.

The gist of it is this:

There’s a ton of great content that is being posted to personal or group blogs. Why not simply cross post this content to the the relevant wiki? You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Add an “About the Author” to the end of the wiki article with information about yourself and links back to your site. Now both the PlanetLotus audience and the Wiki Audience has a chance to see your content and recognize you as a contributor. It’s a win for all participants.

Then we thought, ok but how do we try and get this going? How to we promote this idea? Well, I had brought back a few things from Lotusphere to give to Chris for giveaways for his site. My wife does the Blogger of the Year award and I needed to ship that to him anyway. He decided it would be better to use the swag items I brought back for this project as an “incentive” to get the ball rolling. We then started asking around to see if we could gain some other items and Lisa Duke from STS and TipsinTwo immediately answered the call by sending us a tremendous “goodie box”! Since then we’ve been talking with various other people in an effort to increase our stash. More details of how this works will be announced by Chris on the community call today, and later on his blog and we’ll be talking about this off and on as the event progresses.

So that’s the Event. Please check out wikimadness.com for further details. If you’re so inclined, show your support by placing out article submission widget on your own blog.

Ok so what about Notes In 9? Well I sub titled this episode “Wiki Wonka and the Collaboration Factory”. This episode talks more about the wiki’s, why you might want to participate, how much traffic do the wiki’s get, and then I do a demo of how to create a wiki article and use the Wiki Markup language to make it look good.

I hope you like it and I hope you take some time to add content to the wiki. It’s really not more then copy and paste.

Thank You!

And now Notes In 9 – Episode 12 – Wiki’s