JotSpot’s Pre-Packaged Wikis: Cool

Read/Write Web has a writeup on Jotspot’s new strategy of releasing 30-50 pre-packaged wikis in 2006.

What’s a pre-packaged wiki you ask? It’s a wiki that’s already setup for a specific use. The power of wikis is there flexibility, but one problem people commonly have with them is setting them up in a format that works for their intended purpose.

As an example, Jotspot’s first pre-packaged wiki is a Class Reunion Planner. Instead of trying to hack some application or website to do your planning, you can get your own Class Reunion Planning wiki which provides a collaborative environment with built in features specific for class reunion planning. Their other initial release is a Bug Reporter. Note that they will be charging for these, although free trials are available. I’ve wondered how Jotspot was going to become a truly useful business after I started reading founder Joe Kraus’ blog a couple years back, and it looks like their strategy is coming into focus.

I can easily think of all kinds of pre-packaged wikis that would be helpful. At Right Media we use wikis a great deal for collaborating on product development. It’d be a lot easier if we had a pre-packaged wiki with built in features that supported this. We chose to use a wiki instead of something like Basecamp just do the additional wiki flexibility, but we wished our wiki had some features like Basecamp. I’m guessing Jotspot will have a pre-packaged wiki soon to meet that need.