PBwiki has become a full-fledged platform with amazing third-party widgets that you can drop into your wikis. Here’s a demo video of how it works:

Click To Play

Just last week, we announced these new features.

Spreadsheets directly on your wiki (more info here)

Video upload to your wiki, or embedded from YouTube (more info here)

Event planning with the Eventbrite plugin (More info here)

Voice chat with the YackPack plugin (more info here)

Click To Play

Shared calendars on PBwiki (more info here) (scroll to the middle of the video)

Click To Play

And finally, the new beta of the PBwiki Installer, which lets you share Word documents right from MS Word. Phew.

Third-party widgetmakers and companies: We want you!
We’re now accepting submissions from third-party vendors to offer great widgets and apps for the PBwiki community. More information here.

For our users: Tell us what you want to see
We’re working to make PBwiki better and better for you. If there’s something you want to see, leave a comment here!

Jim Blomo, a friend of mine since junior high (!), joined the PBwiki team last week.

Growing up in the rough neighborhood of IRC’s #crackz, Jim escaped the shadowy life of “reverse engineering” to become classically trained at UC Berkeley’s EECS program. There he participated in all things nerdy: playing the Cal Marching Band, being a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar, and moving through the ranks of Residential Computing. After graduating, he entered the wild world of ops at A9.com, running Amazon.com’s product search.

We’re thrilled to have him help us make PBwiki even better, so please welcome Jim to our team!

(To see other job openings at PBwiki, visit our Jobs page.)

PC World named PBwiki last week as one of their Top 25 web sites to watch, along with our buddies at OpenDNS.

PC World says “The site’s simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki” – woo!

Read the full article at PCworld.com!

So we like to have fun here, too. You just can’t help but want to hack on neat projects with such talented engineers around, so Nathan, Brian, and I put together a computer that is attached to our wall with thumbtacks, displays hundreds of silly cats, and makes a sound whenever interesting things happen at PBwiki, like when someone upgrades. We tried having it make a sound whenever anyone edited, but the loud and continuous torrent of noises proved too much.

[flickr source picture w/ more technical details]

We’re announcing an awesome new feature today: voice chat on your wiki. You can talk to anyone (using voice) for free. This works for 1-20 people with no software download needed — and it’s ready to use today.

Watch the video below to see how it works:

Click To Play

What the video says:
We partnered with YackPack to bring voice chat to the PBwiki community. The Voice Chat plugin (also known as WalkieTalkie) brings live voice to your PBwiki pages. Everyone looking at the wiki page can hear your voice when you push down the “live� button and talk into your computer microphone. They can push the button and talk back. This makes it easier to collaborate with your team, classmates, or work group.

Insert the Voice Chat plugin on any PBwiki page, or you can put it in your sidebar (this makes it visible from all pages).

A very good use: You can leave your wiki page open all day and benefit from a “push to talk� voice connection. Any time you have something to say to your team, push the button and talk. It’s simple.

WalkieTalkie Widget . . .
* is free
* requires no installation or registration
* works on PC or Mac
* works anywhere in the world you have Internet
* connects your group with high-quality voice

The big news: You can use voice chat on your PBwiki today — free. Just insert the Voice Chat plugin by clicking Edit Page >> Insert Plugin >> Chat.

You can now embed spreadsheets directly in your PBwiki. Even better, you can edit the spreadsheets directly from your wiki!

We partnered with Numsum to let you import existing Excel spreadsheets, or to create your own. Give it a try.

To insert a spreadsheet on your wiki
Click “Edit Page” >> “Insert Plugins” >> “Productivity” and click Spreadsheet.

Or try inserting a sample spreadsheet in our sandbox
Play with the new spreadsheet plugin here: http://spreadsheets8.pbwiki.com

The big news: You can now insert live spreadsheets on your PBwiki — free.

Lots of people embed their YouTube videos using our Plugins (Edit Page >> Insert Plugins >> Video).

Today we’re announcing a new feature: Upload your videos directly to your PBwiki — free. If you have videos sitting around on your hard drive, upload them and share them with your friends. It takes about 5 minutes to upload.

When we decided to add video to PBWiki, we wanted it to be easy and look great. Working with the folks at Fliqz, we’ve added video functionality that turns any wiki into your personal primetime platform. What can you do with video? Here are 10 great ideas:

10: Show off your talent to the world

9: Share a recent experience with your network

8: Send a video message to someone you care about

7: Share videos of a family wedding, birth, or vacation

6: Invite your network to participate in a business or personal event

5: Create a video resume

4: Make a video review

3: Teach others how to do something (like make a great peanut butter sandwich)

2: Offer your views and opinions on a topic that matters

1: Demonstrate a product or a service

How to add video to your wiki
Just click “Edit Page” >> “Insert Plugin” >> “Video” and then insert your video. It will appear shortly afterwards. Remember, your video uploads do not use any of your wiki storage space.

The big news: You can upload video right to your wiki and share it with your friends — free.

Have you ever wanted to plan an event, coordinate RSVPs, and even sell tickets right from your wiki?

Lots of people already use their PBwikis to plan events (e.g., here and here).

Now, we’ve added a free feature to make event-planning easier. We partnered with Eventbrite, the leading online event registration service, so you can sell event tickets and collect registration information online. You can publish, promote, manage, and sell out your events with Eventbrite and PBwiki.

Watch the video below to see how easy it is to insert the Event Promoter plugin on your wiki.

(What the video says: To use the new feature, click “Edit Page”, Insert Plugin, and then hover over “Productivity” to “Plan an Event.”)

The big news: You can plan an event, coordinate RSVPs, and even sell tickets right from your wiki using the Eventbrite plugin — free.

[Update, 1/30/08: We've put this project on hold, so please disregard the blog post below.]

We just released a super-very-much-not-final beta of the PBwiki Installer at http://install.pbwiki.com.

Share Word documents through PBwiki
Want to collaborate on a Word document? Use the Installer to send files to PBwiki and collaborate with your co-workers. You can send your Word files to PBwiki in two ways:

1. In Word, just click File >> Send to PBwiki.

2. Use the dropbox to drag Word files to PBwiki. Just drag files to the dropbox and they’ll magically appear in your wiki.

Coming up: the ability to send documents to your wiki alone, improved notifications on your desktop, and a Mac version (depending on demand). David spent many late nights on this, so give it a shot!

Download the PBwiki Installer here.

We have some free PBwiki materials I want to share with you.

Lots of our users give talks about wikis. Some are teachers, like the 1,000+ who responded to an email I sent out a few months ago asking if they plan to present about wikis. (They presented in places like Maine, Malaysia, and Texas — see pictures.) Others are just casual users who want to show their friends what a wiki is. Sometimes, employees in big companies want to communicate the idea of a wiki to their boss.

For everyone, we’ve developed the PBwiki Presenter Packs, which include videos, how-to guides, and more. Until now, you had to sign up to get them (and if you want a free PBwiki t-shirt, you should still sign up).

But now you can download the PBwiki Presenter Pack materials and use them for free right here. Enjoy!

-Ramit