No, not that Enterprise 2.0

Join the PBworks team at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco (November 2-5), where we’ll be making a major announcement and giving live demos of groundbreaking new functionality.

You can meet the team, get one-on-one advice, and help us show those Enterprise 2.0 folks just how much we all love PBworks.

Best of all, you can get into the exhibit hall for free–just register using the discount code “EXPOPASS”.

As an added bonus (as if you needed one), every PBworks user who stops by our booth (Pod 22) will get a free T-shirt, and every customer will get a free massage from Kathy, our corporate masseuse.

Stay tuned for more clues about the big news, and see you at the show!

P.S. Think you know what we’re announcing? Leave your best guess as a comment, or better yet, Tweet it using the hashtags #pbworks #e20conf.

Look familiar?

You may not know this, but I’m a huge fan of the Fake Steve Jobs.  The real one ain’t half bad either.

I remember hearing Steve talk at a dinner honoring him, and some poor schlub was foolish enough to ask Steve, “Now that Dell makes MP3 players, how is the iPod going to compete?”

(This was a number of years ago, when Dell was considered the titan of the PC industry, and Apple was a niche player.)

Steve delivered a withering look of utter contempt and said, “It’s called good taste. People will pay for you to tell them what’s cool.” (here’s a more extended version of this story)

The point is, Steve knows good taste.  Steve knows what looks good.  And so it is with considerable pride that our engineering team pointed out to me today just how much Apple’s wiki server resembles PBworks.

It’s a dead ringer, down to the interface for starring pages.

As Picasso once said, “Good artists copy.  Great artists steal.”

We stole the inspiration for PBworks 2.0 from Apple’s clean interface style.  It is an honor to have the favor returned.

As Fake Steve himself might put it, “Namaste, Apple.  I honor where our sense of aesthetics become one.”

Some of our frequent blog readers will recall the PBwiki Biggest Loser Challenge. During this challenge PBwiki employees learned a lot about themselves. We learned how great it felt to eat right, work out, and lose weight. We also learned how fiercely competitive the team is here in the office! Trash talking, sabotage attempts through delicious baked goods, and mind games.

It’s been a few months, and sadly some of the weight has crept back on. Without the push of the challenge, we’re not quite as tempted to hit the gym, avoid PBwiki cupcake treats or stay away from the delicious caloric beverages in the PBwiki fridge. That being said, PBwiki’s VP of Marketing, Chris Yeh, and yours truly have decided to start up our own weight loss challenge – the Final Showdown.

You can track our progress on our weight loss wiki, read our blogs posts about this adventure here, or you can contribute to the winnings and help raise the stakes. Don’t forget to vote on the wiki for your favorite pick for winner!

Starting today at 9am, it’s on!

Image from derok.net

The National Basketball Association has finally reached the quarter pole of the 2008-2009 season meaning that teams have played about 3/4s of their total games.  At this point, it’s pretty easy to tell which teams have a chance of winning the championship and which teams are already dreaming about next year.

The Boston Celtics is one such team that is vying for a championship.  Lately, they’ve been in a slump due to the injury of one of their best players, Kevin Garnett.  With Garnett’s influence, the Celtics are the class of the league, without him they are just another “very good” team.  Like most NBA superstars, Garnett is blessed with supreme athletic ability, willpower and drive.  However, what the team misses most when Garnett doesn’t play is his ability to communicate during the game.   Garnett keeps his team working as one cohesive unit with his incessant chatter and masterful communication skills.

It’s interesting to note that on a team full of world class talent, it takes a strong devotion to communication in order to achieve the next level.  This holds true in many situations, whether it is a basketball game or the execution of corporate strategy.  At PBwiki, we strive to make that communication easier and more effective.  Check out some of the ways that other organizations have utilized our tools.

Through a long chain of events, I ended up constructing a castle around my office. Last night, while I was out of the office (at an important meeting, I might add), a young Canadian hooligan destroyed my beautiful edifice.

Oh, the humanity.

Image from directsnapfootball.com

I spent most of Sunday afternoon at home watching various football games. While I’m a fan of all sports, I’m always amazed at the execution and synchronization of a typical football play. Each down, the 11 players move in perfect harmony in order to reach their goal. The slightest misstep can be the difference between victory and defeat.

What is true on the football field is often true in real life: if a team isn’t on the same page, the team is likely to fail. Football players spend hours reading a playbook and practicing over and over again in order to attain this togetherness. In the business world, we don’t have time to practice for hours which makes having a good playbook essential. If your team doesn’t have a playbook, why not build one today using a wiki?

Photo courtesy of Jonathunder.

It has come to our attention that in Mashable’s Open Web Awards, PBwiki came in as the runner-up to Wikipedia in the “Wiki” category.

Clearly, this is a travishamockery of justice. Sure, Wikipedia is the largest repository of human knowledge, but you won’t find caricatures of all the Wikipedians on their web site.

Please write your local politicians and demand justice. We’re coming for you, Jimmy Wales!

(In all seriousness, thank you to all the bloggers who voted for us. It’s an honor. And hey, maybe next year….)

With everyone worried about the economy, now is the perfect time to focus on increasing your productivity.

If you’re a business owner, being more productive with everyday work will give you the time to think about how you can shift your strategy to account for the new environment.

If you’re working for someone else, being more productive will improve your job security.

If  you’re independently wealthy and kicking back on your yacht, being more productive will allow you to visit more tropic islands and plan more parties.*

Many of our customers report getting as much as one extra hour a day of productivity from organizing their teams with PBwiki–what would you do with an extra hour per day?

* If this is you, make sure you add us to the invitation list.  We work pretty hard here, and could use the R&R.

Late last week in the office we had a discussion about weight loss. From this conversation we developed the PBwiki Biggest Loser challenge. For a $100 ante, PBwiki employees can enter into this 60 day challenge to be the biggest loser.

• The page template tool allowed us to easily create an exercise log for each participating employee.
Because the wiki is private I don’t need to worry that every Tom, Dick and Harry on the Internet knows my current weight and how many chocolate chip cookies I just had to have for breakfast this morning.
Email notifications of wiki changes are a great motivating factor – when I’m feeling like staying home and watching TV, I get an update saying that a colleague has done the treadmill and it gets me over to the gym.

The PBwiki Biggest Loser challenge runs until Monday August 25th. Watch out PBwiki, I’m going to win!

UPDATE: Wow! The responses to my blog post about the PBwiki Biggest Loser challenge have been awesome! For everyone who is looking for the spreadsheet we used, it’s actually just a simple formula:
Total weight loss divided by the starting weight times 100.

You can see the table we used here: http://pbwikibiggestloser.pbwiki.com/Spreadsheet
(By the way, this is a private wiki. I made this one page public using the new Page Security tools from PBwiki 2.0). Good luck on your own challenges!

When the web was first conceived, it was intended to be a read/write medium. Right now, wikis are the best implementation of that vision: web pages that are easy for people to edit directly from their web browser.

Yesterday, we heard about the Universal Edit Button from a commenter on Get Satisfaction. When we looked into it, we thought it was a great idea: the Universal Edit Button is a Firefox extension that adds an “Edit” button right in your browser on pages that support it. We are happy to say that we now support this great idea, joining a growing number of wiki providers online. You’ll see it on all PBwiki 2.0 pages (PBwiki 1.0 will get it on Monday) that you have writer access to — it’s a pencil in a green square:

Right now, you have to have to be using Firefox to use the extension, but people are working on a version for Internet Explorer. Keep up to date at the official Universal Edit Button web site.