This week we’ve already talked about the value of editable lists, on AboutUs and elsewhere. But one thing we didn’t address is that to be truly wiki-like, they need to have a trail of edits that show what has been done and who did it.

As of now, all AboutUs lists have a history page that show edits to the title and description for that list. The button is located right next to the edit button, so it should be very easy to find. Each entry within the history is titled with the person that made the edit, and red or green text will highlight the changes.

For now lists don’t show the edits to summaries or tags of sites within a list. But the history of any individual summary or tag can still be viewed at that domain’s AboutUs page if you notice a change in a list.

For a visual example of list history, visit the site or check out the screenshots below of the Arduino list that our own Ward Cunningham is the list keeper for.

Adding a history to lists allows for faster and more valuable collaboration between AboutUs community members. Please feel free to test out this new feature, and don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve list editing in the future.

It’s now been a few weeks since Twitter released its lists functionality to everyone. It’s given the millions of people a chance to better organize the stream of information that flows endlessly from Twitter, and it’s safe to say that lists have been a big hit.

Twitter isn’t the only one who sees the value in lists. For several months now AboutUs has offered the ability to create topical lists of websites, allowing anyone to summarize and tag sites that matter to them.

Why Lists Matter

Twitter lists are feature that grew out of that community’s need to give order to a huge ecosystem of information. AboutUs lists revolve around websites instead of Twitter accounts for people or organizations, but the goal is the same.

A list is a really fairly boring tool for organizing information. But if you add the ability to edit and share lists broadly, they become a vital tool for organizing a community or a body of knowledge that is too big to handle with search alone.

Making Lists Really Editable

Lists have clearly taken off, but they’re not perfect yet. Dawn Foster, friend and Portland-based mistress of all things community management-related, wrote at WebWorkerDaily about some fascinating suggestions for improving Twitter lists.

Naturally the one that sparked our interest the most was the idea of making lists publicly editable. This public editability would be selective, and might be limited to your followers if you like. Anyone can edit a list on AboutUs by default, but we definitely encourage list keepers to take responsibility for subjects they care about.

Currently Twitter lists are limited to one person’s notion of the most important additions. Part of what makes certain lists important are the people who’ve created them (such as Robert Scoble’s list of tech pundits). But with sites such as Listorious emerging, many lists are becoming important public resources regardless of who curates them.

Who is doing most of the work to curate a list is clearly important. But here at AboutUs, we’ve attempted to strike a balance between letting someone curate a list and leaving room for collaboration. Getting that balance right is the key to making lists a sustainable model for any community, and it’s why we agree with Dawn’s suggestion for Twitter lists.

WikiWednesday is a free monthly gathering of wiki enthusiasts that AboutUs has hosted for several years now. Usually it’s fairly open in format, but occasionally we roll up our sleeves and all collaborate on something pressing. This is one of those times.

In the wiki world, a gathering dedicated to work on a particular site is called a Barn Raising, and this month we’re devoting WikiWednesday to a barn raising for a Portland city wiki.

A city wiki is a place for everyone to find and share information that matters to their community, and now Portland will have one too. Please join us for WikiWednesday tonight (same time, same place) to help create the building blocks for PortlandWiki.org. They’ll be snacks, drinks, and plenty of wiki experts around to help you contribute to Portland’s wiki in whatever way you can.

As one of the newest members of the AboutUs.org community, I’m constantly reminded of the power and diverse benefits of wiki.

There’s so much useful information to discover in an AboutUs.org list or domain page. The lists and links within these pages can help us find anything from technical support in a specified field to a cool shortcut for an otherwise laborious task. Sometimes a list guides us to something that’s just plain fun!

Anyone can edit a wiki. Fresh knowledge added by many people equals a concise list that springs to life.

While you can read a great article on a specific topic in The New York Times online, the links in the article will be limited to whatever the writer decided was link-worthy.

By contrast, a wiki article may contain numerous links and relevant information added by others with expertise in the field. These contributions can vastly enrich the accuracy and breadth of a piece.

AboutUs lists have directed countless people to find new tools, music, films, books, travel tips and more. The possibilities are endless. Collaborative lists aren’t just another technological twist – they’re a way of life.

The wiki “WOW” factor. How can this super-interactive tool enhance your life…?

p.s. Check out a sampling of Hindi DJ music via DJMayur.com

It suddenly feels like everyone is talking about cycling to work.

First GOOD magazine’s transparency issue declared Portland, the home of AboutUs HQ, to be the number one city in America for riding your bike to work. Check out their shiny infographic to see exactly how Stumptown stacks up against other U.S. cities. Then The New York Times jumped on the bandwagon (or is it the bike?) with a piece about business cycling.

AboutUs has always been a business built by cyclists. Many of our employees get to the office on two wheels, and you can usually see their bicycles parked in our entryway.

Still, having a mere 3.9% of the city’s population bike to work isn’t the pinnacle of achievement. The Netherlands, where more than 25% of all trips are made by bike, is pretty much the king of urban cycling. There’s definitely things we could learn about transitioning to a bike-oriented lifestyle.

Who better to talk about the transition than someone who recently did it for themselves? That’s right, our own Ward Cunningham will be at the upcoming Ignite Portland to speak about becoming bike oriented.

As he says in his proposal, Ward’s car was stolen back in January, and he chose to try and become more bike-oriented then and there. Since that time Ward not only started commuting to the office by bike, but he’s led many AboutUs-ers on office bike excursions.

Ignite is an event where presenters are given five minutes and 20 auto-advanced slides to tell their story. Those of you not in Portland will be able to watch the livestream or recorded talks for Ignite. For AboutUs, we’ll be proud to see our CTO speaking up for cycling.

GeoCities was a pioneering Web hosting service, one that offered millions a place for self-expression for over a decade. Built during the mid-to-late 90s, it was later acquired by Yahoo!, who announced in April that it would be permanently shuttering GeoCities on October 26th.

Like MySpace for 1997

As TechCrunch put it, “Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world.”

Today there are some big advantages to the sites that have replaced GeoCities: social networking sites allow for greater privacy, blogging tools make a writer’s life easier, and photo sharing sites are tailored to photographers. But the importance of GeoCities in the context of Web history is touted by many, even if it has become a backwater of the Internet today.

The GeoCities Preservation Project

So how will all the old school “user-generated content” of GeoCities be preserved?

Yahoo, Jimdo, and others have offered up their paid hosting services to GeoCities users, but there’s a fundamental problem at work there. The same sort of non-technical person interested in GeoCities is unlikely to want to switch to another host.

Thankfully everyone from niche sites like the FanHistory wiki to the Internet Archive has since stepped up to help GeoCities users beat the rapidly approaching deadline. Be sure to check out the resources at FanHistory and the Archive to learn how to help out.

How AboutUs Can Help

As for AboutUs, while we aren’t a Web host, our site is a great tool for describing websites hosted elsewhere and creating lists of connected sites. Our wiki-based site might be a good place to help further catalog the former GeoCities sites which have since been distributed around the Web.

Part of the beauty of GeoCities was the fact that it felt like more than a hosting company: it was a community, an ecosystem of sites. Once the content is migrated, AboutUs might be the perfect place to list top sites according to topic or affiliation with GeoCities.

That’s right, we’re looking for several highly talented folks to to join our Portland, OR or Lahore offices.

Here’s a rundown of the position. If you or anyone you know might be a good fit, email your cover letter and resume to jobs@aboutus.org (be sure to include the job title and city in the subject line).

Agile Rails Developer

Top 10 Rails site (Alexa #715) seeking talent for our small development team. AboutUs.org is a structured wiki of all websites. We run much of our site on AWS and are experimenting with other technologies that scale to support hundreds of thousands of people working together on millions of pages. We’re venture-backed, and our founder’s history of leading startups to successful acquisition helped him win the Entrepreneurship Award for Individual Achievement from the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network last month.

Requirements

We are looking for people to join an elite team. To be successful, you’ll need to have already done the following:

• Deployed web applications
• Wielded advanced programming
  • closures
  • metaprogramming
  • distributed computing
  • service-oriented architecture
• Worked with XP/Agile methods

Read more…

Not long ago ProBlogger, the popular site about making a living in the blogosphere, wrote a list of five ways to get your blog indexed by search engines in 24 hours. It was a great resource for bloggers launching their sites for the first time, listing many sites that can help you get noticed quickly when you’re starting a new blog.

But ProBlogger did leave out one powerful tool for getting your site indexed fast: an AboutUs page filled with rich content. Here’s our take on his advice for getting indexed, as well as how a free page on AboutUs.org can augment what you’re already doing.

1. Blog Communities: Blog communities are basically a social network for your blog and for bloggers. These community portals are similar in AboutUs in some ways, but are exclusive to blogging. Getting a profile for your new site that is branded appropriately and is SEO-smart (i.e. proper keywords and tags) is a good way to get Google or Bing to notice your blog. Some top blog communities include, in order popularity: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs.
2. Site Valuation & Stats Sites: This is one area where all the old school site valuation and statistics shops might help you, even if you might never return. Directories like WhoIs and analytics tools like BuiltWith will definitely help with getting indexed.
3. Feed Aggregators: Feed aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, and FeedAdage will take any feed you’ve submitted, track your new posts, and index them in their site. All this creates another way for search engines to index your growing site fast, and it’s free traffic, since the feeds contained on those sites link back to you.
4. Social Sites: Social media is the avenue for getting readers that everyone is talking about these days. Now, treating Facebook and Twitter purely as tools for getting indexed by Google quick isn’t a sustainable strategy. But setting up Twitter and Facebook pages early on that obey SEO best practices will definitely be a big boost for you. More social sites especially relevant to getting your blog discovered are Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.
5. Misc Sites: There are a few other sites ProBlogger mentions that might be appropriate if you really want to hit it out of the ballpark. ChangeDetection is particularly relevant to blogs, since a public listing will track updates to your site and publish them in a news section on their site, which will in turn get them picked up by search engines. A site that traditionally has been very big for getting your blog noticed by both Google and readers alike has been Technorati, the blog search engine. Technorati used to be the premiere site for finding and ranking blogs, but it’s fallen by the wayside in recent years. Some news outlets have reported that Technorati may be changing its strategy yet again, so be sure to tread carefully.
6. With AboutUs: Three key characteristics make AboutUs a powerful resource for getting your blog indexed quickly. First, like many of the other sites listed above, it’s free. All it takes is an account, which you can create in about 60 seconds. Second it’s quick to create and update. No waiting for us to pre-approve updates or verify your account, just hit edit and save, like any wiki. The faster you get rich, original content on your AboutUs page, the more good it does you.

   Last but not least, it’s simple. Improving your AboutUs page with a little original content that is accurate and well-written will not only be useful to those visiting AboutUs.org directly, it will help on the SEO side as well. For some tips on easy things you can do with any AboutUs page, check out our series on Five Simple Ways to Improve an AboutUs Page.

Some of the friends and community members who’ve been with AboutUs since the beginning will remember that we used to be based on MediaWiki, the collaborative software that powers Wikipedia and countless other sites. With 15 million pages and more added every day, we’ve since outgrown MediaWiki.

But that doesn’t mean traces of our software don’t have the occasional positive side. One such advantage is that many of the scripts that power users of the FireFox browser employ through Greasemonkey work on both MediaWiki and AboutUs.

One such user script can create a presentation from your MediaWiki pages. The script also works just fine on AboutUs, which means you can create a slideshow using freely-licensed AboutUs content without every touching PowerPoint.

If you want to try it out follow these four simple steps:

1. Install Greasemonkey for Firefox, if you haven’t already. The word scripts sounds intimidating, but all it takes is a couple clicks.
2. Add MediaWiki Presentation to your list of scripts. To do so just click the “Install” link on the script page.
3. Go to your favorite AboutUs page and click the “start presentation” link. The link will appear automatically underneath the navigation tabs near the top of the page (see screenshot below).
4. Watch as the different sections of the AboutUs page get turned into slides you can click through in your browser.

For AboutUs pages that have been improved even a little bit, this script is the easiest way to get a presentation about a website and organization with all the basic information you might need. If it’s currently missing some information you think is fitting, you’re more than welcome to add it yourself.

Now that you’re a Greasemonkey user, you should also check out the AboutUs Helper script. If you’ve got any suggestions of other scripts to try, please let us know in the comments.

Recently marketing wizard Seth Godin launched a new addition to community site Squidoo. Brands in Public is a shared dashboard of Web activity related major brands, meant to bring brand monitoring into the public eye. So why would businesses want to bring brand monitoring out into the light of day? Godin has a great answer as part of his pitch:

There are already monitoring tools online (like Radian6) that allow big brands to watch from behind the scenes. That’s great, but what are you doing in front of your audience? Is there a low-cost, easy way to let one of your non-technical marketing people lead and engage with people who are already in the conversation?

There have certainly been plenty of people very unhappy concerning the way Godin and Squidoo have gone about Brands in Public. But the ethos behind the site is one we agree with, even if we have a different approach.

At AboutUs we don’t automatically aggregate customer comments about your company, though the new look for our pages does include quick links to brand mentions on Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

More importantly, we believe that it’s not just big name brands like Amazon and IKEA that deserve a place to interact with people and describe their presence on the Web. Anyone with a domain can use AboutUs to promote their organization and start a conversation with customers. We also provide a level playing field for all, and do not charge any fee to participate in a page that talks about your brand.

Every AboutUs page is a digital public square that can help you start a constructive dialog with your customers. We’re committed to being free and open to everyone on the Web, in order to create a useful resource that abides by the values of our community.