When I first started reading Wired.com’s wiki article on how to conduct a remote meeting, I chuckled a little. Step 1 is “Set a time” — isn’t that a little elementary? As I read on, though, I was reminded that sometimes it’s those simple “no duh” points that we can forget to pay attention to but can mean a big difference when it comes to how smoothly a meeting will run.

Here is a quick look at Wired.com’s 6 steps for running a remote meeting: read more…

As Wikipedia’s 10^th birthday party kicks into the high gear, newly released stats show that 53 percent of Americans visited the user-generated encyclopedia Web site in 2010, which is up from 37 percent last year. I’d rather have folks on this site, instead of “tweeting” about what they had for lunch.

More reasons to worry about a computer takeover of civilization: IBM”s supercomputer just beat two human contestants on “Jeopardy.” The answer is: This is the year when human beings realized that the “Matrix” movies were no longer a fantasy.

Oh, this is convenient. Twitter says that e-mail is on its last leg and will be replaced by “tweets.” Again, how convenient.

In light of this week’s big announcement that Verizon has broken AT&T’s death grip of the iPhone, we wonder: Will it change the course of human history?

Finally, happy anniversary to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who’s been at the top spot there for 11 years.  As a result, bloggers throughout Seattle and techno-blogosphere are asking whether it’s time for Steve to retire.

What else is happening?

-Ralph Gaillard

Monday, we discussed your first choice in the “choose your own adventure” approach to building a wiki — deciding what features you want for your wiki. Once you have a clear picture of that, you can move on to . . .

Choice #2: Where will the wiki live? Will you host the wiki  (on the company server or your own hardware) or will you use a wiki farm?

If you have an IT department, let them know that you want to start a wiki and ask about hosting it on your own server. This will save you the costs of using an outside provider and, if your techies agree, provide you with in-house support for navigating the process of creating and maintaining the wiki.

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A wiki is an interactive online platform that allows multiple users to edit and augment content. In the workplace, wikis can be used to enhance employee engagement, recruiting, and productivity.

Creating a wiki page is a lot like the series of Choose Your Own Adventure books that were  popular when I was in middle school (except you won’t encounter a dead end just as you are on the brink of discovering hidden treasure). At every step in the process, you have a choice to make. If you have an IT department, you would be wise to involve them in these choices. If you don’t have an IT department, some of the choices have been narrowed down for you already.

This week’s posts will look at the first two choices you have to make once you’ve decided you want a wiki.

Choice #1: What do you want your wiki to do?

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