Email is a great communication tool, but it is not a great tool for collaboration.  By the very nature of email, the only people who benefit from the knowledge contained within them are the people on the trail.  Since everyone in a company does not operate on a shared In-box, ideas and decisions will always lack a degree of perspective and creativity- and they will be less thorough.

When you are building knowledge that others can benefit from, working with clients and partners, or making decisions that affect other aspects of the company- a wiki is a perfect tool.  Using this criteria, our subscribers have decreased their email traffic by over 30%!  No more FYI emails, no more having to answer repetitive questions, and no more searching your email for a nugget of information that you know is trapped in an email somewhere...

The bottom line is that wikis give you the right tool for collaboration.  Wikis are not a replacement for email- they are a replacement for a void that email was filling for us, temporarily.  Organizations now have the perfect tool to improve both communication and collaboration.  To see how BrainKeeper does this, sign up for a free trial.

We attended the New New Internet conference last week, which focused on emerging web technologies and the application of the products, features and concepts that have been grouped into Web 2.0.  As with most conferences, there were speakers and presenters who really know their stuff, and those who only think they do.

Overall, the conference was great, and reaffirmed that wikis, blogs, social networks, and mash-ups have some very tangible and unique benefits to business, government, and educational organizations.  Improving communication and collaboration are still some of the biggest challenges faced by businesses, and many of the presenters aim to address various aspects of a solution.  Some of the high points were:

Product presentations from HonestyOnline, Spigit, and talk2CHIP.  Spigit stood out to me because of the completeness of their vision for their product.  They have social networking features that allow collaboration and bring the best ideas and concepts to the attention of decision makers, which is all well and good- but they also have a customizable workflow engine so that those ideas can get pushed through an integrated process.  In a world where capturing ideas is a focus, it is refreshing to find a product that helps to implement those great ideas.

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek were both excellent.  If you are not familiar with either of these works, we highly recommend them.  The perspective that these concepts give you can truly influence the decisions you make every day.  They can also notably improve the way you collaborate with your team, department, and organization as a whole.

The most intriguing product (yes, it will be a product) that will be released soon is Mash Maker, the mash-up application developed by Intel.  The demo went far beyond the traditional on-line map mash-up and offered a potentially significant influence to the development of the semantic web.  The next year will be very interesting for collecting, classifying, and relating web content.  The implications to wikis are readily apparent, and we will be looking for ways to tap into these technology evolutions.