It seems like everybody under the sun is putting together a wiki for something. There’s even a wiki for the board game Go. But with all these wikis around, is a wiki always the best tool for the job?

Back in September of last year, I talked about some general questions people should ask before setting up a wiki. The very first question I asked was: “is a wiki the best technology for what I am seeking to accomplish?”. That may not always be an easy question to answer.

So if you’re thinking of setting up a collaborative space — when should you use a forum and when should you use a wiki?

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Stephanie at Healthy Simplicity has written an insightful post about why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to ban allergens in schools. In my reply to her post, I talked about how banning something often gives people a false sense of security — and is, in reality, a security that doesn’t usually exist.

This post made me think about something else that often gets banned. Organizations are often fond of banning technologies — giving various reasons such as exposure to risk (whether that risk is leaked information, inappropriate comments by employees, or viruses or other malware).

The usual targets for technology bans are things like peer-to-peer downloading software and instant messaging applications, as well as web sites, which can be banned through an organization’s site filtering software.

There are several arguments as to why software or sites should be banned within an organization, and they basically go like this. Employees don’t really understand copyright, often misjudge what’s in good taste, and waste quite a bit of time — and if we ban certain software and sites, we’ll curtail some copyright infringement, distasteful content and time-wasting.

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Michael Clark has written up some fascinating ideas about the need for more open social networks. While I agree that this an extremely important area, I’m a little more concerned by the fact that social networking sites don’t have much incentive to share.

I’m reminded of the fact that it took (in the web world equivalent anyway) a long, long time for Microsoft and Yahoo! to allow users to start sharing contacts on their instant messaging platforms. I certainly applaud both companies for making the move — but there are still many other instant messaging platforms that aren’t part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! interoperability framework.

There are lots of very legitimate reasons for this — privacy being the number one concern as Michael points out. I don’t necessarily want some shady upstart instant messaging program having all my vital data. Yet privacy shouldn’t be something we have to sacrifice in order for interoperability to work.

The ‘just another social network’ phenomenon, however, has another twist to it. Those that run these social networks are only secondarily concerned about openness, and in fact, more concerned about competition. While a site like Facebook doesn’t really have much in the way of major competitors, this only encourages more niche sites to form.

For example, sites like LinkedIn offer the professional social networking take on things, and it seems that lately, there’s a social network for almost everything. Yet like most things web, standards are usually set after the fact. Let’s just hope that principle of openness doesn’t get lost along the way.

Doug Cornelius has put together some interesting thoughts about corporate wikis. Doug points to CNN Money’s Why commerical Wikis don’t work as evidence of the failed commercial wiki — with Penguin Books failed attempt to write a novel through a wiki being the article’s shining example.

Despite the assistance of a British university’s creative writing team, the collaborative book has become a hodgepodge of writing styles and plots. Let’s face it, there are some people who shouldn’t write a book.

CNN also tells the tale of the L.A. Times’ failed attempt at opening up their editorial page to user editing. Unfortunately, a few people started trashing the pages, and were generally just being destructive (I talked about the destructive potential of anonymity on wikis at the beginning of the year).

Chris Taylor from CNN makes some great points about the need for wikis to be focused — which keeps them from just recruiting anyone to contribute. It’s a bit of a fine line between being open to participation and being a closed community.

All discussions around wikis, however, seem to overlook one crucial and obvious fact. Wikis are often not the best technology to accomplish a goal. Creating a wiki to write a book is about the equivalent of picking several thousand volunteers off the street, putting them in conference centre for a few months, and asking them to design a car. Similarly, we’re not all talented novelists.

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While wading through my daily dose of spam (which originally never plagued my Gmail account, but now has risen to approximately 50 spam a day), I started thinking about the quality of information. How do we gauge the value of something that there is so much of out there?

How can we filter out the good from the bad — and prevent users from missing that one important message that went into the junk mail folder? First though, I decided to look at some statistics about spam.

The famous Akismet spam filter (which filters WordPress spam) has caught a total of 2,171,905,896 spam comments so far. According to Akismet, this accounts for 94% of all comments left on blogs. Taking a look at the the diagram below (which is borrowed from the good folks at Akismet), we can see that legitimate messages make up a tiny portion of all comments.

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I was speaking to a good friend of mine a few days ago, who was busy trying to juggle demands from a few people who wanted an organizational chart completed of their entire organization. We’re not talking about a small company — it’s a mid- to large-sized multinational company.

Taken to the next level, there are immense potential benefits for relationship/network mapping, as well as mapping people to some of the terms that you might create in a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary.

This reminded me of something I read in KM World a while back (I’d link to it, but it was in paper) about how social networks need to replace organizational hierarchies. So wouldn’t it be cool to create some kind of human ontology where people are not only related to each other, but also to services, departments and job functions (by the way, ontologies and taxonomies have been explained in some really interesting ways, in case you’re curious)?

My excitement at having thought of this was quickly quashed by my friend’s reaction. “We can’t even create an organizational chart, let alone map out all these other relationships. We can’t even keep up with who reports to whom,” she informed me.

So what’s the answer? Should networks really replace the organizational chart as the way to represent how the organization is structured? Or do you first need to create a hierarchical organizational chart and then build out non-hierarchical relationships from those?

It would seem to me that while networks replacing organizational charts sounds really great — in reality, it’s not very practical. There will always be a place for hierarchical relationships between things and people. Social network mapping is an extremely useful tool, but an organizational chart represents a particular set of relationships and a specific structure that a social network map does not.

What do you think? Can social network mapping and organizational charting (I just made up that term, it sounds a bit nautical) co-exist? Or does one necessarily have to destroy or replace the other?

At the end of a particularly insightful post on ClappingTrees, J.K. asks why the huge backlog of submitted sites can’t be opened up to everyone, Digg-style, in order to get sites approved (she’s referring to the DMOZ and Technorati backlogs here). She also points out some flaws with the Alexa ranking system (as I pointed out in my comment on that post, the reality is that Alexa’s ranking system, which they say consists of millions of users with Alexa toolbars installed, is less than perfect, and actually consists of probably around 180 000 users).

Tecnorati, in a sense, does act like a collaborative ranking system. The only problem with that collaborative ranking system is that only site owners who create a link to other sites get a say as to what blogs are popular — site readers (who don’t own a blog) don’t have any way to have their voice heard on Technorati.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many people that Digg users pretty much hate blogs (unless you’re Smashing Magazine apparently). So on the one hand, we have Digg users who are collaboratively rating content (but largely don’t want to see blog content — and for the record, I’m not knocking Digg for that, the Digg community can decide to see or not see whatever they want), and on the other hand, we have Technorati that only ranks blog content through links (which are created by blog owners, not readers).

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A while ago, Matthew Stibbe talked about the real power thinking and acting collaboratively.

Matthew explained the concept of crowdsourcing — which is basically just user-driven and user-created content (although some people would argue that ‘crowdsourcing’ is more a cost-cutting measure than anything).

Yet when it comes to user-created content, the subject of compensation always seems to crop up somehow. Having just purchased YouTube, Google has been accused of contributing to copyright infringement.

Everybody wants a piece of the action.

But as a content creator, should you be compensated for the content you create? Or is your content like a letter to the editor (which the publication can print, reprint or not print as they see fit)?

YouTube (since being purchased by Google) seems to think paying content creators is the right way to go. It would seem that Google has decided to ‘do the right thing’ and pay content creators.

But wait a second.

Just like copyright and patents, content creation is about incentives — and creating a mutually beneficial situation for sharing those creators’ content.

Just like Google’s advertising model, Google’s strength is in the network it has access to. By providing further incentives to video creators (beyond the obvious, existing incentive to show off your video), Google is ensuring the dominance of its network over other networks.

Much like it has already done with AdSense, Google is consolidating its position in a particular niche of the advertising world through redistributing a portion of its revenue back to the people who created the content, in exchange for taking a cut to allow you to use their network to distribute your content.

While this may seem unfair to some, perhaps it may offer bloggers and web content creators who live in more economically disadvantaged countries to make the same money as their counterparts in first world countries.

Social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn have consistently grown in popularity (measured of course, in the amount of users that they have).

But are they about to hit an adoption plateau?

Some people think so — and they’re concluding that the next logical step for social networking is opening up their data so that other sites can use it (the original BusinessWeek article is here).

Certainly, a critical element of YouTube’s success in building its user base has been the fact that you can post a YouTube video anywhere — it’s hard to imagine YouTube without that feature.

Yet YouTube has a very appealing and specific type of content (video) that people are willing and interested in reproducing on their own sites — but who’s going to want to post someone else’s LinkedIn information?

And more importantly — YouTube is not a social networking site. While there is a social component to YouTube, being social and connecting with others is not its primary purpose.

For the record, I’m definitely for opening up the data (in a secure way, obviously) that’s on social networking sites, which would be a mutually beneficial proposition both for users and for the sites themselves.

Yet in the BusinessWeek article, they cite eBay as an example of open social networking’s potential:

“Social-networking sites are realizing that if they want to grow their user base—and build a sustainable business model—they need to attract third-party developers. “Social networks have reached a point of maturity, and opening APIs will help them grow,” explains Adam Trachtenberg, a senior manager for eBay (EBAY). The auction powerhouse made its software available so others could easily link to its site. Today, some 40% of its listings are actually posted on other Web sites, providing eBay with billions in revenue from fees.”

Like YouTube however, eBay is not a social networking site either — eBay’s primary purpose is to connect people to purchases, not people to people (yes, they usually connect to people through purchasing, but that’s like saying going to the mall is social networking too).

BusinessWeek’s point about open standards and reusable data makes sense — but let’s not start calling everything that involves two or more people interacting ‘social networking’.

Social networking has a specific meaning, and the dilution of social networking’s cache is much more of a danger to social networking sites than closing themselves off from data reuse.

Predictions about what’s going to happen on the web always seem to include a social media or social networking component, but let’s just remember what social networking is (and what it’s not).

In response to my open query about whether LinkedIn actually matters, Scott Allen over at LinkedIntelligence points out that there are many people who are getting hired through LinkedIn.

Scott makes a good point — LinkedIn certainly hasn’t grown its user base by being useless. Users are certainly deriving some value from being on LinkedIn, or they simply wouldn’t be on LinkedIn.

Yet what I see happening (and this of course, is highly unvalidated and subjective) is that there is a growing middle market on LinkedIn — users that have joined and now aren’t quite sure where to go with their LinkedIn experience.

There are certainly people who have used LinkedIn and Jobster profiles in innovative ways, but that knowledge doesn’t really seem to filter down to the average user.

LinkedIn has its share of ‘superusers’ who have hundreds of contacts and have devoted the time it takes to build up such an impressive network.

But for the rest of us, perhaps LinkedIn could:

1. Provide suggestions for how to use your contacts when you sign up for LinkedIn.

This would provide newbies with a brief primer on what to do with the connections they make. The LinkedIn folks are certainly the most familiar with what to do with LinkedIn, so would be in the best position to suggest what we could do with our connections.

2. Point users to external resources.

Sites like LinkedIntelligence provide great resources on LinkedIn (as did Guy Kawasaki’s post on ways to use LinkedIn), so why not point to external resources that users could take advantage of?

3. Provide discussion on what to do with LinkedIn connections.

Why not have a forum, wiki or other method to post ideas about using LinkedIn profiles and connections in innovative ways? There’s certainly no shortage of great ideas for how to use LinkedIn, so why not provide users with an open way to get at those existing ideas.

LinkedIn is a great online networking tool (heck, you could even argue it’s the online networking tool), and I think the LinkedIn team has a great opportunity to provide a bit more guidance to their growing user base.

And while I certainly haven’t devoted the time to LinkedIn that I’d like to, I know I’ve certainly made some great connections through it.