It is very interesting to watch the web 2.0 services and websites being acquired by larger corporate players. Google has acquired both Writely (now Google documents and spreadsheets, integrating both Google Spreadsheets and Writely functionality) and YouTube in the past year– and now Google is into the Wiki world with its acquisition of JotSpot.
Jot.com was one of the first wikis I ever used, back in the Spring of 2005 when our educational law class research group used it to create a “Student Cell Phone Use and Other Technology Concerns for Schools” wiki. My favorite free wiki sites are now PBwiki (great because its tagging markup is so simple, and you can have a private wiki for free) and WikiSpaces (nice because of its better WYSIWYG formatting options.) It will be interesting to see how the feature set of Jot.com changes (and hopefully improves even more) now that Google has acquired them.
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On this day..
- Don’t Get Tricked Online – A Media Literacy Lesson – 2019
- Amazed by Edgar’s Design Creativity in Minecraft – 2014
- Photographic Highlights and Mapping Media Learning from NW Illinois – 2013
- Innovative Learning Institute in Norman: Nov 6, 2012 – 2012
- Digital Magazines: Text Plus Multimedia – 2011
- When Parents Don’t Want Student Email – 2011
- Mirroring an iPad with iOS 5 & Apple TV – 2011
- Platforms for Interactively Sharing Student Work – 2010
- AudioBoo provides a great opportunity to record and share holiday memories – 2010
- The Research on Teaching Animation Design Art by Yang Huansong – 2009
Comments
3 responses to “Google acquires Jotspot”
[…] JotSpot, one of the leaders in the Wiki space, was sold to Google. This was covered on a wide variety of blogs, including Scobleizer, Mashable, TechCrunch, and A VC. I was actually very surprised to hear this one- having watched the video on the ScobleShow where Joe Kraus talked a bit about his vision of creating “do-it-yourself” applications. Having founded Excite, I was guessing Joe wanted to build JotSpot into something large himself- but I guess the funding & possibility of almost limitless resources proved tough to pass-up. Here’s an interesting podcast for you to listen to. Congratulations to the JotSpot team nonetheless! […]
Geez… it’s getting hard to keep up with the shopping spree these guys are on. What do you think is going to be their next target? I’ve got my money on Netvibes.
I have been writing on the topic of corporate wikis recently (http://wikibc.blogspot.com) and this come as a confirmation of the potential of these applications.
Some of them already offer powerful solutions in terms of coordination and communication within organizations and with the entry of Google JotSpot is likely to improve its level of service – for free.
I look forward to a Google-based wiki with great interest. If you want to find more on the topic, just give a quick glance to my blog.