#3 Wikispaces.com Wikis

Wikispaces wikis are probably tied with PB wikis for popularity. Like PB wikis, wikispaces.com offers free, web-based, easy-to-use wikis. However, when you compare the two side-by-side, Wikispaces kind of seems like the cooler older brother of PB wikis. To begin with, wikispaces looks much sleeker than PB wikis. The design is much cleaner and modern looking. If you want an attractive looking wiki, wikispaces is probably the better way to go. Wikispaces also has a lot more customizable options for changing the "Look and Feel," (as they call it,) of your wiki. You have the option of several different themes and a practically unlimited number of colors. In PB wikis, you only have a couple choices for color changes.

There are also several other neat features that Wikispaces has that PB wiki does not. For example, Wikispaces keeps all sorts of usage statistics for your wiki, so you can see how many views your wiki is getting, (from either members or "unique visitors,") or how much your wiki is being edited. Wikispaces also has an internal messaging system so members can send messages to other wiki members, while keeping e-mail addresses private. Wikispaces also has many more embedable widgets than PB wikis. Not only can you embed a YouTube video, you can also embed things like a Flickr slide show, a SurveyGizmo poll, a Google doc or Google map, a tag cloud of a page's tags, Delicious, RSS feeds, or even Skype or Meebo! Wikispaces really seems to be keeping up with the cutting edge trends, especially in terms of 2.0 tools.

Another thing Wikispaces does better than PB wikis is the wiki editing history. When you click on a page's History tab, you get a detailed log of who changed what on that page when. There is even a space for comments, so editors can communicate about why they changed a particular item on a page. When you click on a history entry, what was changed is clearly highlighted. There is also the option to revert to old pages in the History, which could be useful if you made a mistake when editing.

My favorite Wikispaces feature though is the Discussion tab. Each page has a discussion tab where any one can start new discussion threads or respond to existing ones. Even if only a few members are allowed to make changes on your wiki, you can set the settings so that any visitors can contribute to the discussions. I thought this might be useful, say, if you were a public library with a wiki and you wanted to have a book discussion section. You can even get an RSS feed of discussion changes, (or an RSS feed of any page edits, by the way!)

I got to know Wikispaces by, the best way, creating and playing around with my own wiki. You can view my very basic wiki here to get an idea of what a Wikispaces wiki looks like: http://acmepubliclibrary.wikispaces.com/. I decided to pretend I was a teen public librarian creating a wiki that was designed for teens to use. I used the Discussion feature by creating a Twilight page that encourages teens to start their own book discussions. This brings to mind a good point about wikis. Though wikis are most famous for their collaborating capabilities, they also work really well as simple web pages. Anyone can easily create an entire web site with multiple pages that can disseminate information, even if they don't know any code for building web pages! In my Teen wiki example, the wiki would be viewable only for teens, (but they could participate in book discussions,) and several librarians could have editing capabilities.

So, Wikispaces wikis sound really great, right? Even better than PB wikis? There is, however, a catch. Wikispaces wikis may look much nicer than PB wikis, but the catch iiiiiis.... Ads. Unlike PB wikis, which are ad free, Wikispaces has a string of ads that show up along the side of each page, tailored to whatever content you put in the page. (My Twilight page has Twilight ads...) If you want, you can pay $5 a month to get rid of the ads, which also buys you some additional features, ( like the ability to create custom themes for your wiki using html and CSS).

Overall, I think the style of PB Wikis lends itself better to more serious pursuits, like the classroom or employee work pages. Wikispaces is much more trendy, so it works perfect for something fun like a teen page.