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EtherPad also allows revision saving coupled with restoration from stored versions, something not found in SubEthaEdit

chronological archived discussion alongside the live space

backchannel discussion about what's being written that doesn't belong in the document itself

It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

if an organization doesn't get these things right, then whether they are using what many see as the "old Notes" or the "new SharePoint", disaster will result. The inherent flexibility of both platforms means that they can be used for great ends and to return great business and individual user benefits, or that same flexibility can result in really bad things happening. Many organizations have been down that route already with Notes, and many organizations are looking at SharePoint as a way of magically fixing all of those issues. It's not going to happen, because the key isn't in the technology ... it's in how it is introduced, embraced, talked about, trained on, and more. In general, if you can't get it right in Notes, you won't get it right in SharePoint

two independent analyst firms have issued warnings about SharePoint in the last two months. I hope organizations are taking note

Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock

Everyblock is a very impressive site that aggregates and geocodes local data

then lets users define their interests down to the block-level