Two Wiki-themed Podcasts: One for Experts and One for Beginners

I’ve posted two podcasts that may be of interest to people in the wiki-world (or to people thinking about joining that world).

The first is an interview with Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki. This podcast should be of interest to people who want to know how he invented it, why he made the feature decisions that continue to impact us today, what he thinks “wikiness” is, and just what this person is like. This is a long recording (almost an hour and a half) and sometimes gets quite technical. It starts with a long section about his work before he programmed that first wiki back in the mid-1990’s and continues into a philosophical discussion about page names and what features make something a wiki.

The second podcast is an interview with Asheesh Birla of Thomson Learning, a large book publisher. He describes how he went from someone who knew almost nothing about wikis, to deploying a corporate wiki running on an old laptop, to watching the growth of that wiki to several hundred active participants and saving perhaps $1 million dollars for his company in the first year. We went over what happened step by step, what to do and not do, Open Source, and more. The interview lasted about 25 minutes. If you are at all thinking about deploying a wiki in a corporate setting you will find this recording helpful.

You can find links to the MP3 files on my podcast page, or you can subscribe to my podcast RSS feed. If you find interviews like this useful, let me know.

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