The last time I checked in on Wikimapia was about three months ago, shortly after they launched. There certainly weren’t many locations mapped out yet. Amazingly enough, they have recently added their 1,000,000th location! I checked back and took a look at San Francisco, and was stunned by the level of tagging that was going on.

At each zoom level, Wikimapia allows you to browse places that have been wikied by other users. As you zoom in, the smaller plots begin to emerge. For example, at the high level in San Francisco, the major neighborhoods have been defined. Zooming in, you’ll find little pockets of information like where somebody’s cat died.

To be honest, I haven’t looked back at Wikimapia, but I will now. It’s especially been helpful in deciphering exactly where the neighborhoods in SF end and begin (which most people can sit and debate for hours on end).

TiddlyWiki comes in at the “not very many people know about it” department. Touted as a “reusable non-linear personal notebook”, TiddlyWiki is a quick and dirty, light-weight, and portable wiki application.

It’s always nice to be suprised by seemingly simple applications. TiddlyWiki has the basic features of modern Wikis: inline editing, markup formatting, ability to add HTML in entries, and easy save and load. The wiki aspect revolves around a tiddler, which is nothing more than a typical entry in any other wiki system. However, TiddlyWiki has so much AJAX embedded goodness that I don’t think you need to even do a single pageload except for the initial one.

When you click on a tiddler, it instantly pops up in the next available space in the main column. This is where the non-linear notebook part comes in–you can open up any number of tiddlers, which will all collate into one column. After leisurely perusing these, you can close any number of them easily.

Editing can be done inline with a single click of a button. Naturally, the edit box instantly pops up. Links from one tiddler to another are automatically parsed, based on the title of the tiddlers.

If you need a heavy-weight wiki application, TiddlyWiki might not be for you. But, if you just want a simple and easy to edit notebook to jot down ideas, TiddlyWiki beats out the competitors with its sheer speed.

So you may be wondering how TiddlyWiki installs. For many wiki systems, installation is a headache. When you click on the DownloadSoftware tiddly on the main page, you’ll be greeted with the fact that you’ve already downloaded the software. All of TiddlyWiki’s code is contained in the HTML file! You simply need to download an empty TiddlyWiki right to your computer, and you can instantly start editing. Now that’s what I call a painless install.

If you’re still not comfortable doing that, you could go for their hosted service at tiddlyspot.

Have you ever wanted to create a Wikipedia entry for yourself or a friend? We’ve probably all thought about it at some point, and maybe even acted on our impulses only to find that the Wikipedia community deletes the entries due to insignificance. Certainly, Wikipedia is not in the business of marshaling biographies for just anyone. Enter WikiBios, which aims to break down the barriers and allow everyone to have a biography for display.

WikiBios is all about telling life stories, whether you’re famous or not. In their mission statement, they state that they are

… a revolutionary project that revolves around the idea that everyone in the world, no matter who they are, has a unique and interesting story that deserves to be told. We aim to create a database of biographies for everyone in the world, as told by those who know them best.

This is indeed a lofty goal. The catch is that you can’t write your own biography–only others can write about you. The reason for this, they say, is that your friends can give better insight to your own character. This restriction means that they will need a large user base before biographies are fully fleshed out, which they currently aren’t. The pivotal action they need from their users will be for them to invite their friends, so that they can start filling in biographies.

Overall, WikiBios is an interesting idea that can be the first to usher in an element of social networking into the world of wikis. However, there just isn’t enough users right now to squash the trolls, gaming, and other ugly faces of the wiki system. Some of the “featured” biographies that are linked from the front page are empty. It might be a good idea to handpick the featured bios by hand, at least for the moment.

Ever since reading about wetpaint on their front page during beta, I’ve been waiting anxiously to see what their product looks like. Their philosophy stands on the foundation of collaborative thinking with an easy to use wiki interface. In addition, the site itself is very nicely designed, with smooth curves and wise use of space which is easy on the eye.

Right now, wetpaint can host your wiki for free. The target audience is a wide range of users, including club members, schools, bloggers, and hobbyists. They’ve really tried to make the service as friendly and as easy to use as possible–it’s very inviting even for wiki novices.

The interface for editing uses AJAX so that you can edit in place without refreshing (something I wish Wikipedia would implement). As soon as you hit the EasyEdit button, the page dims and focuses on the editing box, where you can edit in a WYSIWYG environment. A toolbar appears and allows you to do basic formatting and insert links. Another feature is the ability to place tags on each page, which greatly helps searches. Once you’re done editing, just hit the save button, and in an instant you’ll see the changes. It really is slick.

You also have total control concerning the editing rights of visitors, from allowing anonymous users to edit, or only allowing your close contacts to edit. It’s flexible enough to meet any need.

Right now, I see about 100 wikis that are hosted by wetpaint, and they’re really trying to grow more. Since they are currently a free service, wetpaint gets revenue by placing contextual ads on each wiki page. The front page displays some the featured wikis that their users have grown.

What I would like to see is a premium wiki service which gives users more enhanced hosted features like:

• Ability to edit CSS: Currently, users can only choose from a library of templates.
• Guaranteed unlimited space: wetpaint currently provides unlimited space, but they may restrict this in the future.
• Media hosting (audio, video, etc).

As evident by the FAQ, wetpaint is still trying to figure out what users really want, and many of these features may become live if there is a high demand for them.

Overall, wetpaint looks like a real winner. The wikis that are made all look nice, and most importantly, are very easily edited. They’ve really flattened the learning curve for wikis, and their audience is potentially very large. Make sure to check out wetpaint if you’re looking for a good hosted wiki service.

On the tails of Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Rrove comes WikiMapia, which allows visitors to annotate, tag, and describe places directly on the Google map interface. It’s definitely a neat idea–instead of surfing Wikitravel to find a particular place via reading text, you can surf around an area of the map on WikiMapia and view descriptions of interesting locations.

Each location has a “card” that holds information about it. Users can choose to view the card, and edit it if they like. Like any good Wiki, each card also has the history of edits.

Currently, there doesn’t seem to be many places with in depth descriptions. In fact, I see a lot of the cards simply referencing the corresponding Wikipedia article. It would be worthwhile for WikiMapia to somehow get access to Wikipedia’s database (and location data), if possible, and simply grab the article and place it in the card description, if possible. That way, some of the information will already be filled in.

The useful case is when people start filling in locations that are interesting, but relatively unknown, like the hidden niches in cities, parks, and other areas. This is exactly what the blog Google Sightseeing is doing, except that WikiMapia could leverage the network effects of the Wiki system to find a whole slew of cool locations. After WikiMapia matures, they should aggregate the most interesting locations and report them on a blog or a front page, a bit like what del.icio.us has recently done with their front page redesign.

The UI for WikiMapia was a bit clunky for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m on a slower machine, but it took quite a while to get some of their UI elements working (even though Google Maps usually zips along on my machine). Their next step should be making the entry box and UI more user friendly, which will encourage people to submit more locations.

Good luck to the WikiMapia team, and keep working at their system. WikiMapia could turn out to be a great resource, especially if they open up their API.

[Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer]