PBwiki
Besides giving us the Web's most famous encyclopedia, wikis offer a handy tool for many other types of informal group collaboration. A lot of open-source projects use wikis to share technical information with their users as well as among developers. While there are plenty of free wiki software packages you can download and install, in-house installation also means in-house update, patching and support.
Initially recommended to our editorial team by one of our Web developers, PBwiki has turned out to be a useful tool to share information and advice about stories in the works and future story ideas. The site claims you can "use PBwiki to make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich," and that's pretty much accurate. And once the wiki is set up, adding pages or text to it is quicker and easier than logging into a more structured format.
PBwiki offers ad-supported free wikis as well as paid, ad-free accounts. Wikis can be public or private/shared. You can add widgets (such as basic spreadsheets, chat, Google maps or videos), with additional functionality for paid accounts. All accounts can see revision updates and changes on the site and track changes via e-mail notification. Business accounts also offer different levels of access per user, the ability to make certain pages read-only and page-level RSS feeds.
Of course, there are drawbacks to free-form data as opposed to more structured formats; you can't really query or sort a text blob. There is a basic search box in a PBwiki, but searching for "Machlis" across many wiki pages can't give you the same targeted results as, say, querying a database for "all stories by author Machlis in the last three months."
Still, if you don't expect a wiki to do the job of a spreadsheet or a database, PBwiki can be a useful addition to your information management arsenal.
Google Docs
Yes, yes, I know: "Don't be evil" Google threatens to become the ubiquitous do-exactly-that Web empire, amassing too much information about individuals and too much power over what was supposed to be an egalitarian medium. Do we really want Google taking over our most-used applications, too? Perhaps not, but I can't help but like Google Docs.
Our recent review of four online office suites found that Google's offering lacked some important features such as spreadsheet charts. Unlike some, though, I'm not seeking to replace my desktop word processor or Microsoft Excel (by far my favorite spreadsheet). Instead, I see a good online suite as adding features such as file-sharing or online backup to my existing text editors and spreadsheet app.
Google Docs offers an easy way to work on documents at home, at the office and elsewhere, without having to e-mail files around. I keep some simple documents in Google Docs and download backups to my own PC. When I want the power-user functions of Word or Excel, I can work in those packages, upload the file to Google Docs and then download again to my next system before starting to work again. It's a version control system for documents and spreadsheets.
I often use Google Docs to keep my own "cheat sheets" for various applications and technologies, so I can remember instructions for coding I'll likely need in the future. It's useful to be able to add something I've suddenly figured out about, say, Ruby on Rails, whether I'm coding at home or at the office, without having to remember to add the information to a document residing on another machine.
In fact, I'm writing this story now in a Google Doc document. I don't need slick formatting, headers and scripts; basic writing, HTML coding and spell-check works just fine. However, when it comes time to turn it in, I'll be downloading it to my own system, saving it as a Word doc and e-mailing the file to my editor, since she's partial to Word's "track changes" function, which I must admit is more elegant than Google Doc's "compare revisions."
Still, comparing revisions is a nice function to have, along with some formatting, quick-link additions and sharing. And I've got a backup copy somewhere I can easily access if I want to make changes at home and then e-mail a new file.