(Photo courtesy of PinkCakeBox and Flickr.)

PBwiki’s 3rd birthday is coming up on May 31, and to celebrate that happy day, as well as PBwiki hitting the 500,000 wiki mark, we’re giving away free lifetime upgrades to wikis 499,999, 500,000, and 500,001.  Click here for the full announcement.

We’ll be announcing the three lucky winners on June 4.  They’ll be receiving lifetime upgrades with all the bells and whistles.  Tell your friends!

When I was putting together PBwiki’s Terms of Service a few years ago, I spent extra time with our lawyers to make sure that it was as pro-user as possible. The first few versions I got back weren’t good enough and I pressed them to make it shorter, simpler, and to put more rights in the hands of users. I eventually ended up with something I felt good about. Something that made it clear that we weren’t going try and take ownership of user’s content and that we took their privacy seriously.

That hard work has been paying off, with many enterprise customers praising our confidentiality clause for private wikis and our lack of authoritarian clauses. Today, Joshua Greenbaum at ZDNet published an article called Making Web 2.0 Safe for the Enterprise: TOS à la PBwiki that did a great job showing how important terms are for an enterprise service. So hurrah! We’ve got your back.

David E. Weekly
Founder & CEO

The PBwiki team is Colorado for our annual offsite this week, and on top of a bunch of regular work we’re doing a couple of great activities — here’s some photos from our paintball session this morning.

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PC World named PBwiki last week as one of their Top 25 web sites to watch, along with our buddies at OpenDNS.

PC World says “The site’s simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki” - woo!

Read the full article at PCworld.com!

We’ve had a few people e-mail us with questions regarding the privacy and security of PBwiki. Is PBwiki secure? Is it managed by a 3rd party? Are PBwiki servers sitting in some guys living room or running at an appropriate colocation center?

In an e-mail written to one of our users, our master chief, David Weekly answered the questions above:

Our servers are in a 24/7 guarded facility in an earthquake-proofed building in San Francisco, behind several layers of locked, sealed, access-controlled portals. The servers are owned and operated exclusively by a select handful of our staff, who have had checks performed on them and have signed a strict zero information disclosure policy document. We do not use third parties to manage our servers.

The servers are secured with a custom-hardened version of the Linux kernel, with a hand-tuned per-server lockdown of services and custom assembled IP firewall rules to only permit legitimate traffic. We have many companies and organizations keeping some of their most confidential data with us; if they kept it on their own shared drives at their office, there would be a significantly higher chance of exposure from a break-in.

Yep, PBwiki is secure.

PBwiki is looking to hire a full-time senior-level Javascript programmer.

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We’ve just started to settle in at our new offices in San Bruno. This is a big step up for our little company! It’s been as much as a year of work-from-home and squatting at local cafes for the team. We also welcome Emily, our great new admin. In addition, here we are posting to our new blog. I’ve always been a little suspicious of blogs but it’s an effective way to spread the word about what PBwiki is up to and to keep in touch with our current and potential users and partners.