[Edit: We removed this after trying it out for a few weeks!]

Now you can follow the daily activities of the PBwiki crew - realtime! PBwiki makes fairly heavy use of IM already, so we built an IM bot that forwards certain messages to our newest wiki page. This means the page will receive tons of fresh insight into our inner minds. (Note: This may frighten small children!) But we think it is important to find new and useful ways to keep the PBwiki community updated on what we are up to. Enjoy!

I’ve been running some internal stats on the various activity levels across the PBwiki landscape. This set of numbers breaks categories down by volume of activity rather than unique users.

How much activity on private versus public wikis?

Around 2/3 of our activity is on private wikis. Takeaway: Our users have found lots of uses for PBwiki that we don’t know about, and we’d love to hear your stories.

How much activity on free versus premium wikis?

More than 16% of user activity is on premium wikis. Takeaway: Lots of people are taking advantage of our great premium features and enhanced security. Yay!

How much activity among major browser families?

Around 56% IE, 39% Firefox, 5% Safari, <1% everybody else.

How much activity over SSL versus unencrypted?

5.5% of our activity is over end-to-end SSL, which is available for our Platinum and custom SMB and business packages. Lots of companies trust PBwiki with their most sensitive documents.

And Fridays are very serious.

Apparently some kid by our local Vietnamese place was making balloon … pbj sandwiches. They’re not usually that chewy.

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 been hearing requests for certain features, so we’ve put together some surveys to learn more about how they might be used. Please take the surveys below and tell us! (Max time: 10 minutes.)

• Would you be interested in an “email-to-a-wiki” feature?
• What’s your #1 goal using PBwiki?
• How would you use page-level access on your PBwiki?
• Tell us about your first experiences using PBwiki

Some people who run wikis that are publicly accessible have asked us for the ability to set a robots.txt that tells polite search engines like Google, MSN, Alexa, and Yahoo to please not index the content of the public PBwiki.  We listened and added this functionality. If you’d like to enable this on your PBwiki, just go to the “Public / Private” settings tab and click Disable indexing. This sets your robots.txt, updates your page headers, and even puts a setting in your RSS & Atom feeds to discourage feed readers & scrapers from republishing your public feed.

For a while, we had temporarily halted wikis from being deleted to do some behind-the-curtain plumbing. Wiki delete works again. If you really want to delete your PBwiki (why would you want to?), just log in, click “Settings” and then click “Delete.”

Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever, so be careful!

Note: Once you delete a wiki, that wiki name will be retired / unusable forever.

As part of our spam abatement we’ve been doing some research about how to identify various kinds of Spam. The following data is from our test of Spam musubi. Initial results are promising.

Here’s an email I wrote to our educational advisory panel (join here) last night:

Well, it’s 10:25pm and I should be getting ready to sleep, but I can’t without getting this email out!! Let me quickly tell you about something we did to make PBwiki easier for your coworkers and students.

We just rolled out a new FrontPage for new wikis that makes it easier to get started. Now when you create a new wiki, you’ll see clearer text, help documents, and quick videos that give you a tour of how to use PBwiki. All this stuff is now on the FrontPage.

Check it out by making a new wiki at http://www.pbwiki.com.

Here’s what the new FrontPage looks like (click here to try it out):

The new FrontPage is one of the ways we’re making it easier to get started using PBwiki. Please tell your friends!

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.