PBwiki’s mascot, Peebers the Unstoppable Robot of Collaboration (SM), is clanking his way through the august halls of the United Nations today, pressing the flesh and helping to create global corporate accord.

The UN’s Global Compact is devoted to creating an opt-in organization for corporations who wish to be good citizens. The Global Compact is collaboratively creating a governing policy document that outlines the responsibilities of businesses in our increasingly inter-connected world. They have also recently announced the “Communications on Progress.” This is an initiative to collaboratively review the would-be participants for transparency and accountability in terms of the developing standards of the organization.

To our giddy delight (Peebers positively squealed and skipped when he found out, terrifying several members of the the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean who were standing nearby), the Global Compact Office chose PBwiki to provide the platform for the collaborations. We’re helping them discover the best way to use wikis in the service of their goals. This is important, as 4,000 companies and 700 organizations from over 100 countries are involved.

Jeff Senne, Communications on Progress Manager for the GC said this:

“PBwiki has been very helpful to us in designing and maintaining an interactive space for content distribution and data capture.”

Nice, right?

I think this is a further indicator that wikis are being embraced as powerful tools by the world at large, in this case, by the global policy-making community. My personal opinion (just mine, please note; doesn’t constitute any kind of endorsement) is that the UN’s focus on dialogue and collaboration dovetails nicely with wikis in general and PBwiki in particular.

For more information, read our press release on PBwiki’s partnership with the United Nations.

Also, see the post by Jürgen, one of the UNers in charge of the project. Here’s the UN’s press release on one of the elements of the Global Compact that uses PBwiki. And, here’s a nice write up on the project by the Bivings Report

–Curt

We and the rest of the world were unable to access our San Jose data center for a few minutes this evening (around 5pm PST) — apparently somebody bumped the wrong fiber optic cable. Your wiki’s data was completely safe and most users were able to access their wikis at all times.

We’ve discovered a subtle case which could cause those wikis with a tabbed sidebar to be unavailable or to load very slowly during this outage. It’s been fixed in our version control system already, and won’t happen again. We’re taking other measures now to ensure we’re able to better tolerate this kind of rare network problem.

Thanks for your patience, and thanks for using PBwiki!

Don’t worry, we recorded both press conferences (2PM and 6PM PST).

You can check out the recordings and all prior press coverage here: http://press.pbwiki.com/Prior-Press-Coverage

Ok, I can’t control myself any more.

Today, we’re officially announcing voice chat in PBwiki. This means that you can now talk to anyone viewing your wiki page. It takes about 15 seconds to set up on your PBwiki — and it’s free.

The details: We teamed with YackPack to embed their WalkieTalkie Widget that lets you chat on any PBwiki page. To get it, just edit any PBwiki page, click Insert Plugin >> Chat >> YackPack voice chat.

Click To Play

(To use this video on your site, just visit http://blip.tv/file/196824.)

Imagine using voice chat to let students talk about research they’re doing. Or to talk about whether a certain paragraph should be in your business proposal. Or to pick the perfect place for dinner from a list on your PBwiki. It’s available now on your wiki, free.

A PBwiki Press Conference — April 12th
We’re holding a press conference (using the voice chat, of course) tomorrow, April 12th, at http://press.pbwiki.com.

• 2pm PT: For technology journalists and other tech folks

• 6pm PT: For educators, educational journalists, and anyone who likes to read books and learn!

From the entire team at PBwiki and YackPack, enjoy voice chat on your wiki!

PS–To post about this on your own blog, visit our Media Resources page for videos, screenshots, and more

Are you trying to view our PBwiki videos but your work or school is blocking YouTube?

Don’t worry, we’ve uploaded all of the PBwiki videos to TeacherTube. TeacherTube is a great video site that doesn’t appear to be blocked by most employers and educational institutions. It’s completely safe for work and has other helpful videos and tutorials for both educators and students.

Take a look at the PBwiki videos on TeacherTube.

Here’s a PBwiki video uploaded on TeacherTube that has educators covering their favorite features on PBwiki.

No, it’s not a joke.

We’re all in the office salivating at http://www.seriouseats.com/ (seriously, check out the photos and videos). Some stats from their page:

• It takes roughly 540 peanuts to make a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter.
• Peanut butter is consumed in about 89 percent of US households.
• The world’s largest peanut butter factory – Jif, in Lexington, Ky. – churns out 250,000 jars of the tasty treat every day.

PBwiki: Where we take peanut butter seriously.

We’ve been getting some flattering comments from educators around the country.

Anne Bubnic, who’s with the California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP Region IV), writes about our new PBwiki videos:

At CTAP, we love wikis and, in particular, we love PB Wiki. We have so many wikis that we actually had to create a wiki to keep track of all of our wikis!

[…]

…more recently, the company created these videos for educators to use in trainings. Some of my CTAP colleagues are among those speaking on the video about their experiences using PB wiki.

You can find this series of 6 videos on You Tube, starting with PB WIKI - What’s a Wiki.

Anne also gives 12 examples of how she’s used PBwiki to help with her work at CTAP. See her entire post here.

(As a sidenote, check out the video below…

…and see all of the videos at our Educational Advisory Board — video page.)

OK, not a billion times, but more like 6 times faster than we were a month ago.

When we first started out, PBwiki was super-fast because there wasn’t much going on. As we’ve grown two things have happened - first, we’ve added lots of useful features and second, we now have lots more traffic all the time. The new editor in particular has led to lots more users being comfortable with editing, and it’s a lot of code to serve up, so we were serving lots more data more frequently to lots more people. For a while we were working our original servers way too hard and the system wasn’t always keeping up with the strain.

Two things have changed: First, we purchased a big pile of fast new servers. Second, we rewrote a lot of the core of PBwiki’s code to scale more effectively. We wrote a lot of new code and also take advantage of a bunch of open source projects, including Pound, Lighttpd, Apache, eAccelerator, MySQL, Memcached, and MogileFS.

Shiny, happy, mostly idle servers

We’ve put in a lot of effort to optimizing the load times of wiki pages and in particular speeding up the new editor, since it’s a lot of javascript to load. The ’six times faster’ claim is for the time between when a user requests a wiki page and we’ve finished building it and start sending it to their browser — the ‘time to first byte’. What else does this mean? Well, last month we were averaging 50-100% CPU load on our servers. That means that at midnight in the US, our quietest time of day, we were still using 50% of all available CPU time to serve wiki pages, store edits, and build RSS feeds. During peak time around noon we were starting to back up a bit due to the load — 100% CPU load usually means ‘would go to 150% if we could’. We’re now ranging between 10% and 20% on all of the application servers, which means there’s always CPU time available for the next incoming request. The supporting servers, such as proxy, database, storage and email are even less loaded. This is a very good thing.

At the same time, we’ve got lots more storage headroom. We were running a little low for a while there and now we’ve got at least 6 months of space for new wiki data and attachments, assuming our current growth rates. Combined with our much-improved server monitoring system (thanks to mon, monit, cacti, and some hand-made stuff) we’ve got a great picture of how the service is running and for the first time in a while our servers are as happy as our users.

St. Francois Xavier Community School is using PBwiki as the school’s website for students, parents, and faculty. It’s been a smooth integration for them with a lot of things learned through the way. John Evans, the administrator of sfxschool.pbwiki.com spent sometime with us to go over his experience with PBwiki.

PBwiki: What’s sfxschool.pbwiki.com about?
John Evans: sfxschool.pbwiki.com is our school web page. I’ve taken the information that I had for several years on a free hosting site and moved it over to PBwiki because I liked the ease of editing and contributing it allowed myself as the admin, as well as the freedom it gave the teachers and students who would be able to make contributions to the wiki.

PBwiki: How do you use your PBwiki?
John Evans: Similar to the response above, we are using the wiki as our website primarily for its ease of use, and the levels of access available to a multitude of users. Currently only the professional staff in our school has authorization to post on the wiki. With further training, my expectation is that staff will begin to use the wiki with their students at least in grades 4 - 6.

I have also created two other wikis for training in Literacy with Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
(http://joevans.pbwiki.com) and for Teacher Wellness
(http://wellteacher.pbwiki.com)

PBwiki: Why’d you choose PBwiki?
John Evans: PBWiki was the wiki of choice for several colleagues of mine teaching ICT to staff and students. I looked at others and felt PBWiki was the easiest to use. I originally thought wikis would be hard to use but taught myself the basics in about an hour by looking at the code of other wikis, saw the potential and took off from there.
PBwiki: How many people are active on your wiki?

John Evans: See Above for our school wiki users. I have several other free wikis that I have had students in grade 4 work on. The first group last year at http://rockhound.pbwiki.com did some great stuff for their first time working with a wiki. They were really pumped with the content they produced and proudly showed it off to their parents.

PBwiki: What has been the biggest surprise for you in using PBwiki?
John Evans: While not really a surprise, the best part was when teachers say to me “You mean I don’t have to wait for a week or more to have the IT guy approve my website before they add it to the school site? I can do it myself!”

In our latest series of training with K-8 teachers on wikis we had planned a half day, but teacher were so into it we allowed them to have the whole day. When I asked one of the originally reluctant teachers what they liked most about the day, she excitedly said “Wikis! I LOVE Wikis!!”

PBwiki: Would you tell others about PBwiki?
John Evans: I use PBWiki in all the workshop training we do in our school division. It’s easy, straight forward and now with the new editor should be even easier to use. I rave about PBWiki all the time to other teachers.

PBwiki: Have you used our new Point-and-Click editor? What are you thoughts on it?
John Evans: …I like the new plug-ins you’ve included. I will be looking at it this week as I prepare for our divisional SY Technology training session on Friday.

PBwiki: With so many people contributing to your wiki is it difficult to manage?
John Evans: When I had the free version of the wiki, I had one student who maliciously changed the pages of other students in his class. He was in grade 4 and followed my instructions to login so he was easily tracked and discovered. This is why I went to the upgraded version of PBWiki purchasing a Silver package for the school. The various login levels make it safer for everyone, including teachers who are more leery of the technology.

PBwiki: How long did it take to implement PBwiki at St. François Xavier?
John Evans: It took me about 2 weeks time - a bit here and there to transfer all my materials over to the wiki. Now things are so easy to maintain. I subscribe to the various pages in my RSS aggregator and I can see whose made changes and if necessary make corrections or edits. I really like the lockable pages that came with the Gold upgrade which I received in the presenter’s package. We’re still technically in the implementation stage as our staff is still learning how to do things with the wiki. Our next session is going to be on uploading images and files. Though it is easy, if staff don’t do it on a regular basis they soon forget.

I spoke to a room of educators last week in Detroit at the MACUL conference.

At first, I was nervous because I didn’t know how many people would attend the talk! But in the end, it turned out to be a lot of fun — and by the end, we had a standing-room-only event! I spoke for about 45 minutes, then answered questions and gave away a few PBwiki t-shirts. We need to get more of those shirts out through our Presenter Packs! (If you’re an educator giving a talk about wikis anywhere in the country, check out the details.)

Kevin Clark, who attended the talk, wrote up a great description of the talk called Behind the Scenes with PBwiki.

So…I think it’s really cool that Ramit Sethi, the VP of Marketing for PBwiki, has come all the way here to give us the latest on what PBwiki is all about. I think it demonstrates some commitment from them that they want to reach out to educators.

[…]

They took the suggestions of educators and listened. Teachers hate ads, so they removed them on educational blogs. They want students to be engaged, so they continue to add features. They also want it to be easy, so they made a new WYSIWYG editor. They’re trying to listen to their hundreds of users and incorporating their suggestions.

[…]

For those of you who use PBwiki (or just wikis in general!) and tell others in workshops, PBwiki offers Presenter Packs which include

• a PDF handout with general PBwiki information
• a T-shirt of your choice
• a PowerPoint presentation to use in your workshop/session
• and three PBwiki upgrades (worth $750)

[…]

Again, I’m really impressed by the approachability of Ramit, and through him, PBwiki. These guys (actually five guys and a gal) are really trying to get it right and to create a useful tool for educators as well as the web community in general. Keep in mind…Ramit wasn’t down in the vendor area and wasn’t pushing his product (you get the Presenter Pack no matter what type of wiki you’re focusing on), but instead is extending a hand to teachers to help create meaningful online content and collaborative activities.

In his full post, Kevin also writes about what’s coming next for PBwiki, as well as some common concerns about using wikis that we’ve heard from educators. Check out the full post: Behind the Scenes with PBwiki.