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Wiki software can be seen just about everywhere, from corporate intranets to human-powered search engines to the world’s biggest wiki – Wikipedia. As the popularity of wikis has grown, so too has the number of different companies providing software for them. We recently took a look at more than 30 different providers of wiki solutions, all of which offer a slightly different twist on the idea of collaborative editing. Let us know which is your favorite by making a nomination using the widget below:

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Just back from a business trip to Europe and Asia, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has decided to make some cuts, firing nearly 10% of the staff and has started to rent out space to other startups. From what we understand, the rentals started earlier as Techcrunch50 finalist CauseCast has been renting space for a while. It’s good to see Jason took my advice from last week.

The staffers who were fired today are absolutely the best of the best. In London at FOWA, Calacanis explained that he only hires the top, best possible talent. This should probably help the fired staffers with future job inquiries. Good luck to all of those who lost their jobs at Mahalo today and if I can be of any help, send me an email.

One of the questions I’ve wondered about and have been asked for my opinion a number of times over the past month is whether the startups that are firing staff are doing it because of the economy or because their business model concepts or actual ideas are the real issue. It’s a very difficult question to answer without getting a look at the information from the inside. I posed the question on Twitter and was pointed to Jonathan Gheller who recently closed his startup Fashmatch. He notes that it wasn’t the economy that pushed them to close.

I certainly can’t say which reason is at fault for Jason’s decision to fire staff today. I can only assume it’s economy related based on the fact that his entire team are the highest delivering employees possible. 

My view on Mahalo is the same as it was day 1; to be successful they will need certain pages to drive the large share of revenue. While ads on the site now mirror exactly the other links on the page (this may actually confuse visitors), will that be enough to drive users to click on the ads? And how much does a page require to break-even? I’ve also started to see an overall drop in Mahalo’s standings in Google. What used to be instant page 1 status now has been pushed further back. Mahalo has $20 million in funding so they have some runway to continue to refine their business model as they continue to grow.

Mahalo Daily, the video show, also appears to be declining in viewership even with their SEO titles and excellent thumbnail work.

Ashkan summarizes the Mahalo business model:

Mahalo’s traffic strategy right now is simply to jump on the latest, breaking news, publish a page on it, and hope that Google’s super quick spiders index their page… It’s a gimmick, not a worthless one, but not exactly priceless either.

There’s been chatter about more Mahalo positions moving overseas. Our sources tell us that Jason has opened an office in Manilla. I don’t want to speculate on what positions are located there yet - we are still waiting for some final confirmation. We were provided this photo which was shot by a Mahalo staffer of what appears to be (unconfirmed) the Mahalo team in Manilla. I count 25 people in the photo.

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NY-based collegiate information resource CollegeWikis has announced that they have raised $2 million in venture capital today. From the announcement, The funding round led by HighBAR Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm founded by Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Roy Thiele-Sardiña. Richmond Management, eCoast Angel Network, and Boston Harbor Angels also participated. Thiele-Sardiña will join CollegeWikis Board of Directors as part of this financing.

They are quick to note that CollegeWikis is not a social network. To actually read any of the content on CollegeWikis you need to register. You can register with any email address but the site notes that .edu accounts will receive additional benefits.

I see more "message board" than "wiki" when I browse the site. While you can edit the question, it isn’t as topical based as Wikipedia is. From my browsing, it’s question-based, "Where’s the best eats at Harvard?" Not that there’s anything wrong with a cross-university message board.

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Over the years, WordPress has consistently proven to be the most popular blogging system out there. Millions upon millions of blogs run on WordPress, and that’s not counting those that are hosted on WordPress.com, Automattic’s free, hosted blogging service.

But it’s not just a blogging platform; as many have discovered, it works really well as a fully-fledged content management system — it really comes down to how the theme is written, and often the plugins that are used.

Let’s take a look at some of the oddest uses people have come up with for a mere blogging platform.

WordPress, the Social Network

BuddyPress turns your vanilla WordPress MU installation into a basic social network — complete with private messaging, friends, groups, personal blogs and status updates.

WordPress, the Email Newsletter Manager

Some have gone as far as using WordPress to manage email newsletters—forget using it for building a website! The process is outlined here, but in short, you create a newsletter category, use some theme coding trickery to hide the category on the site, create an RSS feed from it and set it up with FeedBurner. Magic!

WordPress, the Word Processor

Are you one of those people who are queasy about Google having access to all your information? Myself, I’m not so worried about that—but I hate the Google Docs interface with a great deal of passion (to each his own, eh?). So much so that if I’m out and about without access to a desktop word processor I’ll simply fire up WordPress and do some writing in there.

And if you’re collaborating, the new revision histories allow you to reverse any bone-headed changes your collaborator makes. Because you’d never do that, right?

WordPress, the Workplace Chat Room

Back in January, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) released the Prologue theme. Prologue is inspired by Twitter and allows users to post status updates with tags.

Some companies have since used Prologue to help employees stay up to date with each other’s projects, which is important in virtual organizations where these things don’t always circulate naturally. More recently, people have been using it to start workstreaming sites — sites built, in essence, to convince your boss you’re actually working!

WordPress, the Contact Manager

Don’t like Address Book or the half-baked Google Contacts application? Turn WordPress into your personal contact manager with WP Contact Manager, or even a company intranet address book. You’re best off doing this on a private server or with authentication, of course, or you might find yourself running from a horde of rioters.

WP Contact Manager does have some advantages over regular desktop software. You can tag your contacts and search via tags (instead of the bulky “Groups” feature most apps use), and comments have been repurposed as user notes that you and others can leave for future reference, which seems better than the generic Notes capability in most contact managers.

WordPress, the Wiki

Heard of Blicki? I thought not. Automattic started developing this plugin years ago and suddenly stopped. It worked at some point, but when I tested it with the latest version of WordPress it didn’t do much.

But still, it’s a cool idea. Most wiki distributions don’t have the ease of installation and customization that WordPress has, which I’m sure you’ll know if you’ve ever set MediaWiki up and subsequently configured it. Hopefully, Automattic—or someone else entirely—will take this project up again in the future.

WordPress, the Task Manager

This list is about weird and wacky, and this is probably the craziest idea in the list, thanks to some deep and dark crevice within the mind of Dustin Wax: use WordPress as your task manager.

You can email or phone in posts as tasks throughout the day, which are then delivered to your inbox via FeedBurner at the end of each day. Once they’re in your inbox, you can use whatever processing system you’ve adopted to complete that tasks or process them into a task list.

As the man himself said, it’s a crazy idea when there are apps like Ta-da List and Remember the Milk out there, but it seems crazy is what WordPress is all about!

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MindTouch has announced the launch of Deki for CRM today at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. Deki for CRM combines the MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server and SnapLogic’s open source data integration framework. The concept is relatively simple: CRM systems are limited in collaboration functionality. Deki for CRM hopes to change that by adding a Wiki to nearly everything inside of the CRM system.

When you look at a customer record inside of a CRM, the Deki for CRM option allows you to add an open wiki-style box where you can collaborate with your colleagues about the customer. Deki for CRM also offers pre-made widgets for stock price, Google News searches and Twitter results. The idea with the widgets is to track the customer across the Web.

MindTouch notes that Deki for CRM will work with any CRM platform. They have pre-configured installations for SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. The basic service comes at a cost of $15,000.

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BienSimple is a new Spanish-language wiki produced by Fox and their Fox International division. BienSimple combines editor produced content with a open wiki format to allow site visitors to contribute as well. An account is required to contribute.

The content on BienSimple is wide in variety including the following categories: kitchen, autos, money, relationships, beauty and technology. In addition to the text-based wiki, there’s video from the BienSimple editors.

Hector Costa, SVP FOX Networks Americas said, "Bien Simple’s content has a natural affinity with US Hispanics’ inclination towards finding their own solutions to everyday problems." The ads on BienSimple are in Spanish which is different than the strategy AOL is using with their Fanaticos spanish-language sports site. 

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Wikia Search has launched a new Firefox toolbar which they call Wikia Evolution. Wikia Evolution is available for download and offers an easy to way to add pages to the Wikia Search project.

Here’s how the Wikia Evolution toolbar works once installed. When you search on Google, Yahoo, etc. or view any Web page, a new set of options will be displayed (see the sample below). The options allow you to add the page to the Wikia Search index instantly and tag the page for the appropriate keywords. There’s also a rating option available for each page that is submitted into the search database.

Wikia founder Jimmy Wales said on the Evolution toolbar launch, “This toolbar, like everything we are doing at Wikia Search, is open source. We hope that if you are a toolbar fan and programmer, you will let us know what features need to be added and/or take this and do something surprising and cool with it.” 

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Whether you’re setting up an Intranet for your company or a collaborative website for your family, there are a variety of wiki solutions to choose from. We’ve gathered a list of more than 30 of them for those that wish to try their hand at running one themselves or are looking for a fully hosted solution.

Do you have a wiki? If so, what solution do you use?

Stand Alone Wikis

Corendal Wiki - A free and open source wiki package directed at corporate users. It’s been a while since it has had any updates.

DokuWiki - Aimed at small companies’ documentation needs. Offers templating and plugin support.

FlexWiki - A free and open source wiki built on the .NET framework.

GetWiki - A modified version of MediaWiki that provides new features including XML importing.

IpbWiki - A system that integrates MediaWiki with Invision Power Boards to make for a whole new wiki experience.

JAMWiki - A Java based clone of MediaWiki that uses the same syntax for things such as footnotes, templates and more.

MediaWiki - The same software that powered the omnipresent Wikipedia, MediaWiki is a PHP based, customizable system that is one of the most popular solutions due to its familiarity.

Mindtouch - Free and open source wiki if you choose to run it on your own host, but if you prefer a managed solution for an enterprise install, they offer various managed solutions.

MoinMoin - Has different built-in templates and allows for the support of documents.  Popular framework being used by the likes of the GNOME and Ubuntu sites.

Ogham - A wiki-like CMS system that runs in JavaScript and is aimed at people who feel standard wikis are too technically challenging.

PHPWiki - One of the oldest wiki solutions, first appearing in December 1999.

PikiePikie - Files are stored in such a way that they are easily manipulated with a text editor on the server, and has safeguards against spammer attacks that make it easy to roll back edits.

PmWiki - Built more for non-IT people and those that have no wiki background.  Easy to change skins and appearance.

QwikiWiki - Built for speed and minimal features, QwikiWiki is built for ease and a quicker learning curve.

TikiWiki - A content management system capable of handling many different jobs, but as the name implies, it favors wikis.

Wikka Wiki - Forked from Wakka Wiki, Wikka has some new features such as support for mindmapping.

Wiki Farms

@wiki - A completely free wiki service that offers WYSIWIG editing and password protected posts.

ClearWiki.com - Gives you your own subdomain, up to 10 users, 256 MB of storage for the free accounts, does have paid solutions with more of everything.  Directed towards businesses.

EditThis.info - Allows you a free 25 MB MediaWiki install with unlimited users and pages.

eTouch SamePage - Allows teams to work in a collaborative environment on projects, free version allows for up to 5 users, 3 projects and 15 pages.

LittleWiki - Create a public or private free wiki with WYSIWIG or plain text editors.

Netcipia - Free wikis with no limits on what you can do and even allows you to monetize your site to sell your expertize on a subject.

On-Wiki - Somewhat directed towards academics and business in that it allows media, graphs, plotting and more for free.

PBWiki - Offers free wikis, but they only have 10 MB of space.  Paid solutions start at $99.50 a year. The service offers password protected wikis for private or corporate situations.

ScribbleWiki - A MediaWiki hosting service that has free accounts for personal use and paid solutions for companies that need their pages ad-free. Site has tech support and a few other premium features.

ViaWiki - Offers free 25 MB sites and paid solutions for multiple users up to an unlimited number.

Wetpaint - A free wiki farm that focuses on bringing together the wiki format with blogs and forums.  Very much directed towards fan-style sites.

Wiki-Site - Free MediaWiki accounts for individuals and groups, paid accounts get unique domains, access to stats and no advertisements, amongst other perks.

Wikia - Co-founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame, Wikia has to approve each wiki that is started, and they have to be believed to draw a large amount of traffic and editors.

Wikidot - 300 MB free Wiki for whatever you want, Google AdSense can be placed in your wiki with you keeping 80% of the revenue.

Wikispaces - Starts at free 2 GB site for friends and families up to paid white label solutions.

XWiki -Offers free solutions as well as paid options for enterprise users.  Allows for application development and embedding in pages, along with RSS feeds to keep teams up on changes.

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