Humboldt County is getting downright Web 2.0 on me. First I discovered a few local blogs. Now I’ve come across a bunch of wikis focused on some aspect of life on the north coast. In case you don’t want to chase that link to the long definition of wikis in Wikipedia (a wiki!), they are sites that allow collaboration and easy editing of web pages. Some wikis are controlled in that you have to register and be approved in order to edit content. Others are open to anyone, though most are monitored by the wiki’s creator and vandalism can easily be dealt with by reverting to older versions of pages.
Anyway, these local wikis have cropped up on wikispaces.com. You can get a good idea of what’s going on there through a simple search for Humboldt. Digging through the resultsl yields a wiki for dog lovers, a wiki for keeping an eye on landlords, and a wiki for organizing a workshop for painting in the great outdoors of Humboldt.
A search on Arcata yields one for the Arcata area soccer community. And one little wiki about parking Nazis?
Wikis have been around for quite a while. So it’s kind of surprising that these things have just started to spring up now. Perhaps it’s a sign that our area is finally more fully adopting to life on the Internet. Of course, the tools have gotten easier and that makes it great for just about anyone who can type, point and click and wants to have a voice in cyberspace.