16 months after acquiring JotSpot, Google relaunched it tonight as Google Sites:

Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it’s just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world.

People can work together on a Site to add…new free-form content.

What they’ve left out of the description is just as telling as what they included, and what they left out is any reference to the word wiki. There’s a pattern on Wikipatterns.com that suggests not using the word wiki when first introducing people to the tool. This helps avoid Wikiphobia, or misunderstanding by people who

• Don’t know what a wiki is and are generally afraid of new tools
• Automatically assume any wiki is like Wikipedia

Google may be taking a similar approach here, and sticking with “Sites” since it’s a more known term at first, and the collaborative nature becomes apparent when people use it.

Scott Karp makes an excellent argument about how a simple user interface enables greater adoption and more effective use of advanced tools:

The archetypal example of simplicity driving technology adoption is Google search. Type what you’re looking for into a box and click “search.” What could be simpler? Especially when that’s the only thing on the page. [Read more]

Google has announced its new knowledge platform, called Knol. “Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.” [Read more]

Just got an email from JotSpot/Google notifying users that all wiki sites will be upgraded to version 2.9 in the coming week. According to the email, the upgrade adds support from Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, fixes some RSS issues and adds RSS feeds for some of [Read more]

Just had a conversation with Joe Kraus, JotSpot’s co-Founder and CEO. We discussed today’s acquisition announcement, and here’s what Joe had to say. Google was attracted to JotSpot because the JotSpot wiki fits [Read more]

Just heard a bit of news directly from JotSpot that they have officially closed a deal to be acquired by Google. A busy fall for Google with the recent YouTube acquisition and now the acquisition of JotSpot. As with the Writely acquisition earlier this year, new account creation has been temporarily suspended while they move to the Google architecture, but you can sign up to be notified when registration reopens. JotSpot has posted a Frequently Asked Questions page, and co-founder Joe Kraus writes more about the deal on the Google Blog. This certainly adds one more element to Google’s collaborative office strategy.

The application formerly known as Writely has been down for maintenance for the last 20 minutes or so, and has re-emerged as Google Documents & Spreadsheets. That’s right, it’s now integrated with Google Spreadsheets, and the whole thing can be accessed at http://docs.google.com. It’s been widely speculated that this integrated product will be announced tomorrow at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, and Google is competing with Zoho’s announcement of Zoho Virtual Office, also slated for tomorrow.

Update: Google has posted about the change on the Google Blog.

• Scott Nesbitt has written a great article for Linux.com called Personal Wikis: Three small, simple alternatives. He looks at DoxWiki, Wiki on a Stick, and TiddlyWiki. Dox Wiki is very small and doesn’t require a database to store pages and revision history, so it can be a good option if you need to get a wiki up and running quickly. The latter two are notable becase they are both designed to run either on a computer or a
• Forbes.com reports that British Airways has become the first airline to use Google Earth, “allowing visitors to not only book their flights, but find nearby hotels and car rentals on a 3D map. Once users have zoomed in on their chosen locale, the Google service provides a link through which they can make a booking back on the British Airways site.”

Links of Interest: British Airways

Google has announced an integrated suite of Web-based applications called Google Apps for Your Domain and a specialized suite for education called Google Apps for Education. Right now, Google Apps for Education includes Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk (Instant Messaging). In an email announcing the beta-release of the service, Google writes: “Everything is hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware to buy and maintain or software to manage, deploy and patch. The applications are fast, reliable, work from anywhere, anytime and have the elegant simplicity everyone has come to expect from Google. And they’re free. (via John Battelle’s Searchblog)
Blogger, Writely, and Google Spreadsheets integration can’t be far behind…but here’s Google’s response when asked if they would complete against Microsoft Office: “The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn’t necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel,” says Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products at Google. “They’re the collaboration component of that.”

(via NITLE Liberal Education Today blog)