Socialtext’s hosted service, built on the open source Kwiki package and a number of extensions, combines the simplicity of wikis with blogging and collaboration functions that help avoid e-mail overload.

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Foremost, Socialtext gives you the advantages of a wiki, providing simple, collaborative page editing where others add comments and documents to posts. But I especially liked the unusual ability to add live chat to workspaces, the contents of which are also captured, as well as the integrated blogging features. Typical blogs work well as general publishing platforms but aren’t good for collaboration. Socialtext’s alternative approach tightly integrates blogging with the main wiki, such that each post is actually a wiki page.

Publishing is simple; you build on pages via the Web or post using e-mail messages. Current thoughts are displayed in chronological order, so readers always see what’s new. Yet, as opposed to typical blogs, Socialtext keeps an archive of every entry; relevant search results “bubble up” to the top of the blog. Additionally, users subscribe to only the updates they want (via e-mail or RSS).

Socialtext’s approach provides an unexpected by-product: a wikipedia for your organization. With just a little work I reorganized the taxonomy of pages, creating a knowledge base of linked and categorized content.

Although JotSpot (Profile, Products, Articles) (Overview, Articles, Company) offers more developer tools and functions than Socialtext, its closed architecture requires special skills for expanding your wiki. That’s not the case with Socialtext, making it a bit stronger as an overall collaborative solution.

Socialtext
socialtext.com
Cost: 50 users, $20 per user, per month; volume discounts available