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Both Google and JotSpot are committed to continuing to support customers, and we know our users have invested a lot in JotSpot. Existing customers of the wiki, family site and class reunion site will continue to have uninterrupted access to their accounts and their data will not be affected. In the future, we'll work hard to move as seamlessly as possible to Google's systems so that customers won't be inconvenienced.

Will paying customers still be charged?

We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won't charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

What about partners and developers?

Google is committed to fostering a thriving third party ecosystem of developers and partners. Current JotSpot developers should refer to the JotSpot Developer Connection for more specifics. Solution partners should contact their account manager for more information.

How are JotSpot on-premise customers affected?

Existing JotBox appliance customers will continue to be supported. The downloadable JotSpot Wiki Server beta offering is being discontinued and we will not be providing support for existing users of the product.

We knew for the Jot team back in July that it was being added as a Google Domain App.

So we now know it has a name.

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing it deployed. I currently use gmail for my personal domains, and it works well - easy to set up, generous limits.

--Q

Curiously, neither the submission nor the CNN article gave a link to the actual project page for the Peer to Patent Project. That page has more information and a blog giving updates on progress. There's also a Community Patent Proposal Wiki, but it seems to be down.

Interestingly, the lead sponsors for the project are HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat. Strange bedfellows, eh?

<button dojoType="Button" widgetId="helloButton">Hello World!</button>

"It's way too early to say whether the company would pursue licenses and litigation from its competitors," Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com. "We'll do what we can to protect our intellectual property."

Though the Friendster patent could be challenged in either the patent system or the courts, opponents would face an uphill battle.

Full disclosure: I work for JotSpot. That said, I think JotSpot Family Site is exactly what you're looking for. It's built on JotSpot's wiki platform, so it's a wiki under the hood, but it has an extremely friendly interface built on top. And it's designed specifically for family collaboration: it gives you a calendar, blog, family tree, map, etc, and it's completely free. Sign up and give it a try.

- Abe Fettig (http://fettig.net/), JotSpot (http://jot.com)

The patent system is broken. The Constitution intended for patents to foster innovation and the promotion of progress in the useful arts. Instead, the Patent Office creates uncertainty and monopoly. Underpaid and overwhelmed examiners struggle under the burden of 350,000 applications per year and a mounting backlog of 600,000. Increasingly patents are approved for unmerited inventions. What if we could make it easier to ensure that only the most worthwhile inventions got twenty years of monopoly rights? What if we could offer a way to protect the inventor's investment while still safeguarding the marketplace of ideas from bad inventions? What if we could make informed decisions about scientifically complex problems before the fact, rather than trying to reform the system ex post? What if we could harness collective intelligence to replace bureaucracy?

This Article argues that we should reform the patent system by re-designing the institution of patent examination. Our existing legal mechanisms for awarding the patent monopoly are constructed around the outdated assumption that only expert bureaucrats can produce dispassionate decisions in the public interest. Building upon what we have learned from online and off-line systems of collaboration, we can now use the tools available to combine the wisdom of expert scientific communities of practice with the legal determinations of a trained Patent Office staff.

This Article proposes the creation of a peer review online system to help the Patent Examiner find the right prior art and access those experts who can advise on how to apply it. This new mechanism for collaborative expertise provides an avenue for reform that requires minimal statutory change while improving the quality of patents. We have arrived at a unique moment in history when four factors converge to make this reform possible: first, the state of patenting has become so problematic as to meet with almost universal opprobrium; second, patent applications are published after eighteen months independent of grant, making it possible to consider open peer review; third, we now have the technology to make peer review on this scale possible; and fourth, we have experience both with offline peer review and with online systems for collaborative decision making that provide the empirical understanding of how to re-construct our intellectual property institutions. This Article not only argues for such an institutional re-design, it provides a blueprint for the pilot that the United States Patent Office has agreed to implement. This proposal has implications beyond the patent process. It may enable us to contribute to the design of other social systems that depend upon the collaboration of experts across a distance, providing ways to improve policymaking, deepen democracy and rethink our fundamental assumptions about governance.

As you can see, it's a pretty far-reaching and very hopeful aim at fixing something that the vast majority of our community, Slashdot, view as a broken system.

So there you have it. Something is broken, here's the proposed solution now let's see if it works. The only possible show stopper I see here is that I'm not so sure it would benefit anyone to join this proposed community of "patent clerks." They are hoping for an army of people to read over patents and notice similarities or infringements for proposed patents. The Wiki's answer to my concer

I've just finished a university assignment with a classmate. We worked on http://www.jot.com/ where you can get a wiki. It was far easier than having emails flying between us, and easier than always trying to figure out which file was the latest. Instead, the latest work was on a private webpage, and I could see what she'd done since I last looked at it.

This sounds pretty similar to JotSpot Tracker.

In addition to twiki, check out the JotSpot wiki. People have used it for managing projects, corporate intranets, document collaboration, and a number of other apps.

I think what you're looking for is JotSpot's new product Tracker which provides just the online, wiki spreadsheet compatibility that you describe, for exactly the problems (like constantly emailing a tracker spreadsheet around) you lament.

JotSpot might be relevant to the discussion in general, as well. They do a lot of work with wikis. Are there any other web development companies out there doing stuff like this? I hope so, but I haven't run across any others yet.

[I'm not an employee or anything; I just found out about these guys last night and it looks like they're doing cool stuff.]

I think what you're looking for is JotSpot's new product Tracker which provides just the online, wiki spreadsheet compatibility that you describe, for exactly the problems (like constantly emailing a tracker spreadsheet around) you lament.

JotSpot might be relevant to the discussion in general, as well. They do a lot of work with wikis. Are there any other web development companies out there doing stuff like this? I hope so, but I haven't run across any others yet.

[I'm not an employee or anything; I just found out about these guys last night and it looks like they're doing cool stuff.]

I found these interesting links about more patent reform work out there. The first one is a partnership between IBM and some university people on building some kind of peer review patent system. Looks very interesting:

http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent

Second is an article by one of the university people with more details on this (PDF warning):

http://peertopatent.jot.com/WikiHome/PeerToPatent- BethNoveck.pdf

Just curious, if they can't host their blogs within China, why can't they do it elsewhere? Like perhaps in the US, Australia, or Canada?

There is a program in place which facilitates persons from around the world to adopt a Chinese blog and host it for the Chinese blogger. Pretty cool concept: people from around the world coming together and helping each other make connections and facilitate free speech.

A much better idea would be to deprecate email as it is currently used, and actually capture intra-office communication in some issue-tracking system, wiki, or other appropriate system.

It'd be much cooler if you were named Clarke, so I could say "welcome to 2001" all sarcastic-like; now all I have to work with is Gateway, and nobody would get it anyway. But, sure, capturing e-mail is nothing new, and good lord, we've been tracking our communications as threads on a private NNTP server for almost 20 years now. Also, there's been automatic majordomo browsing since Gopher, and back in the days of BlueWave ...

I tend to agree with Flexible. Yes, RSS can be productively used as a way to keep people abreast of changes, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. We have both a bugzilla deployment with email notification and a mediawiki deployment with RSS notification; because they're both gathered by Thunderbird, you'd think they'd be transparent to me, and that RSS would be at least as good as email. This turns out not to be the case: it's very frequent for us to need to discuss issues that come out of project controol and/or bug control, so even what's going around in RSS eventually gets pushed around email anyway, and then it's a giant pain in the ass to find anything. (Google mail would partially ameliorate that due to its search mechanism, but there's no reason for the problem to exist in the first place.)

It's my opinion that you're addressing the wrong question. What's important isn't whether RSS is good enough to use; there are tons of things that are good enough to use. The question should be whether RSS offers any compelling benefits over the existing mechanisms, and to that I suggest that the answer is a resounding "no."

Where I work we started doing this with JIRA and Confluence, both of which offer RSS feeds so that you can stay up-to-date on the changes within those systems. The combination is powerful, and I recommend it without hesitation.

What about it is better than the existing email notification mechanisms, and what justifies moving to something other than the existing well understood mechanisms, causing problems in sorting, especially when RSS is a pull-only mechanism?

Be sure to look into Jot, which has a lot of code dedicated to supporting this sort of stuff, including the relatively odd notion of sending email to a page. Email is just as flexible as RSS; it's just not new, shiny, and buzzwordic. What benefit do you suggest RSS provides?

this is completely different and a bad analogy, it cost these stores money to send it out, and they don't send out in massive bulk quantities, once a week from safeway? who cares.

you know how ridiculous you sound? spamming has NOTHING to with free speech, it's all about advertising, go read the first amendment, i'm not even american and i know enough about it.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;

Free speech should not be limited to one person's conception of what should be protected. All speech should be protected. This is especially true today when attacks on "spam" or "child pornography" or "piracy(/theft)" or "hackers" are being used as springboards for the advocacy of new laws to lock down speech on the Internet. There is a massive effort underway by governments and monopolists to make the Internet look like an evil, lawless place. This way, laws like the DMCA and laws to filter and monitor speech on the Internet can be passed.

So, cleaning your inbox is a little incovenient. Big deal. It is much better than losing the Internet as we know it. Read Code and think about the fact that most of the things this book predicted in 1999 have already or are rapidly becoming true.

I recently came across JotSpot (still in beta), which allows users to work with all sorts of structured data in addition to the traditional free-form wiki text.

It's a cool example of what might be the "next-generation" style of wiki.

There are a bunch of wiki's out there now with excellent wysiwyg interfaces. I've been playing with jot and I am very impressed with it. Like you, I'd rather not have to remember yet another markup language and I don't really want to have to explain something like html to somebody either.