2008 April

Archive for April, 2008

Wetpaint - Best Site on the Web…

Posted by TroyJMorris on April 25th, 2008 3 Comments

Madonna The BBC’s flagship technology program, Click, has recently profiled Wetpaint as one of the best sites on the web. We always knew we had a brilliant network of sites. We always knew we had a n ace group of users. And now we know we sound pretty neat when spoken about in an English accent.

According to journalist, Kate Russell, “The whole world wants a website. Well, maybe not the whole world, but a lot of people do.” Yeah, we think so too, Kate.

What do the rest of you think about Wetpaint’s ability to fill your website needs?

Keyword Tags: Web 2.0, General, Wetpaint

Free Tibet – A TagTeam Graffiti Protest

Posted by TroyJMorris on April 18th, 2008 comments 1 Comment

When we launched our latest Facebook Application, Tag Team Graffiti, we expected it to be pretty awesome. What kindergarten graduate can resist painting and sharing? But what our number one painter did is something truly amazing.

Avid Tag Teamer Angie Hewitt started creating art to protest the current situation between Tibet and China. She has been unable to go out to the streets and join in Tibet’s cause, so she started creating art on Tag Team Graffiti as a metaphorical megaphone to help her voice be heard.

Angie leads the Tag Team ranks, at last count, with 142 paintings in one month. The UK mother of two is working on becoming a Community Artist to work with “vulnerable groups of people and pass the tool of creativity on to them. ”

To start making your voice heard and share your art, you can add our Facebook App and start the sharing.

Keyword Tags: Web 2.0, User Experience, Collaboration, User Generated Content, Wetpaint, General, Fun

World Record Recycling Event

Posted by TroyJMorris on April 15th, 2008 comments 1 Comment

Wetpaint is always where the action is! A mere 30-minute drive east from Wetpaint’s downtown Seattle headquarters lies Sammamish, a town where a record-busting event is scheduled to take place this very weekend.

This Saturday, April 19, from 7am to 3pm, the “Green Team” at Discovery Elementary in Sammamish will hold a record-breaking event. In those eight hours, the students, under the leadership of teachers Ms. Kirby and Ms. McNamara, will rally the community to recycle over 88.18 pounds of plastic bottles to break a record set by McDonald’s in 2006.

The Green Team knows awareness is key to the success of their event. The students hope to literally demonstrate to Sammamish citizens the amount of waste generated as plastic bottles. “It’s a valuable message,” says the teaching duo, “When the recycling is picked up every week, it’s too easy to forget how much there really is.”

The group is using a wiki to organize the volunteers and guidelines. We wish them the best of luck and anyone located in the region, please visit the site to find out what you can do to save Mother Earth and break a record.

Keyword Tags: Web 2.0, Education, User Experience, User Generated Content, Events, Wetpaint, Wikis, General, Fun

New Features - Say Cheese

Posted by TroyJMorris on April 10th, 2008 5 Comments

Dear Faithful Wetpainters,

You may notice a new addition to your wiki header this morning. Haven’t spotted it yet? Let us point it out for you

Ta-da! For your wikiing pleasure, we present Photo Gallery power! Now you can create, coordinate, and curate photo galleries and then share them shamelessly with your wiki-mates.

There are a couple things you should know about how this affects adding images to your site:

1. You can now add images from your wiki’s photo gallery to any page, any time. (No more having to save all the images you’ll ever want to use on your computer!)

2. What if you don’t have that great image of Grissom? Do a Yahoo! image search. Oh yeah, one more thing, you don’t have to leave your wiki to do so!

Remember, Young Grasshopper, harness the power of Photo Galleries for good, not evil.

Learn more about the latest feature at Wetpaint Central and keep staying tuned for the next set of awesomeness we unveil.

Keyword Tags: User Experience, General, Wikis, Wetpaint

A Wiki Profile - The Diary of Anne Frank

Posted by TroyJMorris on April 9th, 2008 2 Comments

We relish the opportunity to spotlight creative and compelling uses of Wetpaint. When we discover an instance where a teacher is incorporating Wetpaint technology in the classroom to engage her students’ interest and enthusiasm, we happily stop and applaud.

Eighth-grade teacher Teresa Hinkel began the school year with a mission to develop a lesson plan using a wiki. She originally intended to present a simple vocabulary lesson, but ultimately decided that the best application of the technology was to create a collaborative study guide for the class’ unit on The Diary of Anne Frank.

The ability of the wiki to capture and foster open, collective discussion through creation of pages and posting of comments brings a genuinely collaborative and creative spin to illuminating the historical factors and lessons of Frank’s life. The students are empowered to pose their ideas and questions and consider and respond to those of others. After all, everyone gets a chance to sit in the front row on a wiki!

One of the greatest takeaways from this experiment, says Mrs. Hinkel, has come courtesy of one of her students, newly immigrated to the United States. “I have a student from Korea who has just come to the U.S.A. I wasn’t sure the invite would appear in her email but it did, with parts in Korean. She doesn’t speak English very well and finds it difficult to communicate and join in classroom discussions. Her comments and posts [on the wiki] have been excellent and [her more active participation] has given the kids something to talk to her about. She has also smiled and shown a sense of accomplishment.”

Bravo, Mrs. Hinkel and students!

Keyword Tags: Web 2.0, User Experience, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Wikis, General, Wetpaint

Super Painter Spotlight: flattail

Posted by Michael on April 4th, 2008 No Comments

Super Painters come in all shapes and sizes– they are aspiring artists, soap opera fanatics, teenage developers, fish keepers, PhD students. The list goes on and on. This week we’d like to introduce you to flattail– a university professor, reptilephile, and all-around Wetpaint all-star.

Wiki Snake

Here’s a little more about flattail, in his own words:

About me: I’m not your typical computer geek or Wetpaint user–I actually prefer to be outside without a computer (and I don’t have a cell-phone or web-connected PDA either). My wife and I are biologists, and we have done field work in remote locations in mountains and deserts studying black bears and horned lizards (for up to six months at a time).

However, I enjoy new technology and using the internet in collaborative ways. I teach biology classes at a regional campus for Utah State University. Several of my classes are broadcast to another campus, so the class wiki site is a way for me to interact more with my students.

Why I wiki: I recognize that individual stupidity surpasses group stupidity, and that group wisdom is greater than individual knowledge. I think the world is too steeped in competition, and that collaboration is where the answers really lie.

My interest in becoming a contributor to wikis came when I was frustrated with our class physiology textbook, and partway through the class I told the students we were rewriting the syllabus and instead of lecturing we were going to make the world’s first free online physiology textbook. I stumbled across Wetpaint when I wanted to have a wiki site for students to collaboratively suggest test ideas, and it has evolved from there.

Keyword Tags: User Experience, General, Wikis, Wetpaint

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