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PBwiki Leads The Hosted Wiki Pack

Few tools are as effective as a wiki when an organization needs to quickly post and collaborate on content. Dozens of free and paid options for creating a wiki exist, but when it comes to quickly and easily creating a wiki with minimal technical headaches, I keep coming back to PBwiki.

I'm certainly not alone. It recently snared a second-place finish behind Wikipedia in Mashable.com's Open Web Awards, (the PBwiki team's tongue-in-cheek demand for a recount gave me a chuckle) and are continuing to build an impressive customer base of more than half a million individual wikis for personal, business, and academic use.

Thanks to a solid feature set, ease of use, and centrally hosted model, PBwiki continues to be one of the easiest, fastest ways to launch a wiki. The PBwiki team is adding functionality and upgrading features at a rapid pace -- it most recently added document management features (basic features are available for free, but document searching requires a premium account). It also has bumped up the file storage to 2 GB for the free service and made file storage for the premium service unlimited.

I'd argue that MediaWiki -- the free, open source software behind Wikipedia -- is more powerful, but it's also more solution than most organizations need. It requires that you provide your own hosting, which can quickly result in administrative and technical headaches. A hosted wiki can help you avoid that, and you can be up and running within minutes.

Even in its free incarnation, PBwiki can be a great solution. Its basic wiki editing and administration features are top-notch, and the platform offers built-in RSS feeds, automatic backups, an API to allow other applications to hook into your wiki, and a robust set of security features. Unless you're inclined to host your own wiki (and granted, quite a few organizations are), PBwiki is well worth checking out.

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