Windows on the Web: Wiki, Squidoo and Other Ways to Share Files
By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster
 The Internet makes geography less and less relevant. For example, the NABE surveys are written by teams of people who typically are not in the same city and rarely meet face-to-face. But by exchanging drafts via e-mail, the surveys are written in a timely fashion, and then released to the whole world with a press of a button.
I guess you could do the same kind of collaboration with a fax machine, as long as someone collected the edits and retyped. But distribution of the final product would be a lot more cumbersome.
Not only does the Internet allow a team to collaborate, it also allows perfect strangers to collaborate and share. Here are a few examples useful to people who use economics in their work.
WikiProject Economics
We've already talked about Wikipedia here. It's an online encyclopedia created by volunteers.
Because it's written by volunteers, they get to write about what they want to. That means it can be somewhat uneven; for instance, the article on Star Trek is just about as long as the article on Adam Smith.
Because popular or geek-type topics often garner more attention, WikiProjectEconomics was formed to improve articles related to economics. From the project page,
- The goal of this project is to provide guidelines for articles related to the field of economics and related subtopics.
- The vision of this project is to improve every economics article substantially so that every article reaches the level of quality of a Featured Article.
- The aspiration of this project is to make Wikipedia an authoritative guide to economics.
At the moment, members are concentrating at the beginning – bringing the article about Adam Smith up to “Feature Article” status. They also have a long list of other articles they want to work on, plus link to the WikiProject Economics page. (So far, there isn't an article on business economics, but if you search you do get redirected to a short page on managerial economics.
Squidoo
Do you get your fill of economics in your job? Want to share you expertise on something a little less formal? You can try Squidoo, a site discovered by reading marketing maven Seth Godin's blog. Squidoo's motto is “Everyone’s an expert on something! Share your knowledge and passion with the world.” In Squidoo, you can build single pages about something that interests you. Scanning the list of the Squidoo Top 100 articles, you see articles like:
- Drums and Drumming
- How to Make YouTube Videos Look Great
- Woodstock Music Festival 1969
- Three Design Books
- Best Panini Sandwich Recipes
Actually, Squidoo pages are called lens – for “a web page that focuses, like a camera lens, on a particular topic you're really interested in.” Squidoo pages are not collaborative like Wikipedia pages; other users can't edit your pages, but they can leave you comments.
Slideshare
If you have a great Powerpoint presentation that you want to share with the world, you can check out Slideshare. Slideshare lets you share publicly or privately and will also let you add audio to your slideshow. Slideshows are tagged by subject matter, and Economics doesn't show up as one of the most popular tags (go figure) but Advertising, Business, Math, and Marketing do show up as popular tags.
Search on economics, however, and you'll find shows on Pricing in Economics, Economics in the Elementary Classroom, The Effective Use of Blogs in Economic Education, The New Economics of Media, and many more.
Swivel
Back in December 2006 we looked at Swivel, which lets you share data sets by uploading CSV (comma separated value) files. Data must be more our speed, for Economics is the first category on their list of subcategories. There are 813 datasets tagged as economics, although more of them may be more accurately described as Business.
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