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Wacky wiki

Monday, September 08, 2008 — posted by Sarah

We recently made our FrameMaker 7 workbook content available in a public wiki. We simply don't have the time to make the needed updates to get the content to version 8, so we thought that we'd let you, the general public, have editable access to it.

The results have been enlightening and, at least to me, unexpected:

1. Nobody is making updates. We have a significant number of people who have registered as users on the wiki, but they aren't making changes to the content.
2. Sales of the fully formatted, not-free PDF versions of the workbooks have increased significantly.

According to Chris Anderson, this second effect is actually what we should have expected for a Web 2.0 platform. He describes the "freemium" model "where 90% of the users get the basic product for free and 10% chose to pay for a premium version."

One of my coworkers thinks that people are using the wiki to window-shop. They verify that the content looks useful and then go ahead and pay for the official version. So the wiki provides reassurance about the paid product's quality.

Your thoughts?

Labels: FrameMaker, web 2.0, wiki

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