In mid-June our burgeoning UX (user experience) team made tags easier to edit than they were previously, and miles easier to edit than categories.  Now you can add and remove tags more than one at a time!

Tags play an increasingly important role at AboutUs.  Not only are tags front and center on pages now, but they also determine what lists a website will show up on.  For example, the tags “Portland” and “Startup” place the AboutUs.org page on the Portland Startups list.  (Clicking on a tag will also take you to the list of sites about that topic.)  We hope that our AboutUsWidget (which includes tags) will play an increasingly important role on the internet as people use the widget on their websites and weblogs.

Ray King shares the finalist honor in the category ‘Individual achievement’ with three others; Bill Kelly of Learning.com; Lynnor Stevenson of Design Medix and Steve Sharp of TriQuint.

Yesterday, Bob Chapman, who has made over 600 edits on AboutUs since April 2008, contacted us via our LiveChat for some help with images he wanted to display on a wiki page.

This prompted he and I to pick up a thread from last year, when we worked together on a great summary about AboutUs. Bob even made us a fantastic banner for his site, designed to link back to us. (see other AboutUsBadges)

Yesterday we finally got these goodies uploaded to his site. Thanks, Bob!

Then today, John Sullivan, who writes a weblog about pot politics and is generally very active on the internet, wrote a blog post about LinkBuilding, a way that people use AboutUs.org to become more visible on the internet:

The only one that I will recommend on this level of links is AboutUs.org. The staff is really cool and they love bloggers.

It is true, we do love bloggers – I must admit that maybe we love wiki walkers even more
Bob and John definitely fall into that category!

CloudCampPDX, to my knowledge the first CloudCamp here in Portland, was Tuesday night and I was glad to be in attendance. I have been curious where the other cloud folks are in town and it was comforting to see that there are local companies doing cloud magic also. It seemed like everyone was really curious to see what was working and not working for others.

I hope it becomes a regular thing. There is some information about the CloudCamp community here. I may have missed somebody mentioning it, but I did not hear that there is a user group here at the moment. If not, I would like to propose that we start one, so get in touch with me if you are interested. (Lyric at AboutUs dot org)

Some other folks in this ’space’: The Cloud Appreciation Society

Seeing this post last week about the 11 Unitentionally Hilarious Domain Names reminded me that I wanted to write about that from the AboutUs angle.

First of all, we have a bot who gets public, fair use information from a website that we haven’t heard from. Then the bot tries to CamelCase the domain name – which usually results in a successful event. When it doesn’t the results can be hilarious, as noted from Identity Woman a couple years ago.

When the bot gets it wrong, it gets it really wrong. As noted by RunningAsRoot last year. (No we don’t think they are trafficking marijuana.)

Please, for a good time, check out some of our bot’s best-miss-hits, AboutUsBotGoneBad

Come join us at WikiWednesday 5:30 – 7:30 tonight (107 SE Stark) to discuss these wiki ideas and more! (like the new Wikia bliki option and SocialText’s new offering)

Oh, by the way, even the Cub Scouts get this idea!!

props to Vartan for the fancy bot graphic!

Time flies when you’ve got your nose to the grindstone, and since those first days, we’ve grown to become a venture-backed startup of more than 30 employees (and soon to be more!) that has built a site of 14 million pages.

But we didn’t do it alone. AboutUs is a community-built endeavor, and as a way of saying thanks for being along for the ride, we’d like to buy you a beer.

At July 17th’s Beer & Blog in Portland, we’ll be picking up the tab, so be sure to join us at the Green Dragon from 4-6pm. Beer & Blog is a venue where we’ve received much sage advice over the years, and we’re delighted to be its benefactor for a change.

Part of our vision for AboutUs is that nearly every single website has a static ‘about’ page – and so our wiki is an attempt to give a place for dynamic ‘about’ information.

We now have a small item that could help make an actual ‘about’ page on your site more dynamic: our widget.

Some had originally thought of it as a widget just for blogs, but what we are seeing is that more people are using it on their websites, like these.

• TestObsessed
• Little Girl Dresses
• Zen Waiter
• Plymouth, California
• BrokerLA
• Wonderpaint
• EuroBatteries

I can easily imagine people placing these on their ‘about’ pages – I also have vision of a larger white label AboutUs widget for the ‘about’ page, in the future.

Imagine if every website had a door to an into open, collaborative, transparent, social media website. What excites me is the connections that are possible and the things, relationships and solutions that could come from that.

Let me know what you think!

Update: AnnArbor.com already uses for its ‘about’ page, a wiki page on ArborWiki! Kudos and props to them!!

Now on the third and final day, it’s not too late to come by this afternoon (for the $99 one-day price) to participate in the ending unconference sessions that have been going on. Not only are some of the best-and-brightest of the Portland technology community here, but there plenty of cool out-of-towners with open source knowledge to share.

Here’s a rundown of the positions we’re seeking applicants for. If you or anyone you know might be a good fit, email your cover letter and resume to jobs@aboutus.org (be sure to include the job title in the subject line.)

Systems Administrator

As a member of the development department, the Systems Administrator will report to the CTO and will work closely with the Software Developers and Community Development groups.

We are looking for a candidate who will be adept in the technologies below and who can also communicate seamlessly while balancing the needs of multiple customers. You will be responsible for keeping our growing infrastructure of Linux servers up and running 24/7.

Read more…

UI Designer/Developer

AboutUs is a top-1000 website that is working at the intersection of Agile and User Centered Design. We are an international company which follows Agile methods with considerable process innovation of our own. We welcome your experience to raise our game.

Read more…

User Experience Designer

As the AboutUs UX Design, you will be working directly with user experience designers and developers to deliver great user experiences on new and existing features. You’ll produce wireframes, paper prototypes, and HTML mockups, and your designs wil be implemented in our web application that now gets 15 million page views per month.

Read more…