Jot’s looking for someone who will apply creative design and engineering rigor to client-side programming. Someone who isn’t afraid to treat JS/DHTML as a real language.
If you’re interested, take a look at some more details and drop us a line at jobs@jot.com. Thanks!
My name is Scott Johnston and I’m addicted to wikis. There. I admitted it. Isn’t that the first step or something?
My addiction began with less dangerous collaboration tools like blogs and discussion groups but using these well known gateway tools I quickly escalated to harder collaboration tools like wikis. Friends started avoiding me, I stopped sleeping and eating, co-workers stopped inviting me to meetings, and loved ones tried to intervene without success. When I heard about Jotspot it seemed like an obvious fit. A place where I could feed my addiction under the guise of a day job. Could it get any more perfect? So after seven years at Kintana, a startup purchased by Mercury interactive in 2002, I tricked Jotspot into hiring me, and fully embraced my addiction.
A little over a year ago we launched the Jotspot wiki. In this time we have learned a lot about the wide variety of uses people have for the application – in fact we have had over 14,000 suggestions. We have talked to customers using our wiki to manage projects, plan events, organize classrooms, run their clubs, manage their knowledgebase, organize their help desk, manage their interview process, just to name a few [1]. I am really excited by how useful people have found the product but also recognize everybody starts with the same blank wiki. Given what we have learned from our customers we would like to provide more out of the box. I think this direction will result in an improved degree of usability and structure while still utilizing the organic, community based wiki. You can think of them as applications with the same genetic code as wikis and then raised by wikis [2].
I came to Jot with one goal: make it easier to work together online and in doing that make wikis work for everybody [3]. I see a wiki as a set of collaboration functions that should be leveraged in a lot of different applications. The great thing about Jot is it was built to allow us to do that. With that I would like to announce the next two Jot apps, in what will be a long line of additions to our suite of applications.
The Jotspot Bug Reporter is a great Bug and Enhancement tracker we have been using internally for awhile now. It is perfect for people that would like instant, hassle free, bug tracking. We focused first on making it really easy to use and quick to create bugs. From this foundation we added features like email notifications, bug creation via email and handhelds, graphical reporting, and a query builder that allows you to publish queries to the main dashboard. Like I was saying earlier this is all built on the Jot platform which means you get all the wiki features like being able to CC a bug to track an email conversation, version history for everything, and simple, one click edit of all aspects of the product. Additionally you get all the Jotspot development API’s that allow you to further change the product to meet your needs.
In a different area, we noticed customers using Jot to plan their reunions. The Jotspot Class Reunion Planner is an application that makes it easier to do just that. This application focused on bringing people together to catch up and reminisce. In addition to a blog, photo gallery, and map that shows where everybody now lives, we also pull in data from external sources to bring back memories of top songs, movies, and other events of the time.
Many more applications are in the pipe so stay tuned. In fact by the time you finish reading this absurdly long post, we might have a few more done.
All for now.
**
[1] Without question my favorite use cited by a customer was “Evil plans for world domination, tasty local places for fried mackerel, long tail reactionary musings, conspiracy theories and favorite pickle jar labels I have seen.”
[2] I’m trying to cover those of you that believe in nature, as well as those of you that believe in nurture.
[3] I’ve got my 86 year old Grandma fully hooked on instant messenger so I can be both persistent and patient.
Our mail server came down with a serious case of heartburn last night and as a result, sending email to and from Jot wikis has been down.
We’re nearly done the Tums treatment, and apologize for any frustration this may have caused. I’ll update this post when we’re sure all is well.
Update: everything is back and humming along nicely. Drop us a line if you see anything out of the ordinary: support at jot.com.
Thanks to everyone who came out Monday for December’s JotSpot meetup. It was fun to put faces to names and meet new folks as we made ourselves home in Jot’s swanky new office.
After sampling flautas, guac and winter brew we settled amongst the cubes for some demos. Furthest-travelled ribbon goes to Michael Sampson, who looked remarkably fresh for being fresh off a flight from New Zealand. Mark your calendars and book your flights now 
for the next meetup on January 16th, 7p, Jot offices in Palo Alto. RSVP on the meetup page.
A big shout out to Reuben, Kathleen, Scott J., and Joe for the demos. Reuben kicked things off with a demo of the new Bug Reporter app, which we’ve been using internally for a couple of months. The entire product-side of the Jot team uses it every day – we’ve got something like 1400 bugs, issues, and feature requests in there thus far. (It will be in the app gallery later today…)
Kathleen Romano of Knowesys was up next with a more technical demo of how to use Jot forms to dynamically configure navigation in the wiki. Knowesys developed this technique while delivering custom apps for some of Jot’s larger customers.
Scott J. previewed the new Reunion app he’s lovingly crafted during his first month here at Jot. This particular app showcases the range of the JotSpot platform, which is equally at home supporting purpose-built collaborative apps as it is open-ended collaborative apps like the wiki.
The cherry on top was Joe’s demo of JotSpot Tracker, a new Jot ditty currently in beta. If you’ve got Excel spreadsheets that look more like mini-databases than financial plans, Tracker will lift them out of the email and shared drive ghetto and turn them into full-fledged web apps with a simple copy and paste.
After the demos we broke into smaller groups to talk shop. I hung with some Jot devs and brainstormed community development projects and processes. We’re at a critical mass of shared needs and Jot skillz and want to start co-developing in an open community process. More on that in a later post…
We plan on continuing the mix of demos and small group sessions where you can meet new folks and brainstorm. Happy Holidays all and hope to see you on the 16th of next month.
JotSpot’s next meetup is Monday December 5th and you’re invited! We’ll meet at our new office in Downtown Palo Alto, 167 Hamilton Ave, 2nd floor. We’re a block and a half from the University Ave Caltrain station so SF and SJ folks can bypass 101 and take Caltrain (or Bart + Caltrain – that’s what I do from SF).
The
last meetup
was more about drinks and hanging out. This time we’ll do some of that up front but then “get down to business” with some demos and
an interactive Jot theme tutorial Update: a set of BOF sessions.
7:00 - 7:30 : drinks and snacks
7:30 - 8:15 : three 15-minute Jot demos exploring a range of apps and plugins
8:20 - 9:00 : BOF sessions
RSVP on the Wiki
As usual you can find this announcement on your favorite event sites for your calendaring pleasure:
We’re de-structuring the meetup a bit and are replacing the theme tutorial with some BOF sessions. This will give folks more time to connect around common areas of interest while together. We’ve also set up a wiki page to plan and coordinate this and future meetups:
http://feedback.jot.com/JotMeetupPages/MeetupDec5th
There will also be:
See the meetup page for details.
Anyone know a good web-services-enabled RSVP service?
Right now these announcements are going to three different calendar services and three different JotSpot’s 3 blogs (blog.jot.com, developer.jot.com/WikiHome, and feedback.jot.com/WikiHome). A central place to collect, manage, and view RSVPs from anywhere on the web would be way better than having comments and attendance indicators spread out over 6 sites.
Sounds like a nice little Web 2.0 service to me… Until then, we’ll RSVP on the Wiki