Wiki-ing, Google-style

Google is adding another app to its put-people's-whole-lives-on-the-Web agenda. Along with Writely for word-processing, YouTube for video-sharing, Google Spreadsheets for collaborative budgeting, among others, Google just acquired the JotSpot wiki service for collaborative publishing (eBay uses JotSpot for its member wiki), CNET reports. Google's acquisition may be a sign wikis (besides the already very mainstream Wikipedia.org) are going mainstream, maybe even classroom wikis (see this Boston Globe article), which might be considered dynamic "textbooks" that students and teachers write collaboratively as class knowledge evolves. [It's the way science is going. Prof. Richard Karp at University of California, Berkeley, recently said that, "increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes" (described by algorithms) as opposed to static phenomena (described by equations), the New York Times reports.] Here's a definition of "wiki" at eBayWiki.com: "The word Wiki is a shorter form of Wiki Wiki (weekie, weekie) which is from the native language of Hawaii, where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something 'quick' or 'fast'."