Tuesday we launched a Socialtext wiki for the Wikinomics Playbook, where people can not only learn about the power of mass collaboration, but participate in it. The book is already one of the fastest selling business titles and is an excellent primer on how models of collaboration are unfolding from open source to blogging to wikis in the enterprise to enable people to participate in the economy like never before.

The second to last chapter is about enterprise wikis. Half of it discusses how Best Buy is using a wiki knowledge-base for the Geek Squad. The other half is an interview with yours truly and shares some of Socialtext’s success stories. The first chapter is available online as a pdf.

This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki. I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

My second thought was that Web 2.0 must be crossing some kind of Rubicon, when a guy like Don can get that many corporate types into a room for the launch of a book about wikis and blogs and peer-to-peer collaboration. And he does it by making it clear that Web 2.0 principles can help traditional companies like gold miners and manufacturers, and that it’s not just feel-good claptrap tossed around by twenty-somethings with fake dreadlocks and Hello Kitty T-shirts.

Will is right that Don, while not actually part of the Web 2.0 movement, makes a good “translator and diplomat” when it comes to explaining the benefits of Web interactivity to a skeptical, non-Webby crowd. If there’s one thing Don is good at, it is taking an emerging field or trend and giving an overview of why it’s important – pulling strands together, explaining them and packaging them in a way that is easily understandable for a novice. That is a valuable skill.

And Don is trying to walk the walk as well, with a wiki aimed at writing the last chapter of the book interactively, and a fledgling Wikinomics community powered by local social-networking platform PikSpot, which I am quietly (or not so quietly) proud to have known about before David.

Just one thing, Don: I couldn’t help but notice in your speech that you credited your daughter with introducing you to the wonderful social network known as “the Facebook” – better be careful, or you will be lumped in with George Bush, who recently referred to how much he liked using “the Google”

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Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.