Marketing Profs

Joe Kraus is a serial entrepreneur. A founder of Excite.com, he is now heading up a new venture, JotSpot, a venture-backed Wiki company. He recently spoke with Nathan Kaiser.

Kaiser: What is JotSpot?

Kraus: JotSpot is a venture-backed company started two years ago. It is what most people would consider a hosted Wiki, but we like to think about JotSpot in the long-term as a pioneer of do-it-yourself applications.

The industry has spent the last 10 years on do-it-yourself publishing on the net, making it easier for a non-technical person to put words on a page that someone else can read. On the other hand, very little, if any, time has been spent trying to make it easier for an end-user to build an application online.

JotSpot is starting out in the do-it-yourself publishing arena with Wikis, but what we're really trying to accomplish over the long term is to enable end-users to build simple, lightweight, web-based applications.

These applications seem to be primarily targeted toward company intranets.

Yes, I believe that intranets are the sweet spot for our initial Wiki offering.

There is a saying in golf, "drive for show, and putt for dough," which basically means that when Tiger Woods smashes a 300-yard drive off the tee and the gallery goes crazy, that drive is for show. He makes his money on the 5- and 6-foot putts.

Similarly, there is lot of fascination with blogging. It's huge in the public domain. Wikis, with the exception of Wikipedia, tend to be worked on in a private setting. As a result, I believe that it is "blog for show and Wiki for dough."

Most of the usage of Wikis is behind company firewalls, where there is an inherent, built-in mechanism of trust because everyone is an employee at the same place. One of the places that Wikis naturally lend themselves to is intranets and sites for project management inside companies.