Did you know that in a recent survey by Harris Interactive that only 16% of the online public know what a wiki is? For some, this will seem surprising. Others will say "what's a wiki?"

I had coffee today with my friend Kevin Flaherty of Wet Paint, the Seattle-based wiki company. He told me that they were perplexed that "wiki" was deemed one the 10 most annoying words on the web, so they ask Harris Interactive to do the survey comparing "wiki" to the terms social network, blog and online forum. Here's what they found (full results here):

16% of the US online population is familiar with what a wiki is. Even if you just look at the online trendsetters (18-34 year olds), only 27% of those online users are familiar with wikis.

Blogs, which have universal awareness among nearly anyone reading this post, are only familiar to 35% of online users. And familiarity with social networks as a category still ranks below that of online forums at 28% and 35% respectfully.

For context, consider that 76% of the same population know of search engines and 97% of toilet paper.

What does this mean? It means that we're making assumptions about what people understand about our online world. There is more misunderstanding than understanding and more confusion than solution.

What really gets me about this is that wikis, RSS, social networks and blogs are all accessible and potentially useful for the general public - but they're not being adopted as quickly as we'd imagine. The culprit, from my perspective, is the language we use to describe and promote them. It's too easy to forget that we're in the minority.

My advice to promote more awareness is to stop talking like a brochure and tell a story. Don't talk about what your product is or does - tell people why they should give a damn. Use real world examples and show how a problem gets solved. Look at every word you use and consider the simpler options.

You might not earn the respect of programmers, but you might just turn your Mom onto something that will save her time - and we all need more time.

Last night I got a chance to hang out with a majority of the folks from SocialText at Nancy White's House. Among other things, I learned about a resource by Chris Dent called Purple Numbers that I'd never heard about before.

In my words, it takes blog-style permalinks to the granular level. Using Purple Numbers, you can have permalinks to a specific paragraph of a weblog entry as opposed to one link for the whole thing. For instance, I can link you to a paragraph where Chris describes the original intent of Purple Numbers(The page scrolls to show the linked paragraph at the top- you can also see more Purple Numbers on Chris' blog).

I'm just starting to learn about it, but it seems to have a lot of potential.

My wife and I have been making an effort to move away from the TV. The winter weather in Seattle makes it easy to sit in front of the tube and eat Cheetos all day- which we both agree is a bad, bad thing.

We’re finding that without TV we focus more on computers in the house and getting more things done via wireless Internet connections. I think we’ll have a laptop with a wireless Internet connection in our immediate vicinity from now on.

This sets us up for an experiment using wikis in the household. We’ve been using a wiki to organize travel plans lately and it’s been perfect. We can update it at home or work or anywhere we’re connected. This experience has me thinking about other ways we can use a wiki in our house.

If you're new to wikis- see this entry.

Wikis and To-Do Lists

We are incessant list keepers and often have multiple note-pads for our various lists. The problem is that the pads get mixed up, redone, lost, etc. Plus, they don’t travel well- my wife doesn’t take the to-do list to work, so she keeps a separate one and then has to merge them on paper. There has to be a better way to keep up with these notes to ourselves.

We’re going to try using a wiki to keep up our multiple lists and see if we can wrangle our to-do’s in one place. My hypothesis is that a wiki may be a more efficient way to keep track of our lists. Here are some of the reasons why I think it may work for us:

Update-able From Any Web Connection

We can manage common lists from Internet connections at home, work, hotels and even wireless devices. Paper can’t be everywhere at once.

Lists Become Living Documents

Instead of having multiple pads with to-dos crossed out, we have a single document with to-dos that are managed over time and in a changeable format. A grocery list becomes a persistent document that serves as a reminder for future trips.

Sharable with Others

In cases where we compile a list of activities for a group, we can just share the wiki with the group and let them provide their own input. An example may be a camping trip list.

My bet is that there will be a number of unexpected problems and opportunities once we get going on this experiment. I’ll report back in a while to let you know how it’s going.

How would you use a household wiki?

Last night my wife Sachiko and I were talking about a trip we're thinking of taking in the next couple of years. As we talked over the evening, it became a brainstroming session on all the things we needed to remember, manage, discuss, archive, etc.

After a little while, I said "Hey, what if we had an online place to keep all this information?"

Sachiko's first words were, "We could use a wiki!"

All I could think was- I love this girl.