Jon Udell (writer for both InfoWorld and O’Reilly Network) talks about the evolution of Wikipedia pages here — erhhh, more specifically he talks about the origin of the heavy metal Umlaut page. Paracelsus Rambles did a little writeup on Jon’s work here.

So how cool is Wikipedia?

P.S. Jon talks about the making of his screencast here. This (you’ll need a flash-enabled browser to view the screencast) is a direct link to Jon’s screencast on the Wikipedia heavy metal umlaut page.

P.S.S. More on screencasting soon.

Andy Ihnatko, The Chicago Sun-Times’ technology columnist, talks about how Bluetooth is like bacon. His full — and hilarious — talk can be found here. It’s part of ITConversations’ full series of talks from the recent Mac OS X Conference.

Ok, to be a little more pragmatic, here’s a link to a Microsoft’s Channel 9 video demonstrating a trick little Bluetooth application (Anil Dhawan of Microsoft uses his Bluetooth-enabled phone to control a PowerPoint presentation on his PC).

I first heard about Jotspot when I listened to the IT Conversations podcast of their presentation from the Web 2.0 conference. Here’s a few words from JotSpot’s FAQ:

What is a wiki?
A wiki is a website which can be edited by anyone, without knowing HTML. See also Wikipedia’s definition.

What is JotSpot?
JotSpot makes simple web applications simple to build by combining wikis and web applications in an easy-to-use hosted service for workgroups. Take the Intro Tour.

What is an application wiki?
Most wikis are great at organizing unstructured text: create and edit pages, create links and establish hierarchy, add attachments and comments and basic search. But they quickly reach their limits when you try to add structure. For example, a lot of folks use wikis for a shared task list. How would you assign a due date for a particular item? Can you assign priority? Could you assign a task to a group, not just a single person? Can you flag items for discussion? All of these are possible using our service because JotSpot allows you to easily add structure to unstructured data. JotSpot makes simple applications simple to build using wikis. Take our Advanced Tour to learn more.

How would I use JotSpot?
Use JotSpot for all of your wiki needs. In addition, build lightweight collaborative applications using our platform.

The JotSpot Application Gallery contains applications you can load into your JotSpot including:

* Event Calendar
* Recruiting
* Task Manager
* Customer Relationship Manager
* Help Desk
* Company Directory
* Issue Tracker

It’s a pretty impressive application… something that makes writing niche, department-level applications possible. To find out how, listen and watch Jon Udell’s screencast (a word so new it isn’t even in Wikipedia yet) of a Jotspot demo (this is a link to a SWF file which playable if you open it in a Flash-enabled browser).