For now, Adobe Flash is the closest web video comes to having one single unified standard, but unfortunately it has its own set of problems.The full version is not at all ubiquitous on mobile devices, which are becoming increasingly important. The iPhone, for example, does not have Flash. The plugin is notorious for crashing browsers, hogging CPU resources and performing poorly. Even if Adobe were to address all of these issues, placing full control of web video in the hands of a single company and their proprietary format is a bad idea.

Another format war?

What is needed for Web video is one single unified, efficient, and hardware-accelerated standard that is not under the sole control of a single company. The W3C tried to get us there by adding <audio> and <video> tags to HTML5, but was drawn into a controversy over which format to support.

Apple, Google/YouTube, and Nokia favor H.264, which is widely implemented and has hardware acceleration. Mozilla, Wikipedia, Opera, and Dailymotion favor Theora, a completely open format. Apple and Nokia fear unknown patent issues with Theora, and Google doesn’t consider it efficient enough. Theora’s supporters dislike H.264’s royalty fees. YouTube uses H.264 but not Theora, and Firefox 3.5 does the opposite.

Uncertain conclusion

Both codecs have some important proponents supporting them, but in some key areas H.264 has advantages over Theora. It’s built into commonly used video editing software, used by YouTube, and has hardware acceleration so that it works in devices like the iPhone. Microsoft has a possible conflict of interest and has yet to announce Internet Explorer support for the <audio> and <video> portions of HTML5. It’s unfortunate that standardized web video is being held back by this mess, but I hope it will eventually come to be.

See also: “Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate” by Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul.

As a student, I’ve made wikis for specific group projects for collaborating outside of class. Unlike phone calls or email, information was preserved and available for the entire group to see. We could update them whenever we wanted, from wherever we wanted. We could build on each other’s work, make changes a little at a time, and even search. Once the projects were done, their wikis were simply deleted. Throwaway wikis can be very useful.

There is an overwhelming number of wiki solutions to choose from. You might be tempted to choose based on number of features, but a wiki is a collaborative tool. It should be simple and easy to use. PBworks is free, takes about a minute to set up, is hosted for you, and will be extremely easy for the other people to use. If you want a self-hosted wiki and your server supports PHP, I recommend PmWiki. If you don’t have PHP, WikiMatrix is a comparison site that may help you decide.

MediaWiki is noteworthy for powering Wikipedia and having many features, but in my opinion there are easier-to-use options available.