Full disclosure here: I loooooove pbwiki. I've used it for a project in another course and also helped my son use it for a project of his and it so easy and so intuitive to use that I couldn't imagine liking another service more. I did approach wikispaces with an open mind, though. I spent about three minutes browsing the site and at that point had to be shaken awae because I had dozed off. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...boring! Very dull interface. The service would seem to appeal to the two far ends of the spectrum: those who want to do a quiki-wiki and don't care much what it looks like or those who are particularly skilled in html coding and want to basically write their own ticket. This leaves out the bulk of wiki users: the ones who need to make a wiki that is visually interesting, but need to spend time on content, not figuring out how to make it pretty. I think pbwiki appeals to me because I can rely on templates and backgrounds and navigation structure they provide, while still being able to play around with elements if I choose to with html code. The source button in pbwiki lets you easily switch back and forth from wysiwyg and code. The wikispaces wysiwyg interface doesn't have a source button (that I could find). The whole interface felt counterintuitive. My critical comment--blech!
Good point on wikispaces: you can tag the page right from the editing screen and they also provide a notes field on the editing screen as well which is appealing to me because I like nothing better than to talk my projects to death.
pbwiki is so easy to use. wikispaces seems a bit more complicated than it has to be, especially considering the endproduct. Maybe it's just because I am accustomed to pbwiki, maybe not. In any case, wikispaces did not have any compelling features to lure me away from pbwiki.
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