As diaries gave way to blogs, so notepads have been replaced with online notes. Stikipad may look similar to 37Signals Backpack (www.backpackit.com), but the key difference is that while Backpack focuses on lists and highly specialised pages, Stikipad serves up a complete wiki – editable pages with new sections created as easily as typing your name – that can be restricted or thrown open to the entire web.

It’s a hosted service, which means that while your data is on a third-party server, upgrades and backups are done automatically. A basic plan is free, offering one wiki, 30MB of storage space for text and images and 500MB of bandwidth a month – plenty for basic text. Paid-for plans start at $4.95 (around £2.80), and offer unlimited wikis, between 150MB and 5GB of space, and between 1GB and 5GB of bandwidth

There are other hosted wikis out there, but Stikipad offers plenty of superb bonus features. You can add lists to pages, reordering them and letting other visitors tick them off and make corrections, as well as tagging pages, posting comments, and keeping tabs on updates. The amount of control is impressive, from page-locking fixed entries to providing a CAPTCHA to keep out spammers, without making all your contributors sign up to the service proper.

On a more technical level, all paid-for plans let you customise your templates and CSS code, with the higher-level ones stretching to mapping your wiki straight to your domain for seamless transition between web page and knowledge base. Most importantly, exporting is easy – the system spitting out linked HMTL files on demand rather than trying to lock you into the service.

Stikipad is an impressive package. There’s no one thing that stands out; just a lot of very well integrated features that make it one of the smoothest, most usable wikis on the net. True, for complete power and control, nothing beats setting one up from scratch, but this is far more convenient for personal wikis and collaborative projects alike.