Instructables Edit
Step by Step Collaboration Online

Instructables is a very cool site that bills itself as the net’s first ‘step-by-step collaboration’.  You can submit your own project or work with others on how to create just about anything.  You’ll get, “step-by-step instructions for making things you never knew you wanted.”  You can learn how to make everything from elastic guns and origami to the LED Fridge Lights (featured on Trend Hunter).  It’s pretty fun just to check out all of the cool stuff people have made.

About Instructables.com:

Instructables is a website brought to you by the partners at http://www.squid-labs.com. We make a lot of stuff, for business, and for pleasure. We’ve been looking for a long time for a convenient system for documenting our how-to projects, and the things we make, but it simply didn’t exist. We decided we’d have to develop it ourself, and here it is, it will evolve as we grow to meet our own rigorous demands, and those of our users. Principal in our demands is convenience - it should take less time to document a project than it did to build it.

We have been thinking and working in this space indirectly for more than 5 years, following the developments in Open Source Software, blogs, wikis, and version control systems. The largest influence motivating us on this project is the 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay of Vannevar Bush “As we may think” which has been widely accredited as a huge influence on the internet.