Archive for September, 2003
For everyone that says, “I get too much email, dammit, let’s work together on a wiki,” there will be two others that say, “I hate having to go off to some web site to see what’s going on. Can’t we do this on a list?” You don’t notice this now, but I guarantee you will as Wiki usage spreads outward from the alpha geeks to the rest of the world. Businesses are trying to reduce email, sure. (They’re also trying to reduce churn, and wikis can create plenty of churn when used to tackle technical issues collaboratively. That’s only one way to use them, however.) But individuals often stumble, still, whenever they stray from it. Admit it - you know somebody who’s intelligent and gives a lot to the world, but doesn’t really understand the Bookmarks menu.
You can fight over whether the wiki should come to the people or vice versa, or you can just build nice email features into your wiki for those who want them. I plan (eventually) to do the latter. But what will they look like?
Subscription is the most obvious. Just as you can, in many message boards and weblog comment engines, check a checkbox to receive email notice when someone follows up on a comment, you ought to be able to look after a wiki page you create or edit. (Or just want to keep tabs on.) Enough people subscribe to the same page, you’re halfway to a mailing list right there.
The weirder problem is editing the wiki from outside, via email. You don’t want this to be a kludge or insecure, like many email-to-weblog gateways I’ve seen that have you put usernames and passwords in the subject line or first line of your email. You can’t use HTML email with fancy stuff done in JavaScript either, because, well, people hate that shit. What you can do, though, is create mailboxes for each page on the wiki and have them behave basically like mailing lists.
…But that would make people treat it like a mailing list. What kinds of afforrdances could we give a wiki email interface that would help keep the discourse wiki-ish? Or, if you’re feeling saucy, what other forms are possible when you combine email with a web collaboration space? And we haven’t even touched on how to bring multiple wiki pages into this. I have a feeling, though, that RSS is going to be more relevant there.
(Afterthought: hmm… automatically determining which wiki pages are closely related, by number of links? Vulnerable to attack. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with email. But people are going to need more efficient ways to slice this hunka meatloaf I’m putting together… grr.)
September 28th, 2003
That headline really doesn’t mean anything but I like that they’ve all started with W so far.
I decided to get crazy and add a new feature to this weblog, based on some talk that went through Brainstorms. You’ll note that there’s a new link in the Comments header of the individual archive pages (you won’t see that unless you click to see the actual HTML of an individual entry, for “all” you RSS readers). You can now subscribe to a given page’s comments as RSS, to see when something’s new!
This is even more farcical on this weblog, which has no comments so far. Go ahead, leave one; you’ll feel more special and so will I.
September 26th, 2003
Wikis are geeky; we’ve covered that. The deeper reason that wikis are geeky, though, is their very flexibility. Geeks get excited about wikis because you can make them do anything… but more casual users get un-excited about wikis because you have to make them do everything.
Weblogs do one thing and one thing only. But they bloody well do it for you! Wikis can do anything, but you’ll be doing it your damn self. I noticed this several months ago when a brief murmur about “wikilogs” went through the weblog crowd. I went to the example sites they pointed to, checked to see if they were doing anything interesting to meld anything-goes wikis with classy, well-oiled-machine weblogs… and they were wikis with a front page that was always edited by the same person. They put new stuff at the top (usually). When stuff hit the bottom, they refactored it to a new page. And I thought, “That’s it? That’s what the hype is about? This isn’t a wikilog, this is a wack-ass hedge!” (More development along wikilog lines has been done since then, and this discussion at MeatballWiki is, well, meaty.)
Maybe wikis make editing a page easy enough that people shouldn’t consider having to do that a big deal. And yeah, maybe a lot of weblogging tools are getting so complex, with their multiple categories and trackbacking, that weblogs don’t have a big usability lead. I think those problems are surmountable and not the real issue.
The real issue goes beyond just integrating wikis and weblogs. The issue is: what if we could teach wikis? What if we could tell a wiki, “when you’re on this page, don’t treat it like just any old page; make it do this specific task really well instead”? Or, “treat it like a regular Wiki page and give it this additional functionality”? If we could do that, Wiki could have a shot at being the duct tape of social software.
I remember way back when I was eleven and twelve years old, reading HyperAge, the magazine for HyperCard enthusiasts. (My having been exposed to Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” at this age explains a lot about my subsequent life history.) There was an interview with Bill Atkinson, if not in HyperAge then somewhere else, in which he talked about how humans couldn’t swim as well as a fish or reach things as well as a giraffe, but we could swim better than a giraffe and reach things better than a fish. Plus, we know where the ladder is kept. Then the metaphor became, well, HyperCard knows where XCMDs are kept, et cetera.
We don’t want wikis to become bloated messes, full of functions and syntaxes signifying nothing. Pluggability might be good though. Then a Wiki is a framework you can build on. (Zope is a framework too, but most shared hosting providers… frown on running your own web server binary. Plus I’ve heard that Zope has other problems, but… anyway. Implementation decisions to be frantically justified later, if ever.)
September 18th, 2003