Weblogs are fish, or possibly giraffes
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.)
1 comment September 18th, 2003