socialtwister — an archive in time
7
October · 2004
22 years ago

The Changing Face of Wiki

filed under Crossover

I have to admit I've never really liked Wiki technology, but I'm not opposed to it. For some time I have been observing and commenting on the merits of different collabication (collaboration-communication) mediums including blogs, wikis, IM, e-mail and the like. The changing face of wiki has me changing my mind as well.

Between yesterday and today, it seems I've had no option BUT to consider a new startup with a very flexible application, JotSpot. As Christopher Allen describes it, "From what I've seen so far, JotSpot looks like it may the first of a third-generation of wikis, the first being the very simple wikis such as Ward Cunningham's C2 Wiki, and second generation being database-backed wikis such as Wikipedia and SocialText.", though I prefer Peter's estimation, "Pure genius" (there's more too Software Only, Scott Rosenberg, GetReal, Social Software Weblog).

So what makes this Wiki engine so powerful? Some of the things are amazing obvious, but simply lacking from Wiki:

  • WYSIWYG Editor - Why no one ever did this before in a meaningful way is mind-boggler.

  • E-mail Integration - You can make use of e-mail to update your wiki, "every page has an inbox"

  • Smart Attachments - Files can be associated with pages, and, for some types, a preview HTML is generated.

JotSpot goes beyond this as well and provides some interesting new possibilities such as:

  • Structured Data - Ever used Wiki and forced yourself to a set "template" so that your data looked consistent? Well the idea that the data should be searchable has crossed many a mind and JotSpot makes it possible.

  • Data Importing - JotSpot will read in both RSS and web pages, utilizing some apparent XSL filters, to style the output.

  • Applications - JotSpot supports some interesting "applications" that allow you to have more structured workflow added to your use of the system. These applications are invoked by some straightforward wiki scripting.

In light of the Relevanta product we recently released, it's interesting to note that we have spawned a new generation "wiki" of sorts as well. Recently, one of my partners commented on these two applications. Here are his thoughts:

Like JotSpot, Relevanta is a WYSIWYG Wiki. You'll notice that Relevanta links people's names and organization's names to profile pages that contain more information about them.

Relevanta currently has five types of content: blog posts (aggregated through RSS), journals (blog entries posted by Relevanta users), people, organizations and polls. For journals and polls Relevanta automatically creates links on the post's title, much like JotSpot does (although we let you override the title to have a more meaningful "link phrase").

Relevanta is based on software called Otter which has many more post types, and many more organizational systems. These aren't present in Relevanta because they're not yet relevant. We also have a folders tree system. Every post (whether blog article, organization, journal, calendar entry, poll, et cetera) can go into the folder heirarchy for better organization. We also have a calendar through which you can view your content in a date-based manner.

Through the entire system every reference to any other content in the system of any type is automatically linked, much like JotSpot. Unlike JotSpot, though, we also provide other modes of primary organization. Our blog view allows you to view post excerpts and metadata using arbitrary sorts (the default is reverse chronological, you can also sort by rating, by relevance to a search term, et cetera). Our Explorer view (the folder tree) allows you to navigate a heirchical structure to fnid your information (your JotSpot post may go under Software -> Collaboration Tools -> Wikis -> JotSpot). Our Calendar view, as I mentioned, allows you to view content by date in an actual calendar view (this is typically used, naturally, for appointments and events). And, of course, you have Relevanta's "Related Content" system to let you know what content in the system mentions a given object (i.e. you can look at the "George W. Bush" Encyclopedia entry and easily find all of the content in the system that have referred to George W. Bush in one way or another).

While we allow users to create organizational structure we don't force them to do so simply by mantaining automatically generated links between content. We provide for more structure in content organization.