Second Life Business Communicators Wiki

There's a lot of froth flying around about the business use of Second Life, but not many facts. Here's a good resource in the making: a wiki that aims to pull together concrete information about such activity. There's not much there are the moment, but you know what you can do about that....

Vive L'Open Source

This is worrying: politicians have discovered that open source is vaguely, well, groovy:

"I am very impressed with the phenomenon of open source software. In the wiki logic, there is a capacity to share and cooperate on research and economic activity. This is a crucial moment of the history of humanity."

Yikes.

Larry's New Code

As the author of two books with the word "code" in the title, I naturally gravitate to other tomes that also draw on this word. But Larry Lessig's Code is rather special: it's one of the definitive texts of the Net age. I remember reading version 1.0, when it came out; and now, following a suitably wikified genesis, here's Codev2. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Enter the WikiMatrix

Confused by all the wikis out there? You will be, once you've worked your way through the dozens listed on this amazing site, which lets you compare them in minutest detail. (Via Quoi9.)

The End of the End for Academic Writing

Scholarship never ends. There is never a last word, even about established facts. What we've had up till now in published works are static snapshots. Sure, there may be follow-up articles, second editions and corrections, but each work stands alone as a completed product. I find myself wondering if researchers - and writers - will continue to be content with snapshots when the technical barriers to revision are so low and readers' comfort level with edited online works is growing.

Ergo, we need other ways of publishing - online, wikis etc. Not rocket science, but definitely something of a leap for the academic world. (Via Open Access News.)

Here's the Jot - Where's the Tittle?

So, Google has bought JotSpot, and adds wikis to its growing collection of office tools. Who's next?

Peer-Reviewed Wikis Are Like Buses...

...you wait for ages and then two come along at once.

First we had Citizendium, now here's Scholarpedia. The dynamics are slightly different, and it will be fascinating to watch their respective evolution. In particular, it will be great to see online Darwinism in action as these two and Wikipedia fight it out from their respective positions.

Never Mind About Firefox 2.0, What About 3.0?

Firefox 2.0 still not hot enough? What about Firefox 3.0? You even get a chance to put in a feature request.

Random Catch-ups: Semapedia and SWiK

Neither of these is new, but I've not mentioned them before, and I should have done.

Semapedia:

Semapedia.org is a non-profit, community-driven project founded September 2005. Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

...

To accomplish this, we invite you to create and distribute Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia (or any of Wikipedias' sisterprojects such as Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wikiquote). You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into our creation-form. Pressing the button will generate a custom PDF file to download and be printed. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. Others can now use their cellphone to 'click' your Tag and access the information you provided them.

SWiK:

*SWiK.net is a project to help people collaboratively document open-source software*

SWiK is visited by over 10,000 people daily, it’s a place to make notes and publish articles on software development and open source projects, tag projects to help organize the world of open source, or just browse around and find interesting stuff.

I particularly like the Zeitgeist page as a snapshot of what's hot.

Wiki in a Box

So, it seems that someone has come up with the idea of offering a box with some wiki software in it. For several thousand dollars.

They'll be selling bridges next.

Wiki, Wiki, Wonga

The New York Times has a piece about for-profit wikis. Personally, I can't see this happening much, since the essence of wikis is the man and the woman on the Clapham omnibus working for nothing: the idea that others will make money off their work will put a brake on that kind altruism.

It's true that the same could be said about open source, but the kind of people who contribute seem to have less problems with commercial use. Maybe it's because anyone can contribute to wikis - even those not so sophisticated when it comes to open politics, whereas coders tend to have a broader appreciation of the issues.

Wired's Wikified Wiki Words Work?

This is one of those things that you just want to work.

Wired has put up one of its stories - on wikis - to be freely edited by anyone. Or rather anyone who registers: this seems to be a threshold requirement to stop random vandalism as experienced the last time this was tried.

Judging by the results, the registration barrier seems to be working. The piece is eminently readable, and shows no evidence (as I write) of desecration. Maybe the wiki world is growing up. (via Many-to-Many.)

The Wiki-God Speaks...Mysteriously

While Wikipedia seems always in the news (as the previous post indicates), the man who started it all - no, not Jimmy Wales, but Ward Cunningham - is surprisingly low profile. So it's always good to come across an interview with him. I found the following particularly interesting:

The Creative Commons Attribution license is the "technology" we need to save patterns. If we'd known this 15 years ago we would not be in the mess we find ourselves in today. Instead creative individuals would be retelling the patterns in a way that resonates with every developer while still preserving a thread back to the analysis that led to each pattern's initial expression.

Unfortunately, I don't really know what he means. God-talk, I suppose. (Via Creative Commons Blog.)

Wikis Get Down to Business

Mention wikis, and most people think of Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is a one-off, a unique, unrepeatable example of what a wiki can be. And so its well-aired growing pains are also pretty specific to what it is and what it's trying to do. They arise mostly from the lack of a strict organisational hierarchy that allows content to be perused and ultimately policed. Strikingly, just such a hierarchy is a salient feature of all the main open source projects, from Linux down.

As a consequence, this most uncorporate of tools might just flourish best precisely in the context of a company. Why? Because there the hierarchy is already in place - it doesn't even need to be articulated, it can simply be applied in the context of a wiki. Basically, this means that more junior members of the hierarchy have to watch what they say and do more than senior ones.

That doesn't imply that they should refrain from joining in: on the contrary. The wiki is a canvas on which to display their wit and wisdom to even the most senior echelons of the company, so it would be counter-productive to abstain entirely. But it does mean that the kind of puerile activities that some get up to on Wikipedia would be self-censored.

Against this background, it's interesting to see announcements from two companies offering corporate wiki products. JotSpot applies the wiki's collaborative method to traditional tools like documents and spreadsheets. I think that's a mistake, because the wiki isn't so much a way as a thing, contrary to popular wisdom. After all, collaboration is hardly a new idea; what's new is the specific form of the wikispace in which it happens. In that respect, I prefer Socialtext's approach, especially now that it has come out with an open source version.

Wiki in the City

If you've ever wondered what might befall an innocent little wiki in hands of a serious investment bank, take a look at this. It's detailed, and the case studies are particularly interesting.

Wikifying Search with Swickis

Swickis are an interesting idea. As their mother-ship, Eurekster, explains:

A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you're interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.

If you want to see one in action, try archival, which helps you "find texts, images, audio, art, public-domain images and information, electronic books, and archival media." The interesting bit is that once you have done a search, you can suggest re-orderings of the results - just mouse over the entry, and use the options that appear to the right.

Wiki + Google Maps = WikiMapia

As I've said before, every good mashup needs a mesh, and you can't beat a map as a mesh. So here we have the obvious next step: a wiki based on the mesh of Google Maps - WikiMapia, which describes itself modestly as "a project to describe the whole planet Earth". Not much there at the moment, so you know what you have to do.... (Via C|net).

Open Source Management

Yes, really. Here's an excerpt:

It is open source software and its social media descendants such as wikis and blogs that are making some businesses ready to consider openness. These tools are a great start, but it's the way you use them that matters. If employers want to encourage a culture of honesty and caring in their work environment, the most important thing for employers to do is to begin with themselves.

Reasonable, no?

New Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Actually, I was wrong: wikis aren't the only form of open collaborations that are thriving. Remixes are coming on strong too. As well as the mother ship at ccMixter, there's now this great offering, courtesy of two of my favourite artists: David Byrne and Brian Eno.

Enter the Graphiki: a Wiki for Graphics

Wikis are a striking success. I don't just mean the epistemological juggernaut that is Wikipedia: there are now hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wikis springing up everywhere. And that's just on the public Web: they are also cropping on corporate intranets, though not visible to anyone outside the company concerned.

But what's striking about this rash of open collaboration is that it is all textual: there is nothing equivalent for images. Or at least until now: with the arrival of kollabor8 we have perhaps the first glimmerings of what a graphics wiki - a graphiki? - might look like.

The idea is simple: somebody uploads an image, someone else edits it and passes it on. As with wikis, the result can be an improvement, or just a mess. Occasionally, it produces something really striking. (Via eHub).