Transclusions, Path-Based Addressing, and Version Control

The PurpleWiki community has been rumbling recently, thanks largely to the contributions of two members of the Canonical Hackers, Jason Cook and Matthew O’Connor. Jason wrote perplog, an IRC logger that supports Purple Numbers and Transclusions. Matthew hacked a PurpleWiki node manager, then started adding and fixing other stuff, including an XML-RPC interface. Additionally, John […]

“Low-Focus Thought” in Knowledge Management Systems

David Gelertner wrote an essay called “The Logic of Dreams” (a chapter in Denning and Metcalfe’s Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing), where he discussed the creative process. Gelertner suggested that there are two kinds of thought: high-focus (analytical, logical) and low-focus (free association). The former we understand well (according to the Gelertner); […]

Battling Group Think

Geoff Cohen asked:    (PM) As we build different kinds of groupware/social software, what’s the role of consensus, and how powerful is it? Does software make reaching consensus easier or harder? For purely message-driven systems like email lists or USENET, consensus is much harder to reach than it would be in a real-life meeting. But […]

WikiWhiteboard

Many moons ago, Danny Ayers reported the successful prototype of WikiWhiteboard, a simple tool for creating editable SVG images on Wikis. Motivated by the simplicity of the design and a little subtle prodding by Danny, I ported it to PurpleWiki. (See PurpleWiki:WikiWhiteboard.) Danny’s writeup on WikiWhiteboard, “Creating an SVG Wiki”, appeared last month at XML.com. […]

Blog-Wiki Integration Turned On

Long-time followers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed my habit of smooshing seemingly harmless words together. I often do it with people’s names — for example, Eugene Eric Kim. Some of you may have guessed why I did this, but most of you probably figured my space key was broken.    (GB) Starting today, my […]