WikiClock: The Next Killer Wiki App

Got back from Montreal and RoCoCo 2007 last Friday with a pile of notes and a case of the flu, which pretty much killed my productivity this weekend. Fortunately, spring conference season for me is over, and I’m boycotting all summer conferences with the possible exception of Wikimania in Taipei this August, which means I’ve got plenty of time to digest and regurgitate. As usual, it’ll come in bits and pieces, starting with this post.    (MAV)

RoCoCo pretty much kicked butt. Much props go to Evan Prodromou, Anne Goldenberg, Antoine Beaupre, and the entire Montreal Wiki community for pulling off such a great event. Lots of participants traveled to attend, including several Europeans, which made the experience much richer. This included representatives from every PHP-based Wiki (Tim Starling of Mediawiki, Andreas Gohr of Doku Wiki, Reini Urban of PhpWiki, Patrick Michaud of PmWiki, and Marc Laporte of TikiWiki), which was awesome. I was happy to see old friends from afar and from not-so-far, and I met several great new folks. WikiOhana is a wonderful thing.    (MAW)

The best session was Evan’s, “Wiki And…,” which he nefariously scheduled at the same time as my Wiki Interoperability session so I couldn’t attend. That didn’t prevent me from learning about his incredibly brilliant idea: WikiClock, made possible by Gordon McCreight‘s most excellent service, pageoftext.com.    (MAX)

What is WikiClock? It’s a clock on a Wiki that tells you the current time in GMT. How does it know the current time? Someone edits the time. Who edits it? Whoever feels so motivated.    (MAY)

WikiClock is a great example of a totally ludicrous application of a Wiki. The point of Evan’s session is that Wiki-enthusiasm can lead to overly narrow thinking. Wikis are great, but they’re not the end-all-and-be-all of collaborative tools. There are a whole slew of good tools out there. Use the right one for the right job.    (MAZ)

The story doesn’t end there, however. What makes WikiClock all the more ridiculous is that people are actually using it. You heard me right. The buzz from Evan’s session started propagating pretty quickly. If you check WikiClock right now, chances are the time is correct. And if it’s not, well, correct it!    (MB0)

WikiClock is that rare breed of joke, where you laugh, then you stop and think, “You know, it’s really not that bad of an idea.” Next thing you know, it’s no longer a joke. I know of only one other joke like it: Parrot, the virtual machine for dynamic languages that started off as an April Fool’s joke.    (MB1)

Granular Editing

I’ve been working with Doku Wiki a lot recently — it was what we used for the St. Louis Collaboratory workshop — and it reminded me of yet another reason why Granular Addressability is more important than we think it is.    (LFO)

My biggest takeaway from working with Doug Engelbart on the HyperScope this past year: Addressability is for more than linking. Indeed, HyperScope takes advantage of addressability to support some powerful navigation capabilities.    (LFP)

Well, addressability can also be used for editing. And in fact, it is. Both Mediawiki and Doku Wiki support granular editing. The reason? Mediawiki is designed for encyclopedias (specifically, Wikipedia. Doku Wiki is designed for authoring documentation. In both cases, you end up having long pages. Editing long pages in your browser is a major pain in the rear. It’s much easier to edit specific sections.    (LFQ)

Augment, of course, also supports granular editing, except the granularity supported is much finer.    (LFR)

This is yet another example of the following law of Collaborative Tools, which I first mentioned in my manifesto:    (LFS)

Good ideas get reimplemented over and over and over again, often independently. It behooves us to identify these ideas, name them, and implement them interoperably.    (LFT)

(This is also the fundamental principle underlying Pattern Languages.)    (LFU)