Buzz Marketing with Blogs: The Next Wikis

The Next Wikis

I’ve been having a lot of fun, using in, and thinking about wikis. I have some ideas about the next generation of wikis and ...

{What’s a wiki?}

Oh, sorry. It’s a Web site that is read/write, not read only. In other words, you, the reader, can edit, add, delete, move, annotate, deface, restore, modify and correct any part of it that I allow to be edited.

{That sounds hideous!}

Well, you’d think so. But that’s because you’re not thinking about affordances. Affordance is the idea that people tend to do with an object, the thing that the object makes easiest to do. In other words, if I hand someone a gun, they’re more likely to shoot it then they are to use it as a hammer. Hand someone a baseball bat, they’re going to swing it, not whittle it. And evidence shows that if you give people a well-designed wiki, they have a tendency to improve it, not scrawl all over it.

{But that’s so not the way the real world works.}

Actually, I think it is. Think of self-organizing lending libraries in a small town, or guest books in a hostel, or bathrooms walls in funny bars where they let you draw on the stalls. Sure, sometimes there’s a little bit of crudity in there—but people also do really creative, interesting things.

In a more general sense, look at community gardens, or open mike nights. Yeah, sometimes someone does something destructive, but if the thing is design to maximize positive effects and minimize bad behavior, some very positive results occur.

{I think I understand. Go on.}

Well, I’ve been contributing to Wikipedia and to OJR and I started thinking about where Wikis are going to go.

{And?}

Well, I think wikis now are essentially interactive RTF files. And there are lots of other types of files that ought to be wiki’d.

{Such as?}

Well, for one thing, I really want to see a wiki spreadsheet. Imagine being able to have a wiki page with columns and rows where you could modify values and formulas interactively. Think what this could do for committee budget calculations. Think of how this could be a great news tool. OR think of how this would be a great way to keep track of money on a group vacation—everyone enters their expenses, taking turns tweaking the sums and the formatting and presto, you’ve got a handy way for everyone to see what they owe.

{And?}

Garageband / midi files ought to be wikiable. Imagine an evolving musical document that you could listen, perhaps on your iPod, even “subscribe” to so you always have the latest version. It could evolve over time, like a whale song. The vocalist could change, and you could add in some blues guitar, or modify the tempo a bit. Audio is an order of operation more difficult to handle than text, but it could happen.

{Seems like anarchy.}

Or even worse, socialism! But it’s not. It would be unwieldy for groups of thousands to all try to modify an audio file at once, but not all wikis have to be massive. A wiki for university class of musicians might produce some amazing fabrications over the course of a semester.

{What about images?}

Images are tricky. They’re more atomic—you can’t remix the red or the shadows of a picture and still have it work. But think of Flickr. It seems to me it’s as close to an image wiki as anyone’s come yet. When you start thinking of Flickr as a self-organized image wiki where contributors are adding metadata, sorting by every conceivable scheme, and then creating interesting uses for that rich data, it’s very wiki-like, without being an actual way to edit each other’s photos. And there’s even some of that—someone posts a photo, someone else grabs it and photoshops it. I have seen groups where someone starts with an image, someone else changes it and reposts it, and so on, and so on. Put a proper wiki interface on that and there’d be some interesting, perhaps Fark-like applications.

{Ooh, this is getting interesting! What about video?}

Before we get to video, let’s go in a different direction. What about calendars? Evite and Yahoo Calendars are far too structured. Apple has a few calendars listed, and seems to be picking up more and more on the benefits of letting users build the things they want themselves (podcasting and iTunes lists, for example)

Upcoming.org has many of the right ideas—anyone can list an event, classify it, etc. But it doesn’t go far enough—there’s no way to modify the front page of the site, to add tags or categories through the data, to create new lists, and to tie more information into the system—photos and audio and…

Online calendaring hasn’t yet been wikified. But when it does happen, it’ll be amazing.

{What about video?}

Yes, yes, I hear you. Video is tricky because of several current limitations: size of files, processing power needed and bandwidth. But the bigger problem, I think, is that successful video projects often call for a singular vision, from a single person. It takes an awful lot of work to keep continuity in a video project, far more than it takes to do it in print. This applies to video-like file formats: flash files, Powerpoint presentations, etc.

But there are uses for video wikis. The spoof site Crying While Eating, for example, could have been done in a wiki format. You could have a video wiki of comedians, or a video wiki of recipes, showing how different people make their best dishes.

Our Media is going that way—but like Upcoming.org, it doesn’t have the flexibility in bunching and sorting the material yet.

{That’s too bad.}

Frankly, it’s amazing that so many wiki-like applications are happening so quickly. I think no one would dispute that humans like to create things, that they like to share things, that they value knowledge and like to feel like they’re participating in something greater than themselves. Sure there are exceptions, but wikis are no passing fad, they’re a tool that’s going to be a growing part of the online landscape.

{Any other wiki thoughts?}

Yeah, I couldn’t figure out where to work this in above, but the next time I teach, I’m going to have a class wiki and put all my teaching notes there. I mean, if that doesn’t appeal to students, I don’t know what would. Imagine a class situation where the class as a group helped to make the perfect set of notes. It’d be great.

{Have you ever been around students?}

Yes, I know, it’s a little optimistic. But if they don’t take advantage of it, I can’t help that.

Posted by Travis Smith on 07/05 at 09:41 AM • Not About Blogs

Comments

Okay. So I’m the dummy! How do you pronounce Wiki?

Posted by g3d on 07/05 at 06:44 PM
I love the idea about using class wikis, I think high school and college students would really get into this. It would be interesting AND educational to watch what the kids did to your notes, watched the evolution of them. If you really do this, I’d love to hear about what happened.

Posted by Denise on 07/06 at 05:23 AM
Ok...so, I’m a dummy. I’ve been involved in three Wikis to date and...I haven’t figured out how to actually use any of them. They’re cluncky, NOT user-friendly, and they offer me nothing I can’t get from a good blog, except a headache.

I know I must be doing something wrong, because I am in the minority on this issue, but...I wish Wikis would just die a slow death. Can’t see any useful purpose for them.

Posted by Yvonne DiVita on 07/06 at 07:47 AM
Yvonne,

I agree with you that most wikis are not at all intuitive—written by geeks, for geeks to use. Reading a wiki, though, is pretty easy. And they’ll get better.

Have you tried Tiddlywiki?

Posted by Travis Smith on 07/07 at 04:47 PM
Oh, and wiki rhymes with quicky.

Posted by Travis Smith on 07/07 at 04:52 PM
Here’s a great wiki app...http://www.jot.com/

As for applications, check this out: http://www.ehow.com

Posted by Paul Chaney on 07/19 at 09:31 PM
Concerning wikis and spreadsheet, check WikiCalc at http://danbricklin.com/log/aboutwikicalc01.htm and http://www.softwaregarden.com/wkcalpha/

It’s an alpha release not yet GPLed and not really standalone for the moment (launched from an EXE locally before being published via FTP on any site) but it does seem an interesting idea.
Great for collaborative work while waiting for some sort of OOo.org made online (I’m not really waiting for MS Live! ...)

Posted by Felipe on 11/11 at 02:34 AM