I recently read about a meeting between two of my computer heroes, Dave Winer and Ward Cunningham, inventors of the blog and the wiki, respectively. It was interesting to hear how Dave characterized the difference between the two media. He described the blog as a more linear, time-line oriented narrative and the wiki as a collection of smaller, concordance like entries. He posed the question “What would a marriage of the two approaches look like?”
I have been giving it some thought. For one thing, an important feature of the blog is that it represents the voice of a single author. The wiki, historically, has been a collaborative work. Ward’s latest experiment, the Simple Federated Wiki or SFW, attempts to draw more distinct lines between content created by different authors. If someone wants to edit someone else’s post, they copy it into their own domain and assert authorship for their changes while referring to the original source.
I think there is also a lot to be said for the idea of treating a post as an outline with footnotes and asides collapsed in the default rendering of a post but with controls for exposing them at the command of the reader. Dave has also experimented with hyperlinking one outline into another such that multiple outlines can be viewed as a single document.
All of these are good ideas but they need a good unifying metaphor for the structure of such documents. Perhaps a hypercube where each facet of the document comprises a face of the hypercube and the reader unfolds the cube to read it. Or perhaps it is better represented by some sort of fractal presentation. I’m not sure how to represent it visually.
In any case, there is a lot to be gained from experiments with combining these two fertile approaches to personal expression. I will be thinking about it and playing with it. I have started building a couple of personal wikis, one using the Instiki package, and the other using the SFW software. These, in conjunction with my experiences with this blog will serve as the starting point for my experiments in hybrid blog/wiki software.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.