I’ve been working on a wiki project as an experiment for the next generation of SWiK.
The concept is that the web isn’t just a lot of static webpages anymore, it’s Ajax widgetry, Flash videos, fancy stylesheets, etc. Wikis however are dragging behind, stuck in static webpage land, there either isn’t a model for extending the wiki, or if there is it’s too complicated to really be ‘wiki’.
The wikiality concept tries to play a balance between these worlds. It’s a very experimental concept, but I’ve started using it personally and I think it’s started to be interesting. The way it works is via two types of pages: wiki pages and wiki templates.
The templating language is straight JavaScript. Templates are wiki pages that contain an eponymous Javascript class. When templates are embedded in a wiki page, the page then incorporates any referenced templates.
I like building applications in wiki form because:
It’s faster to develop, about two times as fast as a regular application
More customization. If I don’t like how something works in a widget, I can clone the widget, change it subtley, and now I have it working both ways. You can also build your own interface from top to bottom, there’s no constraints of the standard application ui.
Video Bookmarks – Like delimages shows you the most recently bookmarked image feeds from del.icio.us, Video Bookmarks shows the most recently bookmarked videos from YouTube and Google Video.
I’m still thinking about how the concept works and it’s very experimental and in flux, but I thought I’d share just the basic idea: I think wikis and widgets can work together.
PS. I’ve been looking more into how Digg works, and how the user ecology is evolving, I posted this on my other blog, but I think it might be interesting to people who just read this one, It’s called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma In Digg Story Promotion”. It talks about a theory I’m working on that there might be a weakness in Digg’s story promotion scheme wherein you can get your stories front-paged by entering into a cooperative game with other people trying for the same thing.
