wikiSquared

Little boxes all the same ...

A few days ago Microsoft made news by announcing it would start delivering services to businesses and consumers directly via the web. By this announcement, Microsoft issued a clear response to parallel offerings (or, at least plans) by Yahoo and Google.

Murmurs of 'paradigm shift' and intimations that 'THIS time, it really, really is different' filled the industry journals and the edge-y techno blogs.

There's room for a contrarian view.

Maybe, just maybe, there's less to the story than meets the eye.

For as long as there have been computers that fit onto a desktop, there has been a steady stream of boxed solutions. The shrink-wrapping gave us Visicalc and Lotus 123, Electric Word and WordStar, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each offered us a wealth of means to business ends. Each gave us option-laden applications to help us process words, crunch numbers and annotate charts. Our responsibility, as informed -- and time challenged -- workers, has always been to select the clump of features closest to what we really need to get our jobs done.

You see a parallel story here. Some very smart people try to guess all the possible needs that customers have and they fill a store with goodies. Our role is to wade through the multiple aisles of, say, a suburban Home Depot superstore, in search of a 60 watt light bulb.

It doesn't matter whether Yahoo or Google or Microsoft offer web-based solutions. They're still boxes full of stuff. Boxes we need to reach into and pull out something we hope is close enough to something we really need.

There can be another way.

We can offer people the tools to build what they need. We can offer groups -- or individuals -- an ability to fabricate idiosyncratic solutions. Need a workgroup calendar that e-mails changes to everyone in your team? Need a tool to scan RSS feeds for articles mentioning your company's competitiors, tabulate, graph and send that information to six people in your office? Need a way to help coordinate a car pool for the dozen people in your immediate neighbourhood who brave the Bay Bridge traffic each morning? Boxes -- boxes in stores or boxes accessible via your browser -- will probably NEVER have exactly what you need to get done.

The solution isn't to sell better boxes. The solution is to offer a machine that will create the tools we need.

And the new story?

Wikis are just such web-machines.

NPR and a show about user-created information

wikis and beyond ...


Earlier today I happened upon an NPR show: it was the KQED/San Francisco  
broadcast of Talk of the Nation.(Wed 2 Nov 2005). 

The starting point of the conversation was a specific online tool -- Wikipedia. 
But of course, it broadened to issues of what happens when "the rest of us" 
create and evaluate the material we need.  

Such is the core question wikis pose. 

Their success has never been -- nor will it ever be one -- dependent upon 
specific technologies. What success will rest on is whether we'll ever 
accept this kind of self-creating and self governing approach to 
how to use information. 
 
From the NPR archive site:
 

Wikipedia, Open Source and the Future of the Web"
A new wave of Internet sites, like Wikipedia, invite their users to
interact and contribute facts and opinion and edit each other. It's a
more democratic way to present information. But is it more accurate?

AUDIO ARCHIVE OF THE BROADCAST