(2024-10-15) Morris What Wikid Wants To Become

Mike Morris: What Wikid Wants To Become. Most of the notebook tools out there are focused on the writing. They use the expression "note-taking" and that's... telling. And why I've taken to speaking/writing about "note-making" — I don't want to be always in the position of a consumer, always just writing down (summarising or recasting in my own words) someone else's thinking (though there are times I do!) — I really want my notebook/slip-box to be a collection of my own thinking and observations (no matter how half-arsed, ill-formed or partial).

It's also a tool for reading, organising, arranging and rearranging those thoughts. A tool for stimulating more ideas and thinking. As a tool for reading and rearranging there are more affordances it wants, and the current crop of notebook tools fail utterly at that.

Then, too, if we start editing a page, or doing some deeper rearrangement of the text on a page, there's a lingering feeling that you're hacking on someone else's precious words, and there's something in us (if we're well-intentioned collaborators) that that's somehow quite offensive!

we want to comment on one anothers' words; we want to have conversations. So WikidConversations are the next logical extension of what the tool wants to become. And no wiki or discussion forum or computer-based blog commenting system seems to have been very good at that. (Google Wave might have become good at that if it had ever had the chance to experience prolonged sunlight.)