Extra! Extra!

According to story in Reuters, “wiki” has now been proclaimed a real word by the Oxford English Dictionary.

I find this somewhat troubling. I have been treating “wiki” as a real word for many years. I find it used in news and magazine articles constantly. Anyone who works in any web-related field certainly understands its meaning. And all this time we have been using an unofficial word.

So it has been a long journey for this collection of four letters to become a real word, but it has been worth the wait. When someone says “wiki,” there is a strong shared meaning. Others either know the word or do not, but do not mistake if for something else.

There is a bit of power in inventing a term for something new, rather than just pulling together terms already in existence (I know, I know. “Wiki” is a derivative of “wikiwiki.” But being a derivative, it is new.) A wiki could also have simply been called “an open page” or “collaborative web” or some other combination of existing words. If that had been the case, imagine the chaos that might have insued as various companies and factions tried to include their own sites under such an umbrella term.

If someone says “wiki” we generally agree on what that means.

This is in sharp constrast to other ideas which have been expressed in terminology that is just a recombination of existing words. Take “user experience designer” for example. I know exactly what it means, and you probably do, also. But if you get eight web folks in a room and ask, you will get at least nine opinions about the exact meaning.

This same lack of common meaning is true of much of the vocabulary we have been forced to establish as the web has evolved to prominence. Remember “webmaster?” Luckily, that has fallen from common usage, because it was so vague as to be almost meaningless. And “web page” is becoming increasingly inaccurate, since what you are seeing in your browser is likely a set of templates used to display a collection of content objects and applications. The term “web page” is a just holdover from thinking about the web by relating it the more familiar idea of a book or magazine page.

But, I have hope. We eventually stopped using the term “horseless carriage” in favor of terms such as “automobile,” “car,” and “taxi.” And no one says “picture show” any more unless they are a Rocky Horror fan. I think new terminology will evolve to replace some of the interim descriptions we’ve been using, and it can’t be soon enough for me. Let the names begin!

Google is getting serious about its online groupware offerings, adding JotSpot to Writely (now part of their Docs and Spreadsheets offering). CNet has more as some analysis including a mention of Wetpaint the hosted wiki service that drives our client HTC’s user-community site.

From the oldie-but-goodie file, here’s Painless Functional Specifications from Joel on Software.

Bonus: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

Dan sent me this link to an article on project management at the Ektron website. I especially like the idea of a project blog (or project log, as I prefer to think of it), since to me it seems like the natural way to post updates and circulate information - infinitely preferable to an endless stack of email messages.

Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.

The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.

Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:

I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event.

…

Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.

I’ve got two panel proposals in the running:

Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online

No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.

(filed under blogging and education / sociological)

and

You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!

Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.

(filed under social networks and user generated / open source)

Vote for my panels and eight others!

Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:

Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity.

August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs.

RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested…

OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names.

The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in.

Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects.

Presenting and answering Questions:

• David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
• Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
• Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
• Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.

If you know a developer - pass the word along.

Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?

(Reposted from The Power of Many.)

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan for Peachpit/New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.

I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as <xian> and she’s known as <zorca>. A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan » interview with christian crumlish.

In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, and the long tail. Hope you enjoy it (in lieu of Friday UX blogging, which I’m too lazy busy to do today.

Microformats are standards-compliant structures based primarily on ordinary XHTML tag attributes (such as “rel=” in a link tag). The Knowledge@Wharton website features an excellent interview with Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare explaining the concept further.

I was going to post a link to this press release Socialtext Releases First Commercial Open Source Wiki | Socialtext Enterprise Wiki, when Dan pointed me to this CNet round-up of business-wiki related news. Looks like the idea is getting some traction in the business world. (One of our clients just pre-launched a wiki in stealth mode so its end-users can share tips on using their products. We’ll link to it when the time is right.)

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Socialtext press release:

Socialtext also shared its Public Roadmap to help guide the developer community for the next three months. The roadmap includes a source code repository, Debian, Red Hat, SOAP and REST APIs, usability enhancements, and additional DBMS management beyond Postgres, starting with MySQL. The release at the end of this period, code-named Palladium, will mark the open availability of the first enterprise grade, corporate backed, Wiki to enthusiasts and commercial users alike.

Full disclosure: I’m friendly with a couple of the principals of SocialText.

Shiv Singh, who writes AARF’s Workplace Blog, points to a report on intranet best practices his enterprise solutions group just published. Downloading the full report requires registration, or you can listen to a three-part podcast summarizing the findings. Details can be found in Singh’s Corporate Intranets Best Practices post on his blog.