Damn, this looks cool.

Thinking in Code: RubyPad

Sad scene on SdiDesk Wiki: RecentChanges as the wiki-spammers catch up with us.

WikiMinion is on the case, but this is fucked. I'm coming round to the view that UseMod / OddMuse is no longer sufficient to keep a public wiki open, we need something that allows proper automatic rollback and elimination of spam.

Seth Godin : This guy buys old magazines and sells them online, one page at a time!

Seth's Blog: Understanding the Long Tail

When SdiDesk grows up, does it want to be MindRaider?

Interesting question. MR looks pretty advanced. And taking advantage of a lot of Java libraries.

I'm not sure I see myself wanting to compete directly with this. Expect SdiDesk to stay more closely wiki-oriented : emphasizing ease of use and the pages with concrete names.

Good hard look at the economics of being a MicroISV.

On an impulse, I just created a new blog which may be of interest to readers of this one.

Platform Wars is a place for my comments on the ongoing struggle between different web and software companies. This isn't meant to be a generic tech. news blog. (Of which there are more than enough.) I'll try to give it a slightly different tone.

There'll be more about strategy, and analysis using insights I've nicked from Clayton Christensen through Joel Spolsky, and possibly even to the real "war theorists" I've found myself following recently. Plenty of my more wild speculation. And maybe some other theoretical stuff.

Rick Segal's post is a good snapshot of the response to writeboard.

Personally I love wiki. And I want to see the wiki idea and name become as widely known and adopted as, say, "blog". So I'm not really into brushing "wiki" under the carpet as too geeky for ordinary people to understand. (Which is, naturally, why I named my program SdiDesk and not something obvious like wikipad, wikinotes or uga-uga - doh! :-( ).

37 Signals are a smart company. They have a genius for doing one little thing (that often seems trivially obvious) in a very usable and user-friendly way, and turning it into a massive hit. So it's not surprising they're coming in to disrupt wiki (and JotSpot) with a simpler-than-you-can-possibly-believe one page, wiki-like thing.

It will be interesting to see how it takes off. What strikes me, is that they've removed what seems to me to be the wiki "essence" : the ease of creating multiple pages and links between them via concrete page names. And, of course, what most people remember : unrestricted access.

What's left is a little bit of wiki-markup. Plus versioning. And the fact that this is a collaboratively editable document.

I wonder if they'll subtly introduce multiple pages with links between them at a later date.