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.

OPML inclusions in the gutter.

There's a discussion going on at John Robb's Weblog about Web 2.0

I got inspired to write a couple of long comments. The first is about what I think Web 2.0 is a response to John's request "What are the 3 big themes that undergird the upgrade?" :

open data
.

You open whatever data you have, and positively encourage others to take it and "join" / "remix" it with their own. Plenty of people always understood this, but were probably swamped in web 1.0 by an influx from traditional media who tended to see data as something they created and sold access to.



specialization.


Open data allows more niche re-users. One company doesn't have to do it all. It's a distributed bazaar where you can get famous (and possibly rich) doing one thing really well, as long as you're plugged into the ecosystem in the right way. Being well plugged-in is probably more important than having a stunningly good and original idea, or great execution. The irony here is that people who get famous doing one thing well, then get rich by being bought by a bigger conglomerate.



automation.


For now, RSS and search engines. I guess we'll see further developments in crawlers, scutters, search and inference engines etc. With or without RDF. The important point is that integration doesn't just happen in the brain of the user any more.

AJAX I'm ambivalent about. It makes cute interfaces, which seem like a big deal to some people. But if we didn't have AJAX we'd probably be doing more with custom client software as was already happening with things like iPodder, Flickr's Uploadr, RSS aggregators, Napster etc.

Of course, the smart people (like Dave Winer) could see all this years ago. But O'Reilly think of memes as platforms they can own. I guess this does help to get a bundle of ideas more widely distributed, and to a certain extent provides a shared vocabulary we can use to communicate more effectively.

Lots of people will misunderstand it all, though.

The second, in response to John's mention of custom services, how I see the developer ecosystem.

I wonder if there's really a continuum. At the far end we're talking users doing their own customization and remixing, possibly with the help of GreaseMonkey or special purpose software. Maybe tagging goes on here too. These are the ultimate specialists, as they are specializing in something that's only for themselves. (With possibly positive externalities)

Further along, we're looking at nano-corps, micro-ISVs and one-(wo)man projects which provide either a service or tool to a narrow niche or geographically local area. (What Shirky calls "Situated Software")

Larger companies provide more comprehensive or more general tools, or tools backed by more robust levels of service.

At the other end of the scale are the real internet players : Google, Yahoo, MS etc. who need to build platforms comprising seriously reliable and customizable service, and integrate dozens of applications.

The key for them is identifying deep commonalities between different applications. In Web 2.0 anyone should be able to plug the output of one application into the input of another. That's for the end users and small-fry. Going beyond that requires owning some very generic infrastructure which can power dozens of applications, the way eBay does with online auctions and payments. Or Google does with search. Or Amazon does with recommendations.

JotSpot reorients itself

Good article on wikipedia

The slightly breathless Trendwatching has a round-up of Minipreneurs.

Creating Passionate Users: You can out-spend or out-teach

Quick bit of market research.

Anyone reading this who uses SdiDesk?

Anyone?

Anyone at all?

Anyone actually reading this?

Ah well ... (sigh)

If someone was reading this.

And they did use SdiDesk.

I'd ask these questions :

What kind of info do you keep in it?

What features do you find useful?

What functions do you never touch?

What bits drive you crazy?

All responses can be on the wiki or added as comments to this posting. Thanks ...

PocketMod version 0.3 beta

Bloody hell! Spammers have caught up with the wiki.

WikiMinion is fighting them off, but this isn't good.

Good post.

Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

Basically following the three Perl virtues : laziness, impatience and hubris. Remember, these are all virtues as long as they're not false laziness, false impatience, and false impatience :-)

Ross Mayfield The disruption of open models of production is the greatest arbitrage opportunity in modern industry.

Compare the RSS ecology story below.

Mark Bernstein on One Server Companies which takes inspiration from this discussion of the RSS "ecosystem".

It reminds me of Clay Shirky's notion of situated software too.

Bruce Eckel asks What is Consulting?

And there's a link to a classic Joel Spolsky story too which sounds suspiciously like it's about Ars Digita.

When I worked at an Ars Digita inspired start-up a couple of years ago, I had a suggested solution for the problem Joel raises : take a lesson from how smart individual cells scale up to multi-cell creatures : mitosis.

Particularly splitting into smaller fairly autonomous units which specialize in different things according to the tastes of those joining each of the separated units.

What happens next is that each subdivision either thrives or dies. If it thrives, it probably grows and sub-specializes again. If it dies, good members may get absorbed back into other cells. There's no reason to write a manual, because no two cells are meant to be doing exactly the same thing. Each will become more specialized, expert in it's field. And that specialization can lead to wider recognition and higher fees.

A reader writes :

I'm not sure I understand or believe this. Can I ask a couple of questions?

Sure. Fire away.

Isn't there a danger in becoming over specialized and going bust?

Sure. Isn't there always. But here's how it's different from just striking out with a completely independent company. Other cells in the company are at least partially aware of and watching what goes on in your cell. In the event that your specialization turns out to be not what your market needs, then a good member of a cell should have a high hope of being absorbed into a more succesful cell.

This could possibly be put on a slightly more formal basis. Eg. cells have some obligation to recruit from inside other cells before looking elsewhere.

Isn't this like an ordinary large company then?

No, because it's not heirarchical. Cells are fairly independent, with just a few co-ordinating principles such as a shared constitution, maybe some shared services (eg. office space, server hosting),

So how does this count as "scaling up" for the greedy founders? How do they get paid more?

Well, I'd say they could get paid more by selling services to the other cells. Let's suppose one cell becomes an extreme programming consultant, while the other promotes a variation on the unified process. Other cells might become venders of software or legal services to these consultancy cells. They can charge high prices for being extremely attentive to the needs of their siblings.

In which case, how constrained are cells to buy from other cells in the overall company. Isn't this just a restricted, limited internal market, which is likely to be less efficient than buying from outside? Why are these cells still part of the same company? Wouldn't they just be better off as entirely independent companies with maybe a shared history and a completely informal culture of co-operation and sharing of staff. Rather like Savile Row's tailoring culture in London or Silicon Valley?

Good point. The actual formality of the interdependence might be negotiable.

Which reminds me. Would enterprising independent start-ups be allowed to join this slime-mould?

Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that. Maybe ...

Also, what's The Business Experiment?

What is FAZR?

Brandon Titus is using SdiDesk to outline Project Bluesnake.

Ross Mayfield on the wikiHow story.

wikiHow to Open Content

Danny Ayers is looking for a business model to fund his life of RDF and personal knowledge management research.

Danny has a range of interests very similar to mine. (He even has some software that really wants to be SdiDesk ;-) And which was written long before I got started.)

At the same time, some of his intuitions are diametrically opposite to my own. I would never have written SdiDesk in Java, and I'm pretty sceptical about the Semantic Web as a whole.

Nevertheless, good luck to Danny on this. It's always inspiring to see people chasing their dreams, particularly of a life of independent software R&D. And I look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

LifeHacker has a story that speaks to one of my fantasies.

Now we're getting cheap digital cameras and camera-phones, I'd like some really good software which could let me take photos of diagrams, scrawled on a piece of paper, and turn them into something useful. I want something really smart. Which can figure out the basic topology of a diagram viewed from any angle, and would then allow the user to quickly hint it into shape.