This is the publicly-readable WiKi Thinking Space of Bill Seitz. See Front Page for latest entries.

Meta:

• Check out Recent Changes (or the "Map" button in the upper right) until I make some prettier [Road Maps].

  • Some focus pages: Sustainable Capitalism, Systems And Games, Personal Network Architecture (leading to Dot Net Futures), Dealing With Terrorism, Collaboration Ware, Educating Kids, Information Sharing Processes, Business Models For Information, Intellectual Property)

  • Collaboration Roadmap

• You should be able to add comments to any page using the form at the bottom of it. If you intend to do so, go to User Options and assign yourself a User Name in Wiki Name format, just for kicks. I may choose to wipe out your comments without comment, or integrate them into my own commentary (sometimes credited, but I may be sloppy).

• To move my WebLog archives to this space, I needed to do some software customizing (Zwiki Customizations).

Summary/meta-pointers (what the heck is going on in this space?)

• Goals: see Thinking Space. Have felt like WebLog writing is too disposable, and doesn't encourage deeper (or bushier) thinking. Love WiKi, but want weblog entries to (a) refer to existing Wiki nodes and (b) stimulate the creation of new ones. Also would like to have all my past scribblings (Bill Seitz Writing Tool History) in one place/format, for easier migration to future media, and for current cross-fertilization.

• Status: how is this working (Zwiki Customizations)? I'm now writing both WiKi and WebLog stuff as wiki pages. The WebLog entries are distinguished by their Wiki Name, which uses an initial z for various silly reasons, then yyyy-mm-dd, then a tie-breaker final letter. I did some ZoPe DTML hacking to make views which render the full body for weblog entries and just the title for wiki pages (with weblog entries I also render the Wiki Name for editing and Perma Link purposes). I've also done some minor modification just to better support a publicly-accessible wiki (e.g. "hiding" some functions behind buttons to avoid search spiders, explode [Wiki Names] in title tags, make acronyms into [Wiki Words]).

• Future: integrate my changes with current ZoPe/ZWiki codebases. Start Migrating Content. Then worry about other Future Wiki Weblog Features (render diffs for wiki pages, maybe provide RSS, etc.).

Here are some Machines Hitting My Server

Another summary: I answered [Just One Question] for Michael Sippey...

Q: Why have you abandoned the standard Weblog form for a Wiki?

While my WebLog started for me in 1998 as a pass-along activity ("this is cool", "this is insanely stupid"), it became more of a combination of "Active Reading" (selecting Pull Quote-s is the equivalent of hiliting, which I do obsessively) and "Making Sense of the world", both of which are Brain Training. Jorn Barger's thoughts on a Personal Web Archive reinforced this for me.

I had always been interested in the "thought processor" software space (Bill Seitz Writing Tool History), but most of the interesting associative tools felt too "closed". So I was thrilled with I discovered WiKi in 1999, as it felt like a "safe" Hyper Text/PIM system. I quickly started thinking about the idea of using wiki for a Wiki Weblog, so that chunks could be associated over time; but I didn't do anything about it.

During 2001 there were 2 events which significantly increased my frustration with the disposability of blogbits. The announcement of Micro Soft's Pass Port and Hail Storm initiatives seemed to warrant some actual design activity, as criticism without a viable alternative would not be likely to slow Pass Port adoption. But blogging seems a poor medium for directed activity. Likewise, September 11th led me to blog a lot about Dealing With Terrorism while protecting our liberty, but I had difficulty tracking all the threads of issues over time. So I finally got working on putting up a wiki.

But I knew that I couldn't continue writing in 2 tools at the same time without going nuts, so I put more time into figuring out how I'd like to put blog items into wiki, and how I'd like to present them, while creating "standard" wiki pages at the same time (Thinking Space).

Thanks to the excellent work Simon Michael had done on the ZoPe-base ZWiki I was using, I was able to come up with a model requiring minimal programming changes (e.g. a hack). So a few weeks ago I started doing my blogging in wiki, and am a much happier camper. Sometimes blog events refer to an ongoing interest in a wiki page, other times blog "events" trigger a brand new wiki node. In either case a wiki node can lead me back easily to all the blog bits that refer to it (via Back Links). I'm not making much more sense yet, but I feel like I'm getting the scaffolding in place.

Hi Bill! Would you be interested in putting your [Web Seitz] in the Primarily Public Domain http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org ? And would you be interested in feeding our Idea Feeds http://www.ideafeeds.com ? You right good blurbs and it would be cool to circulate stuff around groups. Andrius Kulikauskas, ms@ms.lt

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