Since we’re 2.0-ing everything that comes out a bit different than the usual, welcome Wiki 2.0! It’s a product called WetPaint that apparently hosts your wiki on their server and is going to run advertisements on the pages.
The interface seems real nice and easy and there’s a tour to show you around. I’ll take some time to explore it more soon. This is a reminder post. Just can’t figure out what to build a Wiki about though. Any ideas?
Tip by TechCrunch.
It’s been quite some time I forgot a bit about Paul Graham, after having eagerly gone through a boatload of his essays when I first found out about him reading his excellent Ansi Common Lisp. Now, thanks to a newbie friend of mine, I got back to him again. And, on a great essay about Web 2.0, he drops this pearl:
“On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.”
Mind closely that last part: “you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.”
That pretty much sums it up. How long is the mainstream media going to keep this unidirectional approach to the web? You pay for it, you read it, and that’s that.
What’s the sollution? Bring down newspapers and put everyone to blogging? I don’t think so. Should they live unaltered side by side? Probably not. Should they meet in between? Perhaps.
There’s been some activity in that area, as with BlogBurst helping bloggers get published on big newspapers and magazines (or maybe helping those with great blogger freelancers) and with Press Releases having BackTracks.
It’s incredible how far-reaching these new social-web developments are getting.
A more contextual alternative to email
February 21, 2006 — obvio171Inspired by Shrikant Joshi’s comment at TechCrunch I decided to put some thought to how email can be “more contextual”.
When I think of “contextual”, I imagine a local, distributed, on-the-spot sort of thing. I imagine embedded.
So my idea of “more contextual”, on these few minutes I put myself thinking about it, is a web application that would allow me to centralize all my text communication into one place.
To date, we have Gmail + Gtalk. You bind together two forms of textual communication into one place, go through your chat history as you would through your regular email, that sort of thing (plus google/yahoo groups).
Now throw into that your blog comments, your flickr comments and mostly any kind of text stuff you drop around on the web everyday. Imagine those being entered through an embedded “drop box” that, besides leaving your text on the website you are, direct it back to your email, saving information about the website, allowing replies to come in and go back as if you were responding to a normal email (coComment generalized and integrated to email).
This idea of a embedded drop box for entering text throughout the web allows for an extension of the Gmail+Gtalk concept in which, instead of centralizing the applications into one place before integrating them, centralizes the incoming and responding, while pulverizing the outgoing.
That would be “contextual” to me.