Thinkubator wikifies SFU
Im sitting in a NV session right now being put on by John Maxwell from SFU publishing. His workshop on ‘Designing Smarter Wikis‘ is showing some of his work on the Thinkubator site. He is using Zwiki on Zope/Plone engine, but you wouldnt be able to tell that from looking at it. SWEET! He is working WITH his grad students on the development of the site itself, not merely using it as a learning tool which is the first thing that strikes me as unique. Kind of a ‘media is the message approach. John is doing some interesting work in customizing his wiki, and making some simple options for authors to quickly and easily make different kind of wiki pages. For example, some pages can automatically list all their child pages in a sidebar, which could be very handy.
The discussion is lively, and it is apparent there is a LOT of interest in this topic, but we are at a nerd conference after all. It seems like they are beginning to broach the topic of RSS feeds in and from wikis which I am very interested in. At this poin,t the only use of RSS I see in conventional wikis is a ‘recent updates feed’ that simply lets you know WHEN a page has been updated. Well is kinda novel, but not really useful. In the wiki we have set up for our work (a wakka wiki) , my nemesis has hacked in some functionality to display RSS feeds right onto the wiki page. Now THAT is a handy feature! On my home page for instance, I can aggregate several of my feeds that are directly related to my work, such as this blog of my google starred items.
well off to another session, so quick. but im looking forward to following up with John on this later. great talk!
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:30 pm
You should probably come visit your disabled cow-orker to debrief. After all, I *did* have NV on my wanted list of conferences. There is beer. Hi to Brian, if you see him. And to Todd Maffin, who I suck RSS from.