Steve Gets A Life

wiki v3.0

so stealing once again from alacrity, i send you off to discover JotSpot, a new type of wiki that is much more than a wiki.

first off, it has improved the wiki interface tremendously, basically it looks a lot better than your basic WikiWikiWeb. it also provides some neat new features, like being able to email to any page for an addition (eg if i cc: a page on the wiki, that email will be appended to the page, a great way to track discussions related to projects). also your standard WYSIWYG tools are available (bold, italic, align, colors, links) so if you know how to use a word processor, you're set. no Wiki formatting required to learn.

just adding those would be nice, would make this a cool new wiki. but what they do next brings this tool into a new realm. as mentioned in alacrity, this becomes sort of the 3rd generation of wikis after (1) basic wikis and (2) Database backed wikis (wikipedia, etc).

What is so great is essentially the introduction of structured data. instead of just being plain text, some bits can be considered "dates" or "values" and can be tweaked, sorted, etc. this allows a wiki to transform from a place to stick a bunch of linked thoughts into a Web Application Development Platform. their example of making a new-hire application is so simple, and so elegant, i just wonder what else can be done that easily. more interestingly, i wonder what tough problems will be find solutions here, ones not immediately obvious.

these guys are a company and they're going to sell this stuff. they just got $5.2M from a VC and it looks pretty neat. im gonna try to hop on early and see just what can be done with this new technology. because, really, thats what this is.

watch the demo (SWF)