Wikification: thinking in public

Over the last 3 years, I’ve stored many small snippets of information in a set of Google Notebooks. Sample topics: notes for blog posts, programming skills that I’d like to learn and preliminary (or half-baked) ideas for research or software projects. I’ve learned that:

  • Whilst Google Notebook is great for scraping information from web pages, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of editing and presentation
  • Ideas left in private notebooks quickly become dead ideas

Yes you can publicise, tag and collaborate at a Google Notebook, but this doesn’t fit with my workflow – or that of many others, I suspect. So, I’ve taken as much of the material as I want to make public and dumped it on a wiki at Wikidot.com. By the way, if you’re looking for a free hosted wiki with plenty of features, you could do a lot worse.

If anything there interests you enough to add material, let me know and I’ll invite you as an editor (you’ll need to create a wikidot account if you don’t have one).

6 thoughts on “Wikification: thinking in public”

  2. Yaroslav Nikolaev

    Nice! Given that both you and Deepak have ended in this state, it is likely to represent a sort of energetic minimum ;)
    Besides obvious benefits, do you think this wiki-mode of expressing your thoughts could benefit from external “interactivity” in a form of comments? Sort of like in here..

  3. cameronneylon

    It seems kind of irritating that you end up needing to use both blogs and wikis to do everything you want rather than just one content management system that does both for you. Hopefully someone is working on this because it seems to be quite a common problem in managing ideas and thoughts and records.

  4. nsaunders Post author

    Agreed Cameron. I think to some extent this is a problem with using free hosted services. Hosting your own site allows for much more flexibility wrt a CMS. I prefer the convenience of hosted, but that may change one day.

  6. nsaunders Post author

    My understanding is that the Google Notebook service remains available; they’ve just stopped development and new user sign-up.

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