January 24, 1976. That's when I was born. 8 years later came the birth of the Macintosh. My baby sister was born on April 29, 1978. 17 years later and we have a newborn Tiger.
I'm also proud to announce a new member of the ¡nkspotting family: WikityWidget is a widget for one of the new parts of Mac OS X, the Dashboard. As the name implies, it's a wiki. Back in November, Apple announced a contest for Dashboard widgets. My recent fascination with Gmail had left me itching to see what I could do with JavaScript. At the same time, I had discovered SQLite and was learning the wonderful world of SQL. But let me go back a few years...
I've always been obsessed with information retrieval. Maybe it's because I'm not much of a note taker. I try to keep everything in my head for a few reasons:
I was also introduced to this internet thing at a young age. See, my mom is a bit of a bookworm so she made sure I knew how to use a dictionary and encyclopedia just about as soon as I knew how to read. My dad, on the other hand, was a bit of a computer geek, so he made sure I knew how to use CompuServe just about as soon as I knew how to type (Apple ][, MathBlaster, TurtleGraphics, AppleBasic, represent). Information overload from the moment you're born. I increasingly turned to computers to help manage the information. My first attempt was something I called Brain Dumps. Periodically, I would just write down everything i could think of into a plain text file, then just search that file for keywords (I eventually learned regular expressions) to retrieve some bits. That didn't scale to well, so I tried creating a bunch of different files and grepped the lot of them. Better, but it didn't really solve the big problem, most of my notes were just references to page numbers in books, and by this time there were a growing number of references to URLs.
So version 3 of the brain dump became what we would call tagging these days, or what I would call tagging at least, since I use computers — not spray paint. I would tag notes inline, a web url, a file url of a paper I'd written, or a page number in a book on my shelf. This system was a winner for me. I still forgot to pay my phone bill because I never used my phone, but I was able to keep track of a lot more stuff.
Which brings us back to now. I'm not sure when i discovered wiki, but it was probably when I started learning new programming languages for fun and profit. I'd search for something and end up on a wiki somewhere. At first I didn't even know that I was actually browsing a wiki. I gradually became more aware that a lot of disparate URLs contained the word 'wiki' in them. Curious, I learned a little more about wikis and things started to click. Link to other places by name instead of address, let the software figure out the address. Woohoo! One less thing to remember, more space for Seinfeld references.
Most people would say that the great thing about wikis are their collaborative nature. To me, that's their secondary functions. I think the strength of wikis lies in their ability to automatically organize and categorize bits of information. If the information set I'm dealing with is a public and shared, then wikis can handle that, but if the content is private, then the wiki can organize that for me as well.
Wikis are cool. The Wikipedia is cool. There's a somewhat high barrier to entry for setting up your own wiki though. Hopefully WikityWidget will lower that barrier and you'll be able to wikify your digital lifestyle. There's more to come, so I encourage you to support my efforts with whatever means are at your disposal.
- michael