When the term "blog" first became really popular a few years ago, my friends and I mostly scoffed. After all, hadn't a series of links accompanied by opinionated commentary made up the bulk of most webzines and personal sites for years?

As Linux developer Nick Moffitt likes to put it: "The insipid neologism 'blog' appears to mean little more than a Web site that *actually* gets updated, as opposed to one that *promises* to be updated REAL SOON NOW and includes an animation of a MEN AT WORK sign."

We didn't understand then how much appeal systems like Movable Type and Blogger would have to people who find HTML and FTP intimidating. We didn't realize how the simple ability to leave comments could transform a "web ring"—a once-popular but never very effective arrangement of sites all linked to each other statically—into a truly dynamic community. We didn't predict the "blogosphere" (and oh, that word still makes my teeth hurt).

But when another web-based technology with a funny name came along, we didn't laugh. We saw the utility of a site that anybody can get on and edit—a wiki—right away. We could plan our camping trips with a wiki! We could keep contact lists up to date! It was a truly new use of technology, not just something we'd been doing all along with a new user interface slapped on top.

Actually, wikis have been around since at least 1995, when Ward Cunningham created the Portland Pattern Repository. It was designed to allow anybody—even complete strangers just stumbling across the site—to modify pages and add new content. He called this paradigm the "Wiki Wiki Web," a play on the Hawaiian term for "quick." In 2001, Cunningham wrote The Wiki Way (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 020171499X), and that same year saw the birth of what has become the flagship wiki application: Wikipedia.

As Wikipedia defines itself: "Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's articles and have their changes instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Its authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be 'edited mercilessly and redistributed at will' by anyone who so wishes. Its articles are not controlled by any particular user or editorial group, and decision-making on the content and editorial policies of Wikipedia is instead done by consensus and occasionally vote."

Wikipedia now exists in 200 languages. The English language edition contains over 772,892 articles (though it should be said that many of these are "stubs," or incomplete entries). It is now regularly cited as authoritative in the context of academic or technical discussions. It may not yet replace more traditionally researched and edited encyclopedias, but it's been a great success by any reasonable measure. Other wikis are now using the concept to break new ground in other areas: for instance, WikiTravel and World66 are building comprehensive world travel guides from the compiled experience of thousands of individual tourists.

Still, where blogs have broken spectacularly into the mainstream consciousness, wikis remain a niche technology used mostly by geeks. There is no "wikisphere" to rival the blogosphere.

At least, not yet. Change may be in the wind. A British nonprofit recently announced that it is building a link between Wikipedia and Google Maps—a link that might expose wikis to a wider audience. And two startups, JotSpot and WikiSpaces, say they can provide user-friendly interfaces that will do for wikis what has already been done for blogs.

"The markup thing can really scare people away," says WikiSpaces' James Byers. "It's the worst of all worlds. It's not HTML, it's this stuff."

His business partner Adam Frey agrees: "The temptation for technical people is to put in as much as possible. What you want is as little structure as possible so they don't get scared away...the power of a wiki isn't diminished by making it easy to use. You put information out there in a form that makes it easy for the people who work with it."

Frey and Byers hope their visual editor and graphically structured workflow will attract nonprofits and small communities of individuals like gamers' guilds or book clubs. JotSpot, by contrast, is aiming for an enterprise market: "You're tracking bugs, issues, vacation days," says Scott McMullan, director of developer relations at JotSpot. "Those things are on whiteboards right now, they're in e-mail, in spreadsheets." By putting this information on the Web, "you get universal access and control," solving the question of who's got the latest lists.

"What I think is exciting," he says, "is that we're growing the population of what it is to be a developer, similar to the way that Excel kind of dramatically expanded what it meant to be a number-cruncher."

Blogs have been credited with transforming the way information is communicated. Wikis may transform the way it is collected and maintained. This time around, I don't think the idea is silly.

Posted by Shannon Cochran at 01:27 PM | Permalink