Wikimania

I've been thinking about wikis a lot lately. I've been plotting various wiki projects for Skillset around job profiles to establish the "official" and the "actual" stories about what people really do for a living. The new Wikimono app on Facebook looks very interesting. And I had a good chat with Paul Youlten yesterday about his new WikiLaLa project for film and TV. Maybe there's something in the water at the moment. I like the concept of wikis. Any software that assumes everybody can be trusted seems to be aiming in the right direction. But they can be tricky to get right. I created a wiki for my FreeSchool project, but I didn't really manage to create the communal area that I was looking for. We've used them for School of Everything too, but the biggest problem there was that on any important issue, the debate would progress offline and the wiki would often end up being inaccurate. They also don't handle decision-making terribly well. Major exceptions like Wikipedia aside, I think wikis work best when they're contained within a community. If there's a pre-existing team working on a project, a wiki can be a great repository of information; a space for recording progress and keeping notes. Wikimono may work well too, by providing wikis for events, groups, communities that create manageable chunks of collaboration. Let's see how it takes off.

For more fluid activities though, other paradigms may be needed. There are "blikis" - blogs as the front-ends for wikis - which neatly introduces a time dimension into the wiki information to give it some context. MediaWiki can often be more useful for its comments engine than the wiki itself. I'm also meeting the guy at if:book who developed the CommentPress engine on Wednesday, so I'll keep you posted on that too. The search continues.

Everything, Now!

The School of Everything is now open to the public. We officially opened our doors at Minibar last night, and although it's still early days there's lots in there to help people advertise classes and find teachers near them. It's a community site so please do sign up and join us, even if you don't want to teach yourself. At the very least you should meet some interesting people.

Take a look now at www.schoolofeverything.com, or say hello to us at hello[at]schoolofeverything.com.

The Visual Web

I had a good chat with Euan Semple yesterday about, amongst other things, how to design social web tools for visually-orientated people. Euan's been helping me figure out how to use blogs, wikis, forums and tagging to engage people in film and TV industries, and it really struck me how text-based most social web tools are. In many ways, web 2.0 is simply the web taken back to basics. At last we've stopped building websites using the rules of print and publishing, and we're extracting more value from simple hyperlinks again. But because of that, the semantic web requires us to be very textual in our thought patterns. There are some things that (visual impairments aside) can be communicated much more elegantly in colours, diagrams, sequences, videos or animations. And besides, doesn't it all that text just look at bit, um, boring?

At Skillset we created storyboard guides to the media industries that worked pretty well as a visual portal into the deeper site content. But they're still embedded as Flash pop-ups in text-based pages, and extracting content relationships from Flash movies is a bit like putting a comic through text-recognition software. Hyperlinked text and tag clouds are easily mapped, and navigation systems can use those relationships easily enough. But what about physical proximity on the screen? Or relative position in a narrative sequence? Or just things that look similar?

Microsoft's Photosynth and other similar projects (and possibly the OU's Compendium) are beginning to offer some answers, but it's still early days. So, how long before we can create navigation systems that are as flexible and granular as hypertext, but as visually appealing as a style magazine? How long before visual storytelling takes its place alongside text linking in the paradigm of the social web?

Open Learning, Open Technology

I had a fantastic meeting this week at the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, who were generous enough to show me some of the incredible software they've been developing. I think the standout product was the fantastic Compendium, a software tool for mapping and analysing arguments. It's free to download and I can already see incredible applications for it in user experience modelling, process analysis and team collaboration. I'm really looking forward to trying it out in some real-life situations.

They also had some brilliant remote-working tools, including FlashMeeting - probably the simplest and most effective video-conferencing tool I've seen - plus a couple of other tools for making people in remote locations feel part of a collaborative community. Great stuff.

The OU are also leading the way in open-sourcing their learning curriculum with the OpenLearn project. If you haven't seen it already, please do take a look: as usual, it's amazing what you can get for free these days. We're looking into how we can promote their content via School of Everything now.

Seedcamp

This month the School of Everything was shortlisted by Seedcamp as one of the top 20 tech start-ups in Europe. We didn't get the final round of funding but it's a brilliant endorsement for what we're doing - and from some of the most respected people in the web 2.0 world. We're also in the FT today. Here's an excerpt: (if you're registered, the full article is here)

One characteristic that seems to differentiate the Seedcamp start-ups from their US counterparts is the importance of social causes over the desire to make money.

The team behind School of Everything, an online marketplace to bring together private teachers and students, have backgrounds in journalism and social activism. Their technical director missed a day of Seedcamp so he could buy a tank to drive to a protest at a London arms fair.

Our CTO Pete was also in the mainstream press for driving said tank to the arms fair, which just goes to show there are more ways to get press coverage than you might think. Seth Godin would be proud.

About this site

Any self-respecting internet consultant needs a good website to advertise his services. This site was put together in one day for a grand total of £20, including hosting and domain registration. It's not the greatest site in the world, but it does the job with minimum fuss, which is what Sociability Ltd is all about. Find out more about what we do in our Services section, or contact me at andy[at]sociability.org.uk.

Andy Gibson Founder and Director, Sociability