Doc Searls has been thinking about what’s missing in wiki technology.
Wikis are flat. All topics are at the same level. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but lousy for, say, projects. Joint efforts such as ProjectVRM are not flat. They have topics and subtopics. These change and move around, and this is where an outliner like MORE is so handy. With a few keystrokes you can move topics up and down levels, back and forth between higher-level headings… You can hoist any single topic up and work on that as if it were a top level. You can clone a topic or a piece of text and edit it in two places at once. I could go on, but trust me: it freaking rocked. There was no faster way to think or type. Hell, I’m typing this in one of its decendents: an OPML editor, also written by Dave Winer.
Anyway, just wanted to say, here in the midst of an unrelated local conversation, that wiki that works like MORE remains on the top of my software wish list for the world. Trust me: it would make the world a much more sensible place. And make both individual and group work a helluva lot easier.
Dave Winer is interested. I’d put money on the proposition that something useful will come from this.
MORE was the most useful piece of software I’ve ever used. It ran on all the early Macs I owned. For years after OS X came out I retained the Mac Classic emulator for just one purpose — so that I could run MORE. I stopped only after Q discovered OmniOutliner, which is pretty good — and still the best tool for thinking on my machine. But it only works on my stuff: a wiki tool which would bring that kind of functionality to collaborative documents would be a killer web app.