TiddlyWiki - The Future?

Wiki came. Blogs came. Podcasts came. Vodcasts are almost here. Now this old Wiki thing is all set to become the next new thing.

TiddlyWiki is the Wiki flavor of the season. Why? 'cause it's got a funny name :-) Well, it's really fun using and building it too. It's built on a very powerful but simple concept. "Human minds are a lot better at taking information in little tiny chunks." They call a chunk of information a Tiddler :-)

Several Tiddlers make up for a topic. There are many other power packed features. The interface is great. The tags support is very much an integral part....This interface reminds me of moo.fx. We can selectively keep some Tiddlers on display, while closing the others. Which means, we only see as much as we want to see.

There is this another great story telling site built on TW. Gimcrack'd has got a small list of stories right now. The story proceeds in tiny tiny chunks and the interesting part is, it is revealed differently to different users, based on the order in which they open the Tiddlers. Everyone has their own tale to tell !!
Reminds me of those Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew combined mystery stories. Go to page xyz if you'd like Hardy Boys to solve the mystery or goto page abc if Nancy Drew has to solve it. We used to read both of them anyway ;-) But here, it's a truly different story, as we can track all the previous chunks read and decide on which chunk to serve next.

One thing that strikes me is, all these so called _powerful_ concepts are all so simple and makes me ask like, "This is so very simple. Wasn't this thought of before itself? basic common sense!!".

Here's my 2 cents on where this could lead to:

First, there is this inclination towards bringing programming language like fundas into our natural representation of ideas. Information is broken up into chunks and modularized. A small piece of information can be reused again and again. So, instead of links to external manuals for more information, we can get that information chunk into our document itself. Saves much efforts in redocumenting things as per the context.

Second, the DRM concerns have peaked up now. There are people ready to let go of the stringent copyrights and share their works under more relaxed Creative Commons licenses. Richard Stallman decries CC and tells GPL can be extended beyond software to cover _content_ also. I think, we can expect more and more publicly modifiable and reusable _content_. We'll soon see different flavors of a novel, all legally valid. ;-)
Or given a set of chunks, which can all fit into a particular part as alternatives, generate a random sequence of chunks and get a new novel generated !!

Or may be, feed and make the computers understand very small chunks of data, and slowly plug/load them with extra chunks to _teach_ them new things....

Before I start rumbling more crazy things, GOOD BYE.

technorati tags: TiddlyWiki, story-telling, story, wiki, Future-tech