After the western invention of movable type not much changed for a very long time. It took many many years for people to realize the peculiar possibilities of cheap, printed texts. Gutenberg invents the Western version of movable type in the 1440s, and it’s in use by 1450. He thinks of it in terms of… Continue reading

I was watching Star Trek — the early episodes — with the family a couple weeks ago when it occurred to me: Silicon Valley has got the lesson of the Star Trek computer all wrong. Here’s the Silicon Valley mythology of it, from Google, but it could be from any company there really: So I… Continue reading

I’ve talked a bit about federated wiki in terms of the way it enables collaboration with others across institutional boundaries. But as we go into Happening #2, I’m gaining more appreciation with the way that it allows for collaboration with ourselves across temporal boundaries. That may sound really muddled. But consider the scenario I demonstrate… Continue reading

[T]he problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt. So the bad writers tend to go on and on writing crap and giving as many readings as possible to sparse audiences. These sparse audiences consist mostly of other bad writers waiting their turn to go… Continue reading

As we plan for our second fedwiki happening the differences between federated wiki and wiki become, well, stranger. If you’ve been following the story thus far, you know that federated wiki is pretty radical already. As with wiki, people converse through making, linking, and editing documents. But because each person has a seperate wiki, there… Continue reading

So I’m super excited to announce we’ll be doing a Fedwiki Happening on Teaching Machines with Audrey Watters helping to facilitate. If you don’t know what federated wiki is yet, the short answer is its a form of wiki where everyone has  personal wiki that magically links to other wikis to form a federation. People… Continue reading

Tim Klapdor has a good explanation of what the FedWiki Happening was and how it went on his site. For those that want to understand what all the fuss is about, that’s maybe a good place to start. He also has one of the better lines of the week: There are some idiosyncrasies to learn,… Continue reading

There’s a really excellent post over at Frances Bell’s blog talking about problems with forking in fedwiki — and really about the meanings associated with different types of revisions and decisions of people.  And there’s a lot there to comment on, but the piece I take away is that we haven’t reduced the stress of… Continue reading

I don’t know how to start talking about the Fedwiki Happening publicly, to people who have not been a part of it. I’m worried that to people who haven’t experienced it it will be about as exciting and comprehensible as hearing someone narrate a dream, or an acid trip. Which, I suppose, makes it very… Continue reading

I’ve talked a bunch about Federated Wiki, and the idea a system like it could reinvent the way we talk on the we talk on the web, replacing our Twitter streams of reaction porn with something more substantive, connected, and iterative. So, imposing on people I knew across the intertubes, I decided to put together… Continue reading