i understand that it is fun and i understand that it is interesting, but i am wondering - with all your experiments - what have you set as common ground so far? as you say, it won't be a wiki clone, not a topic map implemention neither a weblog tool. just trying to get my imagination running.

and, hey, nice to hear from you.

I'm a big fan of wikis... they make quick, collaborative work a snap. In my experience people use them on the intranet when traditional intranets gather dust.

Wiki dont scale well in terms of either performance, or information imho.... the metadata and actions upon it are by informal convention contained within the content (performance scale problem) that is easy to break, get wrong or simply ignore.

I'm looking to keep the good wiki bit, but pull the metadata outside the content.

Weblogs are just incredibly convenient... they aren't good at persisting information though.... the amount of worthwhile information on the Web that's consigned to the "archive" is I think a great shame.

My hope is to "web" weblog like entries into a broader context so that they aren't lost.... in Conclave a blog entry can be shared among many topics. One place may be temporary as a highlight, another as a permanent resting place.... we badly need to stop throwing good information into archives.... so if I give a shout-out to S# Smallscript, the blog entry may only stay on the FrontPage a week or so, but it'll remain a blog entry under SmallTalk.... in an organisation this is even more useful.... also blog entries are just topics, so any topic can be made a blog entry... you get the idea.

Common ground?... the ease with which the information system can be bent easily into new shapes.... and integration with different data formats, which is the bit I'm just getting to.... oh and a steady learning curve. Easy stuff to to as a novice straight away, but still a tool that hasn't been dumbed down and that one can grow into.

This weekend I'll have finished topic "occurence" editing which along with allowing topics to point at multiple wikis, some of which may be unique to that topic, some of which will be shared with other topics also allows me to start dropping in support for other data formats such as RSS, FOAF etc.

Whether I manage to keep the best of wikis, weblogs and TMs and ditch their weak parts remains to be seen.... a lot of people are saying "eh?" so there's a good chance I'm missing the mark =)

to make information stick is an interesting project. imho the big question seems to be the process of preception and merging. so far archives fullfill a certain role, at least for a human who likes to dig :). but claro, there are certain ways how to do so. so far i don't see the light at the end of the tunnel: neither with topic maps, nor with weblogs or with the use of rss-feeds. you are right, something is missing ...

I'd be more than a little interested to hear your thoughts on merging, in particular how you envisage resources being merged.... I'm curious as to whether you use the term where I might have used "integration".

well first i guess that is a nice starter: communicate

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(steve newcomb)
the task is to find something that can be called metalevel, 'to catch the idea behind a term or name', right? to integrate in this case would be of no help: i will end up with a set of whatever that will grow wheresoever. also aggregation doesn't help: you get the same effect. under merging i understand that you have to try to define a metaterm under which corresponding ideas will fit. reading about patterns i humbled over another term that maybe would be of some help here: encapsulate. (or brings another angel to it)

after all discussion of freedom nikos salingaros thinks what is missing is an "enlightened dictatorship": both, bottom up and top down interventions are required to create communities. that's his conclusion after 30 years of discussion on patterns. going back to evolutionary processes and the idea of darwin. the problem is just: human are not good at this at all. i guess human came to a certain point, where they are better in making themself believe something is good, enlightened, functioning ... and here i am back at newcomb's statement on communication but also back at big ball of mud. still, it seems some ideas stick :) they merge in my head somehow, but on a spreadsheet? no sé.