Hunting The Muse

I've been blogging for

I've been blogging for a while and I've also been reading discussion groups for a while - whether web-based or usenet.

There's one concept, though, that I think the internet would be GREAT for, that we haven't seen a great medium for yet. And that's Making Progress.

What the hell do I mean? Well, for instance. One of the newsgroups I am reading is rec.arts.int-fiction . They discuss interactive fiction - the old infocom game. There's a lot of academic interest in the area. A piece of interactive fiction isn't quite a video game, isn't quite a MUD, isn't quite virtual reality, isn't quite a book. So what is it?

Someone on that group asked that question recently - asking if it were possible for them to come up with an actual definition of interactive fiction. Some people tried, more people brought up flaws, argued points, argued subpoints...

What, I ask you, are the chances that over the course of that conversation, everyone will actually hash out a definition of interactive fiction? That they'll pull together the parts they all agree on, separate out the parts they don't agree on, and integrate it into one slimmed-down document?

From my experience reading internet discussions, I'd say just about nil. Usually what it takes is one insanely dedicated reader to pull together everyone else's points and journal them. And that just ain't efficient. What usually happens is either everyone agrees on something and then they all go home, leaving that thing to wither and die, orphaned in the ether, or, two groups of people argue a point endlessly until they get bored or distracted by something else - again leaving the discussion point to wither. And often times in the course of these discussions many points just get abandoned.

They're archived, sure, but how interesting is that? When we are researching a point or a concept, We go back and find discussions to find the information, not to find all the personalities having their little side arguments or reinforcing their view that Something Has To Be Done.

I'd argue that archived discussions are not the best form for the information uncovered in those discussions. It's the prose before the poetry, it's the scrawled notes before an outline. What's needed instead is a living document that self-evolves - without the burden being placed on one person that painstakingly reviews every point to make sure everything is represented clearly.

Right now it looks like the closest answer to this is Wiki. Wiki is a system where someone opens up their webpage so that anyone can edit it. People come in, edit information, add new information, delete information, and the web page can be set so that all revisions are saved in case something gets corrupted.

But there are problems - what about pulling in new sources of information? And who decides what level of detail to go into? And how do you guard against entirely irrelevant additions?

Blogs frustrate me because while it is hard to find archived information, it is even harder to find packages of archived information. For the thoughts that have only been disseminated via blogs, it's already starting to feel like I have to put together a puzzle every day to find them. This will grow exponentially in the future.

But a blog combined with a wiki.... that's a possibility. What if at the end of every blog entry, I had an "integrate me" link? Or perhaps only at the bottom of entries I specifically wanted to catalog? Then either I or perhaps anyone could integrate them - the next screen would be a checklist of categories, perhaps - multiple categories could be chosen.

And then perhaps each of those categories could be a wiki. A living document, but always being fed with unprocessed bits of information. Little todo items for people to respond to. Someone could read the living document, read an unprocessed bit of information, and edit the living document to integrate the unprocessed bit of information - and then that bit would disappear from the unprocessed list.

So a blog entry could be wiki'd. And people reading a blog entry could go to the wiki's it got integrated into.

Still letting it tumble around in my head.... hrm.... hrm..... Posted by Curt at June 23, 2002 09:54 PM