Gadgetopia

You may have already seen something on TiddlyWiki floating around the blogosphere. If you thought, “Blech, yet another Wiki”, without checking it out, adjust your attitude and go check again, because you’re missing out on one of the most original concepts to hit the web in some time.

A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it’s divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole. I think that TiddlyWiki represents a novel medium for writing, and will promote it’s own distinctive WritingStyle.

The whole system is written in Javascript. It’s similar to the editing concept I proposed in the first installment of This Old Blog, but with a much cleaner execution (I have, of course, started snooping source).

What’s novel about it is that it’s sort of an entire Wiki contained in a single page. When you click a link to a new WikiWord, it opens that word within the same page, so you can read in a very stream-of-conciousness sort of way.

The one downside at the moment is that there’s no way to save edits back to the server, but Patrick Curry and Gabriel Jeffrey have already solved that problem. Brilliant.

(I hadn’t posted much today for fear that my cold-medicine-addled state would lead to some weird posts. Deane poked me with the email stick to get me rolling. Thanks, buddy.)