Social Software

As I’ve mentioned I’ve gotten a job at Socialtext, which has been a very rewarding job – I tend to spend too much time working but it’s generally because I like what I do.

Many folks ask me “What’s a wiki?” Well, what *is* a wiki, and what do you *do* with it? I found the niftiest example of what a wiki is at 43 blogs, a list of the 43 best blogs… a wiki list. Which means that anyone who views the page can edit it. Go ahead, add your blog, remove another one, the only rule is that there have to be 43 blogs on the list when you’re done, because 43 is the magic number of web 2.0.

I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about how people use the web, and recently, through 43blogs, I ended up at BoingBoing (I couldn’t resist clicking a link that said ‘boingboing’…) and then from there I found a mention of this hysterical text-adventure version of World of Warcraft. Then I went on to look at other things, and a little later I realized I had to share that link, but alas, I am not in the del.icio.us habit and I had to retrace my steps to figure out which of the zillions of paths I’d followed had led there. Eventually I found it (the sad truth is that even though I could find the end point I needed, for some weird reason, to find out *where* I had found it). Thinking about patterns like this is something our company does a lot of.

One of the reasons this blog doesn’t get much love is because I spend a lot of the day blogging internally. And while the blogging features of our wiki product aren’t great, I’m becoming very addicted to the idea of LinkAsYouThink, so as I type this entry I’m finding this whole html linking thing getting in the way of my stream of thought. Very sad.

In more mundane news, it looks like we’ll be moving back to Scotts Valley, which is nice because almost all my friends live up there.