Scoble is writing about the advantages of using weblog software for remote meetings. He’s now the marketing manager for Userland Software, so I suppose he can be excused for seeing everything as a nail for the Userland hammer. At least he’s doing it in a constructive way.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure he’s right. Weblogs are great tools for communications, but there are significantly better options for facilitating remote meetings. At the top of the list is wikiwiki software.
Wikiwiki software is used to create wikiwiki webs, alternatively called wikiwikis or simply wikis. A wiki is a collaborative electronic writing environment. Participants all contribute to the same document. You’d think it would get messy, but it generally doesn’t. One of the most interesting wikis currently active is wikipedia, an attempt to build a collaborative encyclopedia from scratch.
As I emailed Scoble, there are several reasons why Wikis may be better than weblogs for meetings:
- Meetings tend to happen in real-time and are very dynamic. Weblogs can be near-real-time and relatively dynamic; wikis tend to be much closer to real-time and much more useful in dynamic situations.
- Weblogs tend to be used for one-to-some communications (some—like Scripting News, Doc Serls’, and Scobelizer are one-to-many—but they are the exceptions). Wikis tend to be used for some-to-some communication).
- Weblogs feel more permanent; wikis feel more transient. Or, put another way, weblogs feel like publications; wikis feel like collaborative conversation spaces.
Maybe what works best is a combination of the two. It’s possible to combine a weblog and a wiki in Zope in a fairly straightforward manner, using off-the-shelf modules called “products.”
It may also be possible in Userland’s Frontier product, or it may be something that Userland may consider adding.
Or maybe Scoble and I are both wrong and Groove is the perfect answer for remote meetings.
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