Anyone who has been working with wikis for a while can see we have come to a crossroads.  I’m not talking about whether we’ll keep using wikis (probably none of us can function without them).  Rather, the path forward to keeping our wikis dynamic and growing is murky.  I think we can find our footing again if we focus on the three foundations of vibrate wikis: ownership, tagging, and permalinks.   Without these three pillars to support future wiki development, we’ll be stuck at the current fork in the road forever.Why do I believe this?  Examine your own experience with wikis over the past few years. (more…)

Have you heard the story of Quadralay’s 14 year old tennis balls? It’s a great example of what can happen when you fail to maintain the principles of business value and ownership.You see, back in the day (1994), we were working on creating this great new product to single-source FrameMaker 4.0 files to user-defined, text based outputs.  At the time, I called the project WDT – WebWorks Document Translator.  For some reason or other, our Marketing folks thought WebWorks Publisher would be a better name.  I guess they had a point.Anyway, to break up the day, one of Quadralay’s founders would take a little time off and play some tennis.  One day, he bought a canister with 3 new tennis balls.  He played his game, came back to the office, and placed that container (now with two good balls left) in our storage room.That was 1994. (more…)