WikidPad

Via Contentious Weblog I latched on to Wikidpad

It’s a personal Wiki for your own PC.

Q Huh?

Well you might use it to organise your own to do lists, jottings, embryonic articles, stuff like that.

Q But aren’t Wiki meant to be collaborative?

Well yes, that’s the BigIdea, but there are other aspects of Wiki as well, such as the ease of link making (WikiWords) and ultra simple markup language. WikidPad deploys these powerful features for personal collaboration.

Q Andy, you’ve lost me now. WTF is personal collaboration??

Ok, I made that up. But when you update a to do list, or start writing a report by sketching out headings which you might come back to later, it’s a bit like collaborating with your past and future self. get it?

Q I ask the qustions!

Sorry. I think you might have to have the ‘global learner’ style to appreciate the advantages. Or if you were once a computer programmer perhaps, using the top down modular method.

Q Right. So what are you going to do with this new personal collaboration tool then?

I’ll start off using it as an aide memoire, to paste in ideas and details I don’t want to lose. But then next year or maybe sooner, I’m going to use it for the authoring stage of writing my ultraversity assignments. I’m going to move away from the Patchwork Text method, and start from the top down instead. It makes more sense to me. I’ve already decided I need to do the literature review first instead of at the end. I’ll sit down with a blank Wikidpad instead of a blank Dreamweaver and grow the report wiki-style, with all the flexibility that entails – then export it as HTML and into Dreamweaver for further development and presentation.

Q Hmm, well good luck

That’s not a question.

Q Ooh. Um, so are there any snags so far with Wikipad?

Yeah, It doesn’t run on a Mac. There must be similar systems though – or soon.