CTO Articles
Published in IT World
July 11, 2006
WIKIs - a tipping point for the Web?
If the Web was a botanical thing, what would it look like? Something like ivy perhaps? A life form that spreads itself by inter-twining with all other matter in its wake. A life form that latches on to any opportunity that comes its way to spread itself even further afield.
If the Web was a mathematical thing, what would it look like? Something featuring an exponential growth curve I suspect.
Something with the all-important property that its growth rate is proportional to how big it already is.
If the Web was a sentient thing what would it look like? I have no idea what it would look like, an exploding galaxy perhaps?
Regardless of its appearance, if it was sentient we would expect to see evidence of a desire to reproduce itself. We would expect a self contained system capable of reproduction and capable of defending itself against predators.
If the Web had an equivalent of DNA what would it look like? A page? A tag? A link? A protocol?
I think the DNA of the web is the humble link. If I may be permitted a flight of fancy, perhaps the link tag is the true life form that has created all of this other web stuff just so that links will get created and propagated. Is the Web just a hyperlink's way of making another hyperlink in the same way that a chicken can be viewed as an egg's way of making another egg?
While this far aloft on a flight of fancy, I might as well look at the Web through evolutionary glasses. Imagine you are the Web for a moment. You are totally focused on the creation of links. In your early years, creating new links involved creating new pages with tools that were not an intrinsic part of you. New pages were created with a prosthesis known as a text editor and stitched into you by means of transportation programs such as FTP and SCP.
Over time, the prosthesis programs became better and better to the point where non-technical users could just use word processors and graphical FTP clients to ship pages around.
Then something important happened. A tipping point. Web browsers became powerful enough to act as editors as well as browsers. All of a sudden, the need for prosthetics fell away. The Web developed a built-in way of creating new pages and the all important coterie of links that go with them.
WIKI technology[1] in particular, oozes with link creation machinery. Words that take certain pre-ordained forms are automatically hyperlinked - regardless of whether or not a page already exists. Creating a brand new page is as simple as clicking on a link. No external editor. No ftp program. Just the Web itself.
But who uses WIKIs you may ask? Well, as is always the case with these things, WIKIs became popular with specialist groups first. Developers have been using them for years. More recently, Wikipedia[2] has exploded awareness of WIKI technology.
However, this is small stuff compared to the recent announcement that eBay is making WIKI available to all its users[3].
The explosion of WIKIs -- the Web's first self contained link replicators - sure feels like some sort of inflection point to me.
What next? Is the web just a WIKI's way of making another WIKI?
[1] http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[3] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ebay_wiki_world.php