This morning I’m thinking again about my want to create an ambitious internet application where people can post their art, and art in development, and have peers give feedback. I may also want it to be a repository of people’s reviews and information about media (much like the web site IMDB) for reference and inspiration. I think this would be a very long-term/far-off project because I’ve decided to pursue acting and video game art instead of programming.

Which reminds me that I probably want to copy and redirect my school log here.

There are things I like more about wikis and things I like more about blogs.

I was just trying to type a search into google and the page spontaneously refreshed and posted my old search term in the middle of my typing (don’t you hate that?!), so that when I was done typing and pressed enter I accidentally searched for “wikiog”, and found this page among two others. Um.. I’ll look at that later, but does this mean an integration of features from wikis and blogs? That might rock.

Yeah, it’s a wiki/blog thing. Hmm.. it’s here. Open source. Great. Not looking at it right away.. that accidental search seems serendipitous though.

Geh.. I have pages to move relating to this. My time is dwindling.. I’ll just link them for now. I have this aging page, and with it, a pull I made of a Wikipedia talk page on IMDB from a specific date, with the article page from the same date. These are no longer necessary because Wikipedia now incorporates a feature to directly link to an article in a state it was in at a certain date - so that here at Wikipedia are the same talk page and article.

Anyway.. the few thoughts I had this morning that led to all this are that before I engineer any social/knowledge software long down the road I would want to have a fairly detailed survey of philosophy (which includes religion), psychology, and politics in my brain (and also for other reasons - I increasingly think that philosophy is the root of all knowledge), including my own analasys of how various social software/knowledge applications make people behave. For the pages I want to copy I would add blogs as social software - in fact I think they are more intuitive than most other things, and that’s why I’ve gone blog-crazy and put up this and three other blogs for three other topics/projects. I’ve been thinking I may move articles from my wiki to here, and use my wiki only as a categorical repository of media in my life.

Double anyway, I think I’ve never said that I’ve speculated on having whatever peer-reviewing web site I might ever make have people provide anonymous feedback to other people’s art. I don’t know about that anymore.. maybe optionally? Also, I can’t have people simply assigned to review each other’s work, because people are lazy and shuck assignments. It’s all got to be totally voluntary, but with some kind of reward - critters.org puts you further ahead in a cue to have your own things reviewed if you review other people’s writing.

I want the application to encompass both the formality of wikis and the informality of blogs, with the media indexing capabilities of imdb. This is very ambitious. Mabye someone else will just make this application if I wait long enough and then all I have to do is tweak it a bit and there you go.

I think one reason laypeople are more inclined to post to blogs is that it’s easier: the comment form is right on the page (at least in Movable Type). Another thing is that people want credit and ownership for what they write, and that tends to be obscured in wikis (it could be made very clear via diff text highlighting though).

And I repeat that wikis must be WYSIWYG before they will take over the world.