WebLogs (blogs) and WikiWiki (wiki) span two extremes of authorship. In doing so they touch upon issues central to the nature of collaboration.
At the personal extreme is the blog. Blogging is charcterised by the admixture of the personal voice and viral attribution. Blogging is made possible by the formal and mechanical: attribution through URLs, and publishing through HTTP. Considered as a whole, the consequent written structure is best described as mycelial --- like the filamentous growth from which fungus develops. Blogs touch all parts of the web by rampant linkage, feed one another through the mechanics of RSS syndication, and are made up of a protoplasm of intensely personal musings.
At the collective extreme are wiki. Wiki subtract from blogging the temporal organisation of the journal, and its heightened personal aesthetic. Wiki add to blogging the liberty for all to edit, and the automatic generation of pages and hyperlinks according to a simple naming scheme. Again the constituents are mechanical, but the consequents are beyond organic. Where blogging is mycelial, the best wiki represent the fruiting fungus --- generating structure from detritus. In wiki, the personal voice is submerged into the collective whole and the product is an organisational memory.
Methodology
This project requires that the participants immerse
themselves in collective writings. This includes the construction
of a hypertextual system administration manual, and the performance
of several intensive seminar courses.
New Ground
The structure in wiki and blog are manifest in the
reading and writing. Critical to this process is an intimacy with
the operation of names and parts. Participants in this project are
developping new schema for naming, and in doing so creating new
organisational memories attuned to SIAL interests.
It is likely that SMS will ultimately have a greater global impact than the web. Complexity need not be a hallmark of innovation. Critical to the success of SMS was the freedom to define new languages under strong constraints (160 character messages). In order that collective entities, such as large scale design projects, amplify their intelligence they require collective languages. Wiki and blog are hothouses for the development of these collective languages.
-- AndrewBurrow