Wikalong is a beautiful idea for a wiki.
Basically, it allows you to enter in urls as wikiwords–and this, combined with the fact that it uses the firefox sidebar to display its content, makes it so that you can make a running commentary of the intarweb. This strikes me as being at the core of what Vannevar Bush wanted to do with his memex:
Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
(except for the bit on dry photography ;) )
2004/09/30 Update: While it might be an interesting concept, a couple week’s worth of use shows that the implementation leaves a bit to be desired.
- It takes up too much screen real-estate for me to keep it on all the time (perhaps if it was in a scrolling pane down along the bottom of the screen)
- (especially given that it’s quite lacking in content, and is blank all the time)
- The audience (wiki-fluent users) are likely to browse blogs frequently and wikalong doesn’t deal well with dynamic content (see comments on boingboing’s wikalong page)
