Innovation in Software

This blog is now at http://blog.vagueware.com – hopefully all bookmarks and incoming links will automatically follow through and so I shouldn’t lose any traffic.

If you now go to the main Vagueware site you will see a relatively empty TWiki installation waiting for the fun to begin. Over the course of this weekend I’m going to be dropping a dozen or so articles into each section to give a flavour of where it’s going, and then I hope to try and drum up a bit of interest from others.

As a rule of thumb, 1% of people viewing a Wiki will edit it. I think for it become an interesting site, I need about 50-100 edits a day, which means I now need make sure that the initial content I work with is compelling enough to get at least 10,000 unique visitors a day. It’s going to be quite a challenge, but I’m looking forward to it.

In other news, this install of Mephisto I’m using on the blog is starting to annoy me intensely. It may be time for a move over to another system, but for now that’s not important.

I always like the first launch of something new. It’s exciting as you see what the reaction is. Right now, I’m busy coding away on a project for a client but am looking forward to spending this evening and tomorrow morning putting up a couple of dozen articles into the new Vagueware site.

As you can see there are a couple of areas I didn’t mention when describing what I wanted to do. I thought I’d run through the sections now and see what people thought:

Development is going to be the core of the site in many ways. Here I’m hoping people will describe problems software can solve and then a collaborative effort will work out various solutions. The solutions will start out using a template based on Edward de Bono’s “six-hat thinking” which is just a way of making people think through every angle of what it is they’re proposing. I’m hoping that in time they’ll evolve into functional specifications you could hand to a programmer, and they’d be able to produce working software.

I hope to be amongst the first of those programmers. It’s not enough to just talk about software – it actually needs to turn into an executable at some stage, or it doesn’t count.

There are a lot of issues about the Development area I’ve yet to resolve with regards to how it’ll work. I haven’t suggested a license or dealt with copyright completely yet, but need to in the next day or two. I’m not sure how communication will work. I’m not even convinced anybody will turn up and help – I could be talking to myself permanently. It’s hard to know.

Research is more fluffy as an area of the site, with the aim of providing strong articles on areas of software research and innovation. You can think of it as a software-dedicated Wikipedia if you like, but with a more informed style and less dry in tone. I don’t think it’s possible for you to learn anything from Wikipedia’s articles on software – they act as a reference, a reminder for the already informed – whereas I want this area to be somewhere people go to discover and learn something new. It’s an ambitious goal, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

WEBINT was something I setup for no other reason than I didn’t want the research area clogged up with company and product-specific information. This is the area where profiles can be built up on specific companies, services and products. Whilst the research area might have articles on the technical, sociological and political impacts of social networking (for example), WEBINT would list all the social network websites and provide a list of features provided. There would be a coupling between the Research area and WEBINT obviously, but it would allow those who interested in one aspect of a technology to research and delve into it without having to be dragged into an article they consider too deep or too superfluous.

I’m still playing with TWiki and deciding if it’s the right tool for the job. Right now, it looks like it does almost everything I need and seems user-friendly enough. But. I’m also tempted to just go back to mediawiki because everybody recognises it and knows how to use it. I’m holding off for now, but need to make a call in the next 24 hours because that’s when I really want to get the show on the road.