Monday, July 2, 2007
Wikis are most often billed as collaboration tools. But considering what makes the wiki a great collaboration tool points to some other often over-looked wiki applications. For example, a lot of customers (including myself) use EditMe for a "personal wiki". It was a personal need that I originally developed EditMe to fill, and it's the way I use EditMe most frequently today. Put simply, everyone should have one of these.
A personal wiki can act as your home page, your to do list, your journal, a reference manual, image gallery, quick and easy online file storage, your one-stop dumping ground for information on the web, or all of the above. It's searchable, always changing, and always on and accessible from anywhere.
Sure, there are tools that perform each of these tasks individually in robust and complete ways, but a wiki site can do it all integrated into a single place. A good friend of mine once referred to EditMe as "a clean sheet of paper on the Internet," and the personal wiki embraces that idea. Your wiki is what you make it - it does not set out to be anything on its own. And because of that, it will gladly become whatever you make it.
One of the obstacles I had using a wiki this way was security. The wiki services I found couldn't be "locked down". I store some pretty sensitive stuff on my wiki, like passwords and license keys. I needed SSL encryption and a secure login mechanism. I also wanted to be able to make public pages, or pages that require a specific login if I wanted to share something with a friend. I've made sure these features are available and easily managed in EditMe.
My personal wiki is my browser's home page, both at home and at work. The home page of my personal wiki serves as my Getting Things Done inbox and next action list. If you're not familiar with Getting Things Done, it's a time and task management system (check it out on Google).
I use my site's menu area that appears on every page to link to project pages that maintain the status and action items of all my projects. I've dropped a nifty Javascript calendar widget in there so I can see where I'm at in the current month. And I've setup 31 numbered day pages and a page for each month to act as an online Tickler File. If one of the days has a task that requires my attention, I simply bold the link to make it stand out. Low tech? Sure, but it works great.
In addition to time and task management, the site acts as a searchable information repository. When I come across something I may want later, I simply create a page and dump it in. I can always find it via search down the road when I need it. If I suspect I've solved a problem before, I always search my wiki first, and then Google.
As I said above, everyone (or at least everyone who sits at a computer for the majority of their day) should have and use a personal wiki. As Ward Cunningham might say, it's the simplest thing that could possibly work. How do you (or will you) use your personal wiki?
