Tiddlywiki

Patrick Lambe on his Green Chameleon blog mentioned me mentioning to him about a great little tool called "tiddlywiki". He does a good job of mentioning some of the benefits (and drawbacks) of using a tiddlywiki.

2 things I'd add though, both connected to its status as an open source tool. One is, as with many OSS tools, is that there is a very active development community behind it. It also means that the less geeky may have some trouble getting started, which is where a great site called tiddlywiki for the rest of us comes in.

Secondly, much like Mozilla Firefox, tiddlywikis can be enhanced through the use of plug-ins (similar to FF add-ons). There are all sorts of plugins for doing anything from adding a clock to you tiddlywiki, to setting up the wiki with an rss feed and using it as a blog. There's a whole mess of plugins available via del.icio.us.

In doing some reading about tiddlywiki, I also came across a great term for referring to it via wikipedia (there must be some word for using a wiki to find out about a wiki, like using a search engine to find another search engine). You see, tiddlywiki can be used as a "guerrilla wiki", which is a wiki you can use without having to get it approved and tested by your IT area as you would a normal software, and without having to worry about internal documents and sensitive information being stored outside of your IT environment.

In fact, the colleague who introduced me to tiddlywiki was using it as a resource for his team to capture processes and learnings, and just sat on their network drive as a single html file.

So, if you've always wanted to start playing with wikis, but were put off by having you mistakes available to the world - or you're looking at introducing wiki within your organisation by stealth, tiddlywiki might be for you.