Collaboratve Systems: Blogs, Wikis, and Others

Overview
Computers have become less and less used for storage and processing  and more and more used for communication. Blogs and wikis are taking the world by storm, allowing ordinary and extraordinary people to "publish" information at a maddening rate, and to communicate and collaborate as never before. We are in the early stages of such communication applications, and there is little integration with each other and with traditional desktop applications. For instance, bookmarking is very similar to blogging, but there is no relationship in terms of existing applications.

Goals
Compare and contrast collaborative systems: blogs, wikis, rss systems, bookmark systems and personal information management systems (e.g., webtop). Maybe also consider email and chat. First step is an extensive survey of existing literature on the subject.

Within the blog and wiki worlds, compare different engines/tools for development. You'll need to download a number of blog and wiki engines and see how easy/difficult they are to setup, the flexibility and ease-of-use after setup, etc.

Also check out the blog search engines such as feedster and technorati. How do these come into play in the overall scheme of collaborative systems? How can blog search and entry be integrated, e.g., when I'm entering a blog entry about X, it would be nice to see previous comments on X.

Develop a taxonomy of these communication modes, and suggestions for improvements or a brand new method of communication (note the annotator project is one such "new" method).

This project group is also responsible for creating the wiki for our course and updating it. The process will be to take student's blog entries, filter them (pick the good ones), and organize them in the correct place in the wiki. One reason that the group is assigned this task is that your goal is to figure out the relationship between blogs, wikis, etc.

Specify and build a prototype for some type of blog/wiki tool that allows end-users to create and share information.

Issues
I'd like to enter things like I do with a blog, and then easily, without programming, build web pages or wikis that display lists of blog entries as defined by some queries.

For instance, I'd like to create a web page which has a list of all papers I know about concerning the semantic web, and all papers that Chris Brooks knows about. The page should dynamically grab information entities I've created, and comments that have been added to the entries.

Related Work

Wikipedia History of wiki

Wikipedia article on bliki -- combination of wiki and blog.

Tepper, The Rise of Social Software, ACM page

Treese, Open Systems For Collaboration, ACM page

VannevarBush, As We May Think, 1945 -- See his idea of personal threads

Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: parallel documents, deep links to content, deep …
TH Nelson… - Cited by 21