Well I think I’ve finally sorted out how to keep my website a bit more organised. I’m over “hand-crocheting” websites, although the USMA Taekwon-do site is still hand-done. I’m using WordPress for most of my writing these days, and Aperture to manage my photos and make web albums. I’m beginning to play with video editing, but I haven’t really had enough time to do too much other than minimal work using iMovie to archive to DVD.
I haven’t found MediaWiki to be as good for collaborative writing as I thought it would be – maybe because I don’t always have access to broadband internet in the way I have grown used to (and possibly because I destroyed my MediaWiki installation through trying to move the index page … D’oh!). But on mature reflection, the most likely explanation is simply that wikis have a much more limited niche than initially anticipated. The more successful wikis (eg WikiPedia, various codices) seem to be those in which specific agreed-on content (documentation) needs to be collated efficiently by a group of people with overlapping knowledge that is not controversial. I beginning to be convinced that wikis are just not the right medium for creative content that “belongs to an author”, and wikis are not as useful as I envisaged for evolving my own ideas. The refactoring process feels inefficient with multiple versions of, for example, a Word document, but that is because the inherent nature of task (organising ideas into some sort of framework) is an inefficient process.
Spookily, I’m actually finding M$ Word and Powerpoint to be useful individual work tools, especially with Word’s new Notebook layout and the much improved Powerpoint > HTML conversion. Maybe the honeymoon period will end soon and I will have another go at wikis, but M$ is certainly heading in the right direction in terms of creating a tool that synchs with the way I actually work and makes it easy to give a face-2-face presentation which can be also web-distributed with minimal overheads.
I must be getting old because I’m also finding that communication spaces have shifted recently – I no longer use goofey, that wonderful little instant messaging service run at Monash way before anyone much was using online chat. It was an extremely efficient collaborative work tool as well as being an active online community and there were quite a few people I got to know on goofey before meeting them face-to-face. I have cycled through MSN, ICQ and email depending on who was limited to what by their workplace firewalls. I recently had a bit of a love affair with my new phone (a Nokia 6280) – the 2MP camera is pretty effective, and with a 2GB memory card, I no longer feel a need for an iPod. Most of the people I want to talk to will now engage in text messaging, and it’s probably my instant messaging medium of choice.
Almost a year of working at DSTO on the restricted Defence Network has desensitised me to the inconvenience of having inconsistent email availability – I can’t access DSTO email from anywhere other than on-site, but while I am at DSTO I can’t reach any of my other email accounts. All-in-all, just as the rest of the world is catching up to the “always-online” expectation, I have moved away from it a bit. I have pretty much managed to avoid MySpace and YouTube and almost all my email is work-related. In fact I rather like the idea of postcards and letters.
Hopefully with a revamped site based around WordPress, a totally cool MacBookPro, a camera, phone and video camera, I’ll be able to create good contet a lot more productively now.