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Scrumptious - roll your own SideWiki for your intranet?

via softwareas.com

You might have heard me talking before about Google's SideWiki and I said:

"wouldn't this kind of functionality be great on an intranet? It would be one way of upgading legacy apps with some social capabilities?"

Well, Scrumptious could well be it. And perhaps even more elegantly, it is based on solid RESTful principles and uses the open source TiddlyWeb server as a backend (TiddlyWeb is the back end for TiddlyWiki), which offers a range of potiential benefits in terms of this being an inhouse version of SideWiki - e.g. browsable, searchable, mashable and 'securable'. I really hope Scrumptious continues to be developed.

Michael Mahemoff (Scrumptious' creator) also pointed me to this list of del.icio.us, digg clones and Open Source Social Bookmarking Engines.

Hat tip to the comments on Mark Morrell's blog.

Mashing up in context content into Websites with SideWiki and Twitter

Its been quite interesting reading the mixed reactions to Google's SideWiki. There appears to be a great deal of misunderstanding about how SideWiki actually works, because it doesn't actually deface pages... rather it simply allows comments stored by SideWiki about a particular page to be shown in context with that page. One of the things that immediately caught my interest with SideWiki is the API.

There are already a couple of 3rd party plugins that tap into that API:
Kutano is interesting in its own right, as it allows users to view tweets related to a particular page and they simply incorporated SideWiki into their browser plugin. If you don't like the idea of SideWiki, then you won't like the idea of Kutano as it has been effectively doing the same thing - just using Twitter as the mechanism for submitting 'comments'. BTW Kutano is by no means the only plugin that allows Tweets to be added and shown in the context of a Web page - e.g. AddATweet (and there are probably plenty more).

SideWinder's bookmarklet is helpful if you use a browser not supported by Google's Toolbar or one of the other 3rd party plugins.

The screenshots show the Kutano, SideWiki and bookmarklet view of the same page.

     
Click here to download:
Mashing_up_in_context_content_.zip (331 KB)

Like it or not, what SideWiki, other in context microblogging tools, and even bookmarking sites represent isn't some kind of abuse, its just where the real time Web is heading.

And wouldn't this kind of functionality be great on an intranet? It would be one way of upgading legacy apps with some social capabilities?

Hat tip to RWW.

So, you don't want people commenting on your Website? Watch out for Google's Sidewiki

I don't want to pick on the SMH in particular, but it was the first site I found with some real comments attached:


BTW You don't have to install Sidewiki to follow the comments, there is an RSS stream (e.g. the SMH home page) although it appears to be restricted the comments per URL not the whole domain. The API for this service also means we could expect to see a bunch of new tools appearing that take advantage of it, e.g. Twitter integration.

One defence against SideWiki are encrypted (HTTPS) pages. And luckily for intranet managers, SideWiki doesn't support comments on internal sites. Yet, anyway...