I’m embarrassed to say that I’m very timid about most stuff having to do with computer software. I’m also not an organized person and that feeds back to the first point. But I dimly grok that it’s very important there be openness on the Internet. So Net Neutrality is important, as is POSSE—Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I use a flavor of Linux as my computer operating system and enjoy using FOSS—free and open-source software. I love blogs and I love RSS. But I’m really quite daft when it comes to figuring software out.
Speaking of blogging and RSS, there’s an Internet pioneer, Dave Winer who played a critical role in the creation of both. Recently Winer has developed an outliner product called Fargo. He and his partners in the Fargo venture have released the core of Fargo called Concord under a GPL.
I mentioned that I’m disorganized, which is part of the reason I haven’t played around more with Fargo—which is free to use by the way. I certainly wasn’t going to do any programming. But a friend made OWL an outliner with wiki linking. You can get it at the link or try it.
I mentioned that I’m daft. I tried OWL and didn’t think much, except something to the effect that I wasn’t going to figure this out. But then I simply copied some text and pasted. And I highlighted a name in the text, it happened to be Dave Winer, and clicked on the link button. Wow! So I just made a page named Dave Winer. A light lit in my head.
I like Wikis a lot but I’ve always wanted to use them with others and nobody ever seemed to want join me. For the most part I hadn’t seen the utility, or at least the mustered the discipline to make wikis for my own use. But OWL looks like something I might use.
I don’t know where all this is leading. But what my friend Interstar did in making something that even I can see is useful shortly after Winer’s Concord was open-sourced drives home how important this sort of open production is.
If you program be sure to check out Winer’s Fargo and the Concord core. Even if you’re like me and don’t program, it’s worth taking a look at Fargo and trying out OWL.