Today, a comment I left on Don Park’s blog got quoted by David Berlind.

Here’s what I said :

Here’s the amazing thing : there are about 8 billion pages accessable through the browser. And not one of them is that difficult to get to. (Assuming you find links going there.)….How many OSs and desktop applications have 8 billion options and functions? Yet, access to these is through a bewildering variety of different methods : menus and submenus, button-bars, wizards, right-click on the icon to change configuration options, hidden XML configuration files, command line arguments.

But then David says something very right :

Given the way wikis make child’s play out of Web authoring (and the emergence of applications like WikiCalc), instead of a desktop operating system, how about a Wiki Operating System. Call it WikiOS (WOS for short).

This is, of course, something I’ve thought for a long time. And it’s one of the guiding principles behind SdiDesk, hinted at several times in the screencasts.

I think the next tipping point will be focused on wikis. We are close to the point where we will no longer have to pick an ‘application’ to create, open or change a document, any more than we have to pick a particular type of writing implement to do so in the physical world. What that will allow us to do is convert our entire hard drive — every document — and all the content we maintain on central servers — every message and blog post, into a single ‘virtual’ wiki, a kind of giant tableau of all our stuff, everything we have created or contributed to, and everything created by others we have filed away or bookmarked or otherwise ‘taken as our own’.

Dave Pollard

For some reason I find this article intensely annoying and depressing.

Here’s why. I’m one the (possible minority) of people on the planet who if I ask what you do, am genuinely interested in what you do.

Not because I’m a cuddly people person, (though, of course, I am), but because I’m intensely curious about the way the world works. Every damned bit of it. I’m curious about the bits of the world you wouldn’t dream anyone might be curious about. About the fashionable and unfashionable bits. The grand scale and the minutae.

Recently I was sitting with a bunch of friends discussing whether you’d rather drink with a philosopher or a dentist. The unanimous opinion was philosopher. But for me, I know it was a close call. And now I’m wondering if that was the right decision. You see, I know a small bit about philosophy. But hardly anything about dentistry. What might I be missing?

Exciting ideas are ideas that cross-pollinate from one field to another. If you don’t know the field, how do you know what’s useful?

That’s why if I ask you what you do, I want you to tell me what you do. I can figure out myself far better than you can how that might (or might not) be useful to me in one of the dozens of projects I’m involved in that you don’t even know about. You trying to second guess that, is just going to muddy the signal.

Look! This is a world where markets are conversations, and information and attention are the true mediators of commerce. And “sales technique” is just noise getting in the way of real communication. These sound-bite examples given in the article are the conversational equivalent of pop-up ads.

What’s really annoying is that it’s articles like this, pedaling this kind of nonsense, that are responsible for the crap that gets continuously sprayed out over real conversations : whether online or in real life.