Tiddlywiki is an amazing little piece of free software that is an excellent personal notebook, or journal. It is also not easy to describe because it does not quite fit into a neat category. It is a wiki, and a stand-alone html file, it can be located on the web and have many authors, and it can be a personal file that you carry around as a ‘wiki-on-a-stick’.

If you click on the link above you can try out the navigation for yourself. A tiddlywiki is made up of ‘tiddlers’ which are usually paragraph length entries. These have their own tags (on the right of the illustration) and they are linked to and closed as you like. A main menu is on the left. It is wonderful for adding material to your personal notebook. Just create a new tiddler, add some tags to it, and you are done. You can find all your records on a particular topic or topics simply by clicking on a tag.

If you want to have a go, on the Home site, see Getting Started, and in the body of that you will find Download Software and an empty.html that you download and is your starting point. In about 30 minutes you will have mastered the basics.

In the Adelaide session I asked Jimmy Wales about whether we will develop good-manners conventions for personal interactions on the web, in time. His answer, “Yes”. His comprehensive and impressive answer was captured by Mike Sefang, and can be found here. (audio)
Again, it repeats his positive but disciplined view of people that has made the Wikipedia work.

I have been a great fan of Inspiration, the education focused mind mapping application, but the recently committed the mortal sin of launching version 8 which is not compatible with previous versions. It is quite expensive and does not have an online capacity.

There are now some very promising looking web based mindmapping applications that are free, at least in basic version, and have the huge advantage of allowing collaborative development of a map. A good review of three of them: bubbl.us, Mindomo, and MindMeister is found here in the Daily Web Worker.

The reviewer concludes that none of them have the full flexibility of the best tools, but are very promising. They rate MindMeister as the best, and it is still in private beta. Users can work on a map simultaneously, and can have a chat via Skype while doing it!

That looks as though these offer great educational potential. Another Web 2.0 success story in the making.

In a spot of recklessness a few months ago I subscribed to Technology Review, an apparently good quality US magazine. They had an article that looked very impressive on the one laptop per child initiative. The attraction of the magazine was not just its content, but that I could subscribe for a year for only $24US and get an exact copy online via the Zinio reader software.

Well, the content is very impressive, well over my head in terms of science, but beautifully presented and a great way, to keep up to date with innovation in technology across the broad range of science and technology.

But what about the facsimile experience? Zinio reader is very polished and presents the magazine in its exact paper format, down to the little subscription insert between pages. Navigation is either by mouse or cursor keys. The standard view is the two page spread [see image] where headlines and the general content can be read, and with one click, it zooms into wherever you click to the readable format. The trouble is that the magazine is in columns, and so you read the top of the left column , then jump down to see the lower part of the column, then jump up to see the top of column two, and so on. It is all a bit silly. A format that works well in a magazine or newspaper, where you eye readily does the ‘jumping’, is not effective on a computer screen – unless of course you can turn your laptop sideways and view the page in its ‘natural’ portrait format.

So I visited the Technology Review website, and lo and behold, the entire magazine content is there in regular web format, and I must say, I find it much easier to use. While the web format magazine lacks the cleanness and full screen display of the Zinio edition, it is a lot more ‘natural’ to the experienced web user. Navigation is simple, bookmarking is easy, and it connects naturally, that word again, to other web tools.

So my conclusion from this experience and from a short experiment with reading the New York Times in its print layout on a computer is that it is futile for web publishing to mimic print display. Each medium should stick to its own advantages.