I've been playing around with a variety of wiki software with an eye on what I might recommend for colleagues at school. It was good to meet Jeremy Ruston at Reboot. Jeremy is the founder and CTO of Osmosoft, 'the publisher of TiddlyWiki, a popular and well-regarded free tool that is relied on by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to record, organise and share all kinds of information'.
Doc Searls' post yesterday, Food for rethought, is a good and quick reminder of some of the things that make TiddlyWiki interesting, but I particularly liked these comments of Jeremy's — made whilst demo-ing TiddlyWiki to Doc:
We don't have many weapons to use against really ineffectual people ... It's reasonable to talk about software as being alive ... It's symbiotic ... It needs a host geek in which to live ... The value in software is as much in its potential as in its functionality ...
I heard the news of BT buying Osmosoft from Jeremy when we were in Copenhagen. He blogged about it at the end of May:
I’m delighted to announce that the mighty BT has acquired my tiny little company Osmosoft Limited. I’m joining BT as Head of Open Source Innovation, and I’ll be building a crack open source web development team called BT Osmosoft. … BT is becoming a remarkable thing: a truly internet-scale consumer company that doesn’t rely on owning “secret sauce” software for it’s business. At the most senior levels, there’s an appetite to embrace open source that wouldn’t disgrace a web 2.0 startup. I’ll be working with a great many talented and interesting people, and I’m looking forward to it immensely. … I hope BT’s endorsement of TiddlyWiki will open up new applications that we haven’t thought of yet. To meet the challenges that they bring, I’ll continue to strive to keep the core of TiddlyWiki true to its origins as a lean, efficient non-linear personal web notebook.
I see TiddlyWiki has just had its release 2.2. I'm off to look more closely at TiddlyWiki.
