One of the tools my colleague Brian Kelly from UKOLN provided for delegates to yesterday's UCISA workshop in Leeds was the Mozilla FireFox extension Wikalong. Here's some brief initial commentary on this interesting 'e'-tool. Basically, Wikalong puts an editable web page (a Wiki) in the sidebar of Firefox.
So why would Wikalong be of relevance? The 'Possible Uses' section of the Wikalong page proposes several but “A roaming blog. Use kwiki's blog feature and you can edit, others can view your thoughts on a site by site basis” should be of particular interest. This use is a similar to the 'document-centric discussion' concept of the asynchronous discussion based D3E which enabled commentary to be associated with particular online journal articles. D3E was a useful earlier demonstrator of the potential synergies which can be released by aggregating applications or services.
Caveats? Wikalong is only at version 0.12 so is best considered an interesting, but still, potentially, very useful, artefact at this stage.
Private Wikalongs are apparently pending.
Firefox is an already impressive open source tool particularly in its native support for RSS; but with extensions like Wikalong, and others, coming along it's perhaps not too imaginative to begin to view it as a platform. Add a touch of Google Desktop and that Windows interface begins to become less relevant … perhaps:)
Microsoft should be really really worried … not perhaps.
