Since the very beginning of the WWW, Wikis have been an integral part of Webculture, driving the Hypertext principle to its very edge. The governing principle of Wikis is really, that everything is (possibly) connected with everything. Every keyword is possibly a new node in the network, every item can be linked to every other item, forming a dense network of intertwingled wikipages. Hypertext to its extreme.

As the name promises, in a Wiki everything works fast, however observations have shown that not all user can easily relate to the imminent "chaos" of a Wiki, were structure is up to the user, rather than partially predefined by the system. Probably we humans need or have got used to predefined structure because we are facing it every day.

Establishing connections in a Wiki is rather easy, because relations are explicit, mostly created by the user with some support by the system itself. But this requires a quite disciplined, focussed and conscious user. You have to willingly maintain connections between the items to receive the benefit of the system. If you just publish content without intertwingling it, you could use a simple Content Management Software or a HTML Editor as well. The added value of a Wiki is, that your personal information space gets more dense everytime you add an item to it. It evolves and possibly depicts useful and meaningful connections between information bits and pieces after a while.

And that seems to be the second (possible) point of failure for newbies in the Wiki world: there is nothing such as a starting solution. Nothing that you can explore an see the benefit of such a system before starting it on your own. You have to invest in the system before it actually gives a return on your investment. Within groups of people such system usually pay off earlier due to the multitude of people and therefore content that goes into the system. When used as a personal information or knowledge management tool this benefit takes much longer to realise.

A possible solution is to Wikify the Weblog. Because what makes Wikis strong is the weakness of a Weblogs. They suffer from the same problems as the WWW itself, they lack semantic connections that simplify browsing, visualisation and retrieval. Instead of getting lost in hyperspace, a wikifyied Weblog or a Wikilog could constantly provide you with connections to other places, that sometimes make you caught in hyperspace, leading from one interesting meme to another, creating a flow where it is (sometimes) hard to stop.

So what if we could derive implicit connections from exisiting information pieces and create a hyperspace network out of them, without having the user to do the work?

We can.