Sounds like the title to some cheesy sci-fi flick, but we know it’s actually a consideration of similar collaborative technologies that have appeared on the web.

This was spawned by an article by one of my favorite columnists, Chad Dickerson: Wiki goes to work.

He feels pretty strongly that Wiki should be the next big thing, perhaps even worthy of bumping Blogs as a tool for the enterprise. Frankly, this consideration may seem comical to some, because many enterprises probably haven’t been forward-looking enough to even reach the point of leveraging the power of Blogs, much less to consider The Next Big Thing. But that point must be ignored by us geeks, but only partially; really, the fact that Blogs haven’t even fully caught on is a concern of mine, because it would be regrettable if Blogs became the beta of collaborative technology and got skipped over simply because they didn’t gain a foothold since people weren’t ready for web oriented collaborative technology.

I actually disagree with Chad regarding the power of Wiki. Well, I actually ought to say I disagree with him regarding the utility of Wiki in the enterprise environment. The free control over content that Wiki provides–supposedly its strength–is precisely what I dislike about using it in an enterprise environment. I just feel that Wiki sacrifices accountability for speed and ease. I like the log-based management of a Blog: Each user posts an entry and has ownership over his entries.

But I suppose the real question is, “What are you trying to accomplish?” For instance, I have been planning on building a simple Blog system for my employer for quite some time. When I do, I plan on using it to log notes for meetings, record updates/patches I make to applications, and document general workday activities. Such usage if obviously perfect for a Blog, not some Wiki technology. However, if you have many shared documents that you want to make easily accessible via web technology, and a group is constantly referring to and updating individual documents, a Blog would certainly be a round hole for this kind of square peg. Even so, I wish Wiki systems would track revisions more tightly to bolster the accountability factor that is ever-present in the enterprise.