They were wrong. The period since the end of those sterile “browser wars” has been one of enormous innovation in use of the web and two of the most innovative ideas have been web logging (or blogging, as it's come to be know) and Wikis.

If these terms are utterly new to you, they no doubt sound very cute and fuzzy, and blogs and wikis join with other cute and fuzzy terms like Yahoo and Google to give the increasingly commercialized net a feeling of being just a friendly and informal place to be -- which it increasingly isn't. Though most of the innovations with the cute names
are in fact now covers for highly profitable businesses, one -- the Wiki -- is actually interesting and brings us back to the very earliest days of the non-commercial net.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web his dream was not that there would be a web browser which would read off pages written by others. Rather, he thought the web would be a place where everyone could both read and write. The ideal web browser was a place not only for visiting websites, but for creating them.

The popular web browsers these days come with software that allows people to create web pages. For example, the non-commercial Mozilla browser comes with its own Composer software. But one still needs to sort out web space, to upload files, and so on. It's still a bit too “techy” for most people.

Wikis are different. Wikis are, basically, websites where anyone visiting can not only read, but write to, the pages they're looking at. If you can find the page, you can co-author it.

The most famous example of a Wiki is the Wikipedia , an online encyclopedia based on the Wiki software. It currently includes over 132,000 articles in English which are the result of the collective knowledge and imagination of visitors to the site.

Go to the Wikipedia and search for IWW and you're going to find not only an introductory piece on the Wobblies, but articles about Ralph Chaplin, Joe Hill and others. And there's room for more: if you click on the link to Big Bill Haywood, a page appears with a blank box and above it, text reading “You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. To create the page, start typing in the box below.”

Start typing in the box -- that's the essence of the Wiki.

Anyone can visit a page, anyone can write to a page, and the results can be sites as impressive as the Wikipedia.

I was impressed by this technology when I first saw it and am still amazed at its bold challenge to notions of intellectual property. But I was also thinking: could there be a specifically trade union use for a Wiki?

To test out the idea, I set up a Wiki for internal discussion by a group responsible for a union website. The group consisted of eight people. All they needed to know to start working together was the web address of the Wiki. Within days, all eight had added pages, made corrections, even fixed up the layout of pages. The Wiki now consists of several dozen pages, many of them updated every day.

We're using our Wiki it to come up with agreed drafts of documents, to plan online campaigns, to share information and ideas, to make lists together. Think of it as an online whiteboard on which everyone can write.

The downside to all this is that anyone can come in and write on your whiteboard, or even erase it. There's no security at all. So the Wiki I've described is an internal one, not for public consumption. There are versions of Wikis with password protection, which could solve the problem.

For small groups in unions working on projects together, Wikis seem like excellent tools for group discussion, including the drafting of texts together as well as the sharing of information.

They are not an alternative to websites but do represent another way of thinking about the web. And unlike websites, no one is using Wikis to make any money -- so in that sense, as in others, the Wiki represents a return to the original vision of Tim Berners-Lee back in 1991.