See also: WikiSpace, DreamWiki, DigitalPalace, WikiToDrupal, AsWeMayThink, VannevarBush, MyLifeBits
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Well I hate to say it but I don't really have any good ideas either. I have my personal wiki (http://www.spack.org/) where I store bits and it works brilliantly for geek related stuff. I can stuff articles in there, technical docs etc. It's way better then saving emails or text files cause it's inherantly hypertext and searchable and yet I keep all the advantages of text cause it is text on the server (I don't use a SQL backend).
However I want to take it to the next step. I want to move my PalmPilot contact database to it. My plan had been to stuff everything via ldif into an LDAP server and then find or write a PHP web frontend to it, but the idea of being able to manipulate this data via a wiki is great, but contact details are inherantly private and structured, I don't want to put my mom's email or phone number up for anyone so it has to be private and starts to deviate meaningfully (IMHO) from what wiki is all about.
OTOH - WikiSpace doesn't have to be public. If you have your own web server you can set up a virtual host that is only accessible from your local machine. Or create a Wiki tree that is password protected for access. I've started a personal knowledge base Wiki that's done this way. - mikeraz
So maybe each user would have a personal data sub-wiki, where they could clutter up the wiki name space as much as they like. with a bit of tweaking international phone numbers (or email addresses) would make good unique page identifiers, and LDAP plugin could fairly trivially grab info from an LDAP server, format it, maybe even load it into text boxes so it can be changed in a structured mannor via the wiki. Hell, maybe you could even create another export function (like the RSS/RDF that we've been talking about) for ldif for export to a PalmPilot or LDAP database. Even better maybe I can sync "my wiki" (or my section of the wiki) with my PalmPilot ... and I'd actually start using it for something other then off site backups of my contact database again 
Do it the inverse way. Store pages as XML and convert them to HTML via XSLT. XSLT support is broken currently (unless you use an old version of 4Suite), but will be fixed, action=raw gives you the XML content which can be easily converted to any needed format. An example for the reverse direction is when you export your browser booksmarks to an XBEL page and visualize that. and finally, ACLs will add the privacy needed in some cases.
What I'm wrestling with is "what is a wiki" and what is it that i want to keep, and what I'm willing to sacrifice for greater functionality.
Would there be anything gained by embedding a webmail (say squirrelmail which is what I think phpgroupware uses) in a wiki page called WebMail. you preserve the wiki interface to a certain point but what do you really accomplish other then more overhead?
I think the marriage with phpgroupware could be quite valuable but I really like the idea (Jeff's?) of being able to maintain the wiki interface to it, so instead of the wiki appearing inside groupware, groupware elements appear inside the wiki. However I have no idea how to structure that so it's *easy* and convenient enough that people will use it that way.
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Do you know about PalmWiki? http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?PalmWiki And dude, this isn't rambling, i think you're onto something, and i may try modifying PikiePikie 0.5 (when it's released) to pull contact information out of regular wiki pages. Also see http://www.usemod.com/mb.pl?WikiAsPim --JohnAbbe
Hey, glad you liked it. I'd forgotten I'd put that up
I've heard of PalmWiki but never checked it out, it's it pretty cool? I've read the WikiAsPim page as well as the WikiAsPim pages, that's kinda where this train of thought started. It's been on the backburner as PersonalTelco has started taking more and more of my time but I love the inherantly non-hierarchical manner of data storage in a wiki. Lemme know if you get anything put together, I'd love to see it. -- AdamShand
Oh yeah, i use PalmWiki to navigate in Palm's Memo Pad almost exclusively. I too am fond of wikis' hierarchical-less nature, in fact i've written about it recently on my weblog AbbeNormal if you're interested: http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi --JohnAbbe
Wiki hierachy -- what I'd like to see is a dropdown box on every edit page which lets you choose one or more categories that the page can belong to (sort of what zwiki does with parents but i don't like the "parent" terminology. I also think sub-categories (or topics) would be useful. The main problem with users categorizing data is that it's hard to make some pages fit just one category and users forgot to do it and forget all the categories that are available. For newbies first arriving it's very useful for them to be able to see all the pages on a certain topic (why I implemented my cheesy sidebars on the PersonalTelco site. -- AdamShand
Exactly. In my head i think of each snippet in my "external brain" (computer) as belonging to multiple categories, but the big two operating system interfaces force us to to put them in only one. I hope Apple updates AppleOsx to implement a Finder interface for Unix-style hard links; i was disappointed when Apple implemented aliases the way they did back in System 7; and of course Microsoft simply copied them rather than improving on it. But enough complaining. My vision is to have a secure, private wiki (probably on my handheld), from which i can easily "publish" any page to my public wiki. Now that StevePike is implementing an XmlRpc interface PikiePikie 0.5, this is one step closer to reality. --JohnAbbe
You might be interested in knowing that MoinMoin already has an XmlRpc interface. I'm not sure exactly what it does as I haven't used it yet but Jurgen mentioned to me in email that it existed. -- AdamShand
Cool...i eagerly anticipate the day when it's straightforward for two or more wikis to mirror a page, publish private -> public, and experiment with other possible relationships (typically among same-named pages i imagine). On another note, in case you hadn't heard, there's a MoinMoin plug-in for weblogs -- http://www.seapig.org/BlogEditCode (it's in use over at http://www.potlatch.net/) --JohnAbbe
That was me that added the note about BlogEdit on AbbeNormal
-- Adam.
D'oh! --JohnAbbe
Please take a look at MoinMoinAsPim for a very close discussion. -- EduardoMercovich.
If people are curious about where I'm heading with all this I've just been talking to a friend about his idea of a DigitalPalace. While I think I have quite different goals then he does it's hugely help me to realize what I want and why I've been so facinated by the idea of using a wiki for a pim. -- Adam.