So we built a wiki. Called PurpleWiki. With Purple Numbers. These were a riff on the HIDs and NIDs in Engelbart's various information systems (NLS, Augment, Hyperscope). They provide granular addressability to chunks of content.
Once those addresses become persistent it becomes possible to have granular reuse through transclusion.
At its height Purple Numbers were able to integrate the wiki, multiple blog engines, mailing list archives and an IRC bot into a self referential and transcluding network of granular content. Each system was able to refer to and quote from the other by reference, not by copy.
I eventually had to find a real job and took the purple toolset with me. The new job was software development. We used it to augment our collaboration. It was awesome.
So where's Purple now? It died the death of most interesting software systems: It was cool for the initiated and trained and pretty much inscrutable for the unmotivated. You can see it living on today when ¶ shows up when you mouse over some headlines in documentation (often Python related). That's because Simon Willison spread them around. He got them from Tim Bray who got them from me.
That was in the spring of 2004.
