The web is a great place to find step-by-step histories of DIY projects. From case-mod projects to Lego models, to sites such as MAKE magazine, these sites are filled with pictorial narratives of creations mundane and extreme. One thing missing in many of these logs, however, is collaboration: the ability to ask questions, make suggestions, get clarifications, etc. Enter Instructables:

Instructables is a step-by-step collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. We hope to make documentation simple and fast. Show your colleagues how to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak, show the world how to make cool stuff.

The site offers free membership, tagging, easy uploads, on-page commenting and Flickr-like direct annotation of areas of photos.

On the “About” page, the creators (Squid Labs) provide an interesting history of the site, as well as the thought and philosophy behind it. This paragraph caught my eye:

A key insight behind instructables is that humans are constrained to working in linear time – ie you do things sequentially and are generally not in two places at once. This gives us the overall framework for instructables, a way of documenting the sequence of steps that are undertaken to make any particular thing or do any task. Many of the sub-sequences will be re-useable. Why have everyone document how to drill a hole repetitively? These sorts of things should be seen as share-able sub-routines in the library of how to do things. Add to that the power of a large community filtering sub-routines for best practice and you get an expanding library of human knowledge, craftsmanship, and best practice for making just about anything.

Sounds like they may be re-inventing learning objects…