While commenting a recent post [1], I became aware of the need for a common bidirectional transport and storage format for blogs and wikis. The blog used here does interoperate on a very simple level with a wiki.
– Categories do have a wiki page per default
– CamelCase words in the blog post are being parsed and linked automatically to a wiki page
– Wiki pages are now featuring trackback functionality
Data of blog posts and wiki pages are stored in different database tables. Interoperability on stored content – moving conentent from a post to the wiki and vice versa – is basically limited to human interaction. The blog posts are already availabe as RSS, RDF and Atom. Not yet the wiki pages though. Merging blogs and wikis even more could lead to new features not yet available here. I could imagine that some parts of a blog post could be marked to be posted to a wiki page automatically. Or blog engines could generate a new wiki page out of a blog post. Not very spectacular you might say, but a start. The question arising to me here is, what would be nescessary to make those blog and wiki contents interoperable.
Imaginably that Atom [2] could step into this role. From my point of view, there should be a common format for transport (syndication), storage and editing being able to handle not only those features needed in blogging (micro-cms) but also on wiki-oriented engines.
I will try to have a closer look at Syncato [3] a weblog engine based on Python and an XML database [4]. Would it make sense to use Atom as an XML storage format?
[1] http://www.circle.ch/blog/p1218.html
[2] http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/
[3] http://www.syncato.org
[4] http://www.merrells.com/john/dbxml/
