Merging weblog and wiki

What is a weblog, what a wiki? What sense does it make to have just another took to administrate? What is the gain, what the pain?

Weblogs are said to be \”A web site organized by time\”, a diary with reports, news summaries, random thoughts, interesting songs, pictures etc [0]. The time factor is mostly part of the URL of a specific blog entry, also there are variations [see Joi\’ URL, 1]. Entries are furthermore organized by one or multiple categories [2]. Even providing an archive does not prevent from searching for a certain entry, which leads to a search engine to be implemented. Weblog entries often can be commented via a comment field or or ping- or trackbacks. I would rather like to have a weblog with a forum attached [3] than a simple guestbook-style comments collection.

A Wiki [4] is a web-based writing space and is typically collaborative, but does not have to be. While weblogs basically store events, Wikis categorize data [5]. Furthermore a Wiki has revisions of pages [6].

Combinations are already fact [7]; Joi does it, others too – see site of Andrew, Keith, 0xDECAFBAD et. al. I also makes sense to crosspost links or contents to existing Wiki titles. Andrew has a hack:

I now also have a hack to B2 that automatically inserts links to wiki pages (with wiki names) that exist, but only if not in between angle brackets – I don\’t want to have links inside of links as nested anchors haven\’t been allowed for a long time in HTML land.

There is currently a discussion over a package called \”Text_Wiki\” to handle Wiki-like markup [8] that could make such an integration less painful.

[0] http://ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?WebLog
[1] http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/07/16/im_not_joi_ito_thats_just_my_name.html
[2] http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis
[3] http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3422
[4] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiClones
[5] http://www.andrewsw.com/wiki/moin.cgi/WikiBlogIntegration
[6] http://www.keithdevens.com/wiki/WikiBlogIntegration
[7] http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/PrivacyGuards
[8] http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.pear.dev&article=18319

Update:
Some more thoughts and discussions in this direction, leading to klogs:
[a] http://iawiki.net/IAwikiBlog/Discussion
[b] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/

Leave a Reply