The more I think about it, the clearer it is to me that Blogs and Wikis are really instances of the same meta-level idea. They should be unified into a single system. Blogs organize information temporally along a single thread. Wikis organize information spatially around a set of nodes representing ideas. Blogs have no concept of space. Wikis have no concept of time. What we really need is a single framework that enables information to be organized freely in space and time. You can create Nodes that represent ideas and link them to one another just like you do in a Wiki. You can post articles to any Node (or set of Nodes), just like you do in a Blog and they appear sequentially by time. When writing any article you can enter Wiki commands to quickly link to, or create new, Nodes. This is the best of both worlds. You can then filter it by Node name, Time, or both.
Funny. A month ago I had exact the same idea. I described it in the teamblog blogosfear.
Look here: http://blogosfear.org/eintrag.php?id=111
Posted by: Jim | August 08, 2004 at 11:07 AM
Heck, you got here early, Shannon!
The present (and future) seem likely to be a mix of explicit and "scraped" metadata.
Wikis, lacking native structure (which is the whole point), depend heavily on the community to create structure in it; the ease of making index-like pages helps, but in a way the wikiest result is that the links in the text on each page acts as a sort of index to its own context (e.g., while refactoring one is encouraged to work "see also" links into the text).
I'm ambivalent about the no-thought-required aspect of blogging - free, uncensored writing is excellent practice; on the other hand the discipline of thinking about where something goes is often clarifying. When i blog something, i never know if i'll see it again. Once something's in the wiki, i'm more confident. Re what Josh said, i love having multiple views on the same data, but get frustrated with having content in two differently-organized categories (date vs. name) is frustrating. Improved wiki-weblog integration (e.g. PikiePikie's search works across wiki pages and weblog posts) can help with this.
Posted by: John Abbe | February 06, 2004 at 10:43 AM
Joining the conversation a bit late, but a few comments.
1. I, for one at least, do not tend to plan my blog posts, they are mostly spur of the moment posts, some rambles about a topic I am thinking on, some a discussion of a page I am visiting (thanks to the Google blog toolbar/blogThis button). Asking me to first add a layer of "semantical typing" to my links is just not going to happen. For one, until I am done writing I fundementally do not know what the link "means" - i.e. I only discover that via the writing process.
2. WIKI's for me are rarely very compelling, because they are so disjointed and randomly changing - and the structure (or lack of it) makes it difficult to know where to do and what to look at, especially when pressed for time. A blog, on the other hand, makes it easy to skim the current thinking and activity of the writer - but it tends to be harder to delve deeply into their archives as most (but not all) do not classify posts around topics.
3. I think the wave of the future will be automatic classifications - i.e. classifications that happen without human intervention or activity, but respond to similar structures and/or content to sort bunches of content into logical groupings (which in the case of a "blog" would then in turn generally be sorted around time)
this is possible today, if not exactly easy.
Posted by: Shannon Clark | November 11, 2003 at 07:54 PM
I think the distinction between the two forms is cultural more than technological. A combination of the two technologies would not be hard to pull off--fairly featureful Wikis and Weblog tools are only a thousand lines of Perl code each--but you'd then have to convince individuals that their publishing models for weblogs are inadequate. The Wiki world would be more amenable--there are already timeline views of wikis that are very bloglike.
More than this I think people need to really think about what links mean, and start semantically typing them, ala XLink. When I link to a topic in my weblog, am I saying "this link is a narrowing of the topic, a broadening, or what?" If weblog authors could do that sort of linking, and map it to ontologies, then you'd have content that was created in a linear fashion, but could auto-assemble into structured topics because the links have meaning; the system could take a guess at the right hierarchy of presentation. But that's a little out of the scope of Moveable Type....
Posted by: Paul Ford | August 12, 2003 at 08:30 AM
There are Wiki / Blog integration software engines. http://www.ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?AbbeNormal is an example of a Wiki/ Blog. There is even a Wiki / Blog commercial service http://www.wikilogs.com/FrontPage
IMHO, the biggest difference between Wiki and Blog is the authorship. Blogging is more a broadcast publication than a conversation.Wiki is (potentially) a collaborative (content) development tool.
I'm curious the content volume of Wiki vs Blog. I suspect public Web Blogging content is 100X the quantity of Wiki.
Posted by: Dave Christenson | August 09, 2003 at 08:15 AM
I actually see this a little differently. I'll use another analogy.
Blogs are like coffee shop discussions- there is no structure, and the topics can veer and change rapidly. In fact, most blogs are more stream-of-consciousness than anything else. Beyond RSS aggregators, and Google, there isn't really anyway to control blog content, either. But blogs are not designed for that purpose- they are public journals.
Wikis, on the other hand, are MUCH more structured- because they are relying on hyperlinks and meta-structure to somewhat control their content.
Why do these disparate systems need to be converged? We use libraries every day (even the Web) that have many interfaces and structures.
I would rather see a new form of VIEWING this content- so I can see the world in different ways- the data is the data...
perhaps semantically?
j.
Posted by: Josh Kirschenbaum | August 08, 2003 at 04:50 PM