Wikipedia.org is awesome. Who would have thought that building a knowledge system based on voluntary contributions from just about anyone who wants to, would work?
So what would happen if one would combine the Wiki concept with the other superstar of social software, blogging? Wouldn’t it be nice that you could have the chronological posts, but also clickable keywords, and the possibility to easily edit them – and let them be edited by others? And then find a catchy name for the combined concept, like a ‘bliki‘?
Unfortunately I am not the first person to think of the concept, nor the name: perl.com mentioned bliki’s in Dec 2003, Martin Fowler talked about it in May 2003, and David M Johnson already in Sept 2002.
One of the pioneers was apparently the incredibly extensive www.jahsonic.com: basically a huge Wiki-like site. Its author, Jan Geerinck, also has a blog page (however without RSS or Atom feed). The blog was started back in 2001.
Some products that implement Blog/Wiki hybrids are: YACS, Fromage, Bloki, SnipSnap and Roller.
SnipSnap was developed by someone from the Fraunhofer Institute (DE) and looks very promising. Roller is used by Sun Microsystems for the employee blogs.
2004-08-28 at 10:57 am
Thanks for mentioning jahsonic.
See ya!
Jan
2004-09-03 at 2:03 pm
Thank you very much for your reference to YACS! I agree that the ease of use of blogging tools and the collaborative approach of Wiki should be combined. This is exactly why YACS has been created originally.
Cheers,
Bernard at http://www.yetanothercommunitysystem.com/
2005-09-09 at 1:11 pm
All the mentioned systems still think in wiki and blog terms. The merging of the two should create a seamless writing space. Everything is just a page. The type of the page is a characteristic of that page. One shouldn’t have to decide which part of the system to write in. Just write. And designate whether the page is collaborative (wiki), personal (blog), knowledge base, or whatever.