Blogged Wiki

Bliki - combination Wiki and WebLog (or Blog).

A WikiLog by any another name is still an old idea.

In my immediate opinion, it seems like the Bliki and the WebLog are not conducive to the information sharing and support that Wikis provide. -- MichaelFinney

In a Wiki, information from different sources all converge together.

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A web log or a Bliki just keeps slippin, slippin, slippin into the future. Plus, I cannot fix other people's typos then! :) -- MichaelFinney

If anything, RecentChanges always reminds me of a (admittedly very minimal) weblog. -- EarleMartin

True. Most of the other WikiPages seem to follow the convergence theory though.

Wikis thrive on the convergence of multiple people's opinions. Blogs are fundamentally about a single person's opinion. Are these not in direct contradiction? -- BrentNewhall

There are numerous group weblogs, actually, that show otherwise. There are multiple-author-single-post weblogs, like the MovableType one, or indeed SlashDot; and also weblogs where multiple authors collaborate on everything - e.g. the 2lmc spool (http://2lmc.org/spool/). -- EarleMartin

ok. So, multiple people can post onto some weblogs their individual and separate posts. However, they cannot update and correct the same information together. A weblog is a stream of posts which flows into the past. Yes, google can retrieve a past post, but that is the same as a mail archive and does not seem as useful as a wiki page which ideally reflects the current state of things.

I suppose if a person wants to state something like "This is how I feel (or this is my personal experience which I am sharing) and I do not want others to mess with my post.", a web log would be most appropriate. -- IMHO MichaelFinney

WebLogs and Blikis are a reflection of WhyWikiWorksNot sometimes. In http://martinfowler.com/bliki/WhatIsaBliki.html, MartinFowler writes how wikis "...can easily lead to long rambling sites." (He does point out that he does like wikis since stuff can get put together quickly.) RubyLanguage page may be an example....

There's no reason why blikis can't have multiple people contributing to them and editing each other's posts. Martin Fowler's bliki has only one author, but that's just his arrogance. The PragmaticProgrammer Rublog can easily be used with multiple authors who are all free to edit each other's entries.

I do not think MartinFowler is arrogant withi his Bliki. In fact, I think he is pretty generous for sharing his thoughts for free. -- MichaelFinney

ok. After careful consideration, I see how MartinFowler is offering me an opportunity to save time. When time is short (and it usually is), I can quickly review his thoughts on his Bliki without wading through the thoughts of others on the Wiki which I may not trust. He even offers an RssFeed? for his Bliki as well as his articles. (Bliki: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/bliki.rss and http://martinfowler.com/updates.rss) -- MichaelFinney (permission is given to refactor all of my postings here into a non-threaded form.)

We're using a Bliki (SnipSnap) for our project. Daily reports by each developer, and time-dependent notices are posted as blogs, and important information is kept as separate wiki pages. Unfortunately, though the concept seems sound, the implementation is weak on the wiki side. SnipSnap relies heavily on 'comments', which is basically what thread mode looks like in Wiki, except that it is next to impossible to edit comments in SnipSnap. This leads to ThreadMess and the related problems of such forums. Also, it is too easy to just put all your relevant thoughts into timestamped blogs with titles like '2003_10_01-1'. This is next to useless for wiki. It takes discipline to move important info into a separate wiki page, and so it is too rarely done in practice.

Still, I think it could work, if the implementation took more cues from TheWikiWay. There are some important discussions which are too time-sensitive to keep on a wiki page, but you need the ability to harvest those discussions for important long-term insights without a hassle.

I suspect MartinFowler uses his Bliki primarily in order to take advantage of the simple TextFormattingRules. Is there any other good reason for structuring a weblog as a wiki? Does he use AutomaticLinkGeneration to link his posts? (mailto:fowler@acm.org, email and ask him?)

A bliki works best for me as a blog which automatically link WikiWord to an associated wiki engine. The blog itself remains chronological and non-editable, while WikiWord will link you to the wiki pages. The WikiWord works in blog the same way as it is in a Wiki page, so after posting to blog with a new WikiWord, a new topic can be created in the wiki. -- HenryJen

Has anyone ever heard of a Bliki implementation that went on EarleMartin 's (above on this page) intuition about the blog-like nature of RecentChanges? Why could one not implement recent changes as kind of an automatic blog, and then have authors come in an post blog entries temporally between (or around) actual changes in the wiki. This way, you are taking advantage of an already time-dependant feature of wiki to sort of narrate the wiki itself, and maybe other related things. This does of course conflict with the WikiNature, since in order for it to be accurately temporal, no one should beable to go back and edit time dependant content. Though in small groups (of possibly one) i think it has potential for success. And I personally would be very interested in such software. -- JesseRudolph?

By the way, have you heard of the wiki that talks about blogs?

http://theconnexion.net/cgi-bin/blogwiki.pl ( BrokenLink )

Or the blog that talks about the CommunityWiki ?

http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/Blog

See also AwikiOrAblog. Also, BlikiPage. --Cheers, JasonNocks

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