Katheryn Windham

I'm Just Another Perl Hacker, writer, dreamer, &c.

Homepage: http://katwyn.com/
Email: see homepage
Weblog: see homepage :)

On weblogs vs. wikis... People are forsaking email for weblog commentary. They're turning off their televisions and turning on Kuro5hin and Mark Pilgrim. It's clear weblogs are becoming a medium of choice - but how does one go about becoming part of it? I tried all of the free weblogging sites, and some commercial sites, but when it comes down to it, there's nowt like rolling your own in perl for the greatest level of cutomisability.

And that leaves me with choices - one of which is as to how I want to interact with people through my weblog. Comments and trackbacks are nice, but wiki work well when large groups of people collaborate, so how about some serious blog and wiki tie-in?

I know some people have hybrid wikis and blogs already - Bill Seitz runs his whole site as a wiki, and the DECAFBAD bloke and some others have thoughts on this too (http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/sbin/view/Main/WeblogWithWiki)... but are any people actually running a blog where all of the posts and everything is editable? If not, why not?

Let's think... Disadvantages:

Syndication feeds would be going haywire with updates! Perhaps have one feed for new posts, and one for updates.
Vandalism. It's not pervasive on c2, AFAICS, because people maintain the site well, but on a weblog where there's serialization and more reading - there's more focus towards the recent items. Imagine if slashdot were freely editable by anyone. Does anyone seriously think that'd work?
Thread mode vs. document mode. People are used to thinking of weblogs as places where entries are put up, and then you comment in turns on the entry and its current comments. But the power of wiki is in DocumentMode, where everything is refactored into a cohesive whole - people would be less inclined to doing that, I feel, on a weblogwiki.

Aside: XXX Perhaps I should split this off into WeblogWiki?? Better to be cautious for now! :)

Advantages:

It might be easier for people to comment, especially if they're used to wiki interfaces.
If document mode were adhered to, the results may generally be better than what's currently seen in weblog + comment-thread land!
Perhaps it'd spark inter-linking between posts. Each new post would have a WikiName, so in essence you'd be devoting yourself to a new WikiTopic? each post around.
When a reader notices the basically the same comment is repeated over and over (as happens all too often on slashdot), that reader can refactor them into a single comment.
When a reader notices one person asks a questions, then way down at the bottom of the thread someone answers that questions, the reader can delete the question, or at least bring them together.

That's not as many advantages as I'd thought. There's probably more. If you know of anyone who already has a set up like this, or if I've missed some discussion on the topic already, then sorry, and please point me thither!

And another thing... While I'm fussing, I may as well ask: where does one put one's weblog? I'm not sure whether to use [weblogname] or 'weblog' or 'blog' or 'log' or / or something else entirely (a subdomain?). Help! :)

- katwyn

Do you mean "where on my site do I put my blog?", or "should I get a domain for my blog?", or "where do I put my blog on a wiki?"

Where on my site. It's the classic organization problem - I'd like to classify using descriptive metadata (and have a LocationlessWeb - something I definitely need to write about) rather than a hierarchy, but I'm bound to the directory structures that Apache and HTTP URIs force on us :) I've decided that I'll use /weblog/ - even though I hate the word 'weblog' - because it's most recognizable to people. From a psychological standpoint, if I used /[weblogname]/, people may be inclined to think that I'm a user at that domain instead of the owner of the domain, and domain ownership is obviously presentationally beneficial to one's web presence.

Hey Katheryn (or Emma, you got me a bit confused there), that's quite a start. I'm not much of a weblog fan myself, but I can point you to some places where people are talking about it. There's not that much on c2, except for BloggedWiki, but there's more on Meatball; WikiLog is a good starting point. The CommunityWiki is a relatively new addition to the crowd, but there's some interesting material already. In particular, you might want to take a look at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/ReasonToBlog.

By the way, there's no need to split this into its own page just yet. It's nice to use your HomePage as a sort of staging area when you're new to a community. You are new to c2, aren't you? Welcome!

-- JohannesGijsbers

Feel free to move your ideas to these pages. http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/BeBold -- DavidCary

Hey there Johannes. Thanks for the pointers! The bliki (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/) of MartinFowler is very much what I was thinking about, if you imagine public access and a larger scale.

Perusing sites like http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/wiki.cgi?FrontPage reminds me that I were to build a bliki (I hate the word 'bliki' as much as 'weblog', FWIW - maybe 'bloki'... no that's horrid too) I'd focus on a small feature set and high usability/low bugrate instead of PLink & transclusion type bloat...

The emacswiki 'ReasonToBlog?' page is interesting - I'd not considered weblogs as a replacement to finger before :)

[half-baked-ramble] On the weblog versus wiki points that it raises, I find it counter-intuitive that there should be more than one wiki on the web. Is there really enough WikiName collision to dissuade disparate communities' cooperation in one place? Why did MeatballWiki and the EMacs community wiki not find their home here? Obviously each of the wikis are differentiated by topic (and syntax, and community, &c.), but I find that no reason to have TWiki-esque subwikis? c2.com has already found it useful to have MeatballWiki as a sister site, allowing easy linking... if all wikis were linked like that, there may be a consistency advantage. It's the difference between having to look up common information on Google, and now having Wikipedia as a central repository where you might want to check first (I know people that do that). Tying this back to weblogs, given the frequency that people post interesting information on each others' sites in comments, why should weblogs be so individual, isolated, and distributed? I'm not usually a fan of centralisation, either, but sometimes it's useful. [/half-baked-ramble]

'Katheryn' is just fine, by the way :) And thanks for the kind welcome!

- katwyn

Howdy. Welcome to wiki. I've decided that the plural of wiki is simply wiki, like the plural of fish is fish. Would you mind if I moved your writing on "Two Wikis is Too Many Wikis" here and on http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/KatherynWindham to http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/TooFewWiki ? -- DavidCary

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