Blogs and Wikis

Wed, 21 May 2003 02:36:00 -0400
/technology

I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about how to increase the crossover between blogs and wikis. Joi Ito started me off so he should find this interesting.

Blog to Wiki

Each blog post should be automatically injected into it’s own wiki page. These pages should be alterable only with the approval of the original author. Changes by anyone else would be queued for the author’s approval and automatically applied if approval is granted. This would allow corrections to be made while preserving the original historic record.

Each weblog entry could now be accompanied with a “correct this entry” button and if appropriate a “view corrected version” button.

The wiki page can show the author’s current (under)standing with the blog showing his original post on the subject.

WikiWords appearing in a weblog post should be automatically converted to links to the correct wiki page.

Wiki to Blog

The only way I could imagine this working is to have have wiki changes presented as either part of the blog or down a sidebar. If this is a personal blog, only that person’s changes should be shown.

The key to making this work is attractive presentation and intelligent aggregation.

If these changes are presented in an attractive enough way, skimming should allow one to intuitively pick up the level and kind of activity occuring on the Wiki (and by extension the project). For a group blog, daily aggregation of changes, per author, may be required to reach a satisfactory level of browsability.

These pretified changes should, of course, be offered as RSS alongside the weblog’s feed. In fact, this is a good example of an alternative use of RSS.