Blogs and Wikis and Content Publishing
Tim Bray argues blogs and wikis have little in common. As he puts it:
they’re both about people placing content on the Web for other people, but in their essential nature, it seems like they couldn’t be more different. A wiki is a collaborative construction engine, with refactoring and edit-in-place being the dominant forms of activity, and many equal voices singing in a chorus. A blog is more like a content faucet, a source with one voice, always growing at one end; while updates to existing content are OK, the dominant activity is pouring new text and pictures and whatever in.
While recognizing Tim’s point about the differences, I think the more important point is their similarities; that they are both content authoring and publishing media. So I start to think simply about content tied to metadata, about different ways to serialize (time-based vs. topic-linked) and publish that content (public vs. private), and different ways to author (collaborative vs. individual). Why shouldn’t I be able to author a note in wiki markup, mark it as private, and then later decide to publish it as a blog entry? Similarly, one increasingly sees collaborative blogs.
I think developers need to think more creatively about exploiting the points of connection between blogs and wikis, as well as more comprehensive CMS systems. My concrete thinking is that the Ruby community seems to be doing some interesting work with the new Rails web development framework, and they may be in a good position to push the state of the art here. Some people in that community are starting to see these connections. For example, in comments on using Rails for blog applications, one poster says I’ve thought about using Instiki as the basis for a blog. It really seems like there is a lot of common code between a wiki and a blog.
This is right, but I’d really go much farther, and think about a sort of CMS framework built on Rails, and then various modules—wiki, blog, etc.—that can plug into it. So Instiki-like wiki functionality could simply be dropped into that system, as could blog funtionality, all of it integrated into a more comprehensive CMS context, which could include RSS aggregators, bibliographic databases, etc. Indeed, Instiki already has CMS-like functionality with its excellent export and TeX-processing support. Instead of starting by recreating existing applications like MT or Moin Moin in Rails, then, perhaps the Rails community is in an excellent position to rethink the whole universe of content publishing on the web?
