Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
Blogs and Wikis
Somebody left a comment recently asking about WikiLogs and whether I was planning to implement anything like this with Pebble. To answer the easy question first, no, it's not something that I'm planning to put in Pebble.
We've been discussing the relative merits of blogs and wikis at Evolution over the past few weeks and my definition of each is as follows.
- Blogs : Tools for logging thoughts as they occur, the overall organisation of which is date-based.
- Wikis : Tools for an easy way to build websites that are essentially static and organised by topic. These have a tendency to be more formal than blogs.
At the moment, my opinion is that blogs and wikis can live side-by-side, although hybrids allow blogs to be implemented on top of wikis and vice-versa. I see blogs as a less formal way of logging thoughts, making them more suited to snippets of information rather than complete articles and documentation. With wikis being more suited to building static websites, content can be promoted from a blog to a wiki should the need arise. WikiLogs attempt to do this by offering a wiki-style user experience on top of blog entries, but I think that you lose something in the organisation here since it's essentially still date-based.
Some other opinions can be found here and while I do think that blogs and wikis are separate, I do agree that they can share many of the same technologies. Having a wiki produce RSS feeds of the most recently updated pages is certainly useful.
Coming back to blogs and wikis living side-by-side, an idea that I'm toying with is to provide bespoke integration that will allow blog entries to be easily promoted to either a static website or a wiki. This would allow people to log their thoughts in an informal way while making it easy to promote the more useful content and organise it in a different way. Effectively you're using blogs as a scratchpad for building a wiki full of really useful content. This is certainly something I'm noticing on my current project. I'll blog about this later.
