I am trying to work out what a blog might do for me.
I have a wiki running on my home Linux box alread (TWiki) and I find it useful for some things, I tend to use it as a CM tool rather than a wiki really as I am about the only contributor! :-) Still it allows me to give other members of the family some space to play in and it allows me to add to and create web pages when I'm away from home.
Now I have a need for a diary type tool of some sort and, fairly obviously, blogs come to mind. However having played with a couple I'm still a bit confused as to what they actually offer. Apart from the ability to edit a web page and add stuff on a sequential basis is there anything special that a blog does that a wiki doesn't? Or, more particularly, are there any things that a blog makes easy that are more difficult with other tools?
Chris G wrote:
Apart from the ability to edit a web page and add stuff on a sequential basis is there anything special that a blog does that a wiki doesn't?
Not really.
But a wiki page is a document which is collaborated on by many people and changes over time, a blog post is a comment/diary entry/journal entry/article made by one person on a particular date which (usually) remains static from then on (except for comments made by other people). You can subscribe to a blog using an RSS or Atom feed and be updated when new posts are made. By contrast, subscribing to a wiki via a feed only makes sense if you're interested in every little change made to a living document.
So a wiki page is for collaboratively editing a document over time, a blog post is for making a timely comment.
For an alternative view, ask MJ Ray, I have no idea how his web site works :P
-- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk
Ben Francis lists@hippygeek.co.uk wrote:
For an alternative view, ask MJ Ray, I have no idea how his web site works :P
It's something like blogging with ikiwiki http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/wiki_blog_convergence/ but done using the One True Editor. I'm slowly explaining it in the All and Hacks categories of my site as I get time.
But by and large, the blogs = journal entries or articles and feeds, wikis = collaborative editing over time is a pretty good distinction.
Hope that helps,
-
Ben Francis -
Chris G -
MJ Ray