Okay, I'm exhausted. That last entry with all the links, terrible... But I gotta say, my mind keeps gravitating to one concept, and I'll outline it here for you right now.
Ahh! But before I do that. I just thought of something. Are there any successful open blogs? Like... Blogs where anyone can post? Oh I just rememebered Metafilter... But that has a barrier. It has money involved! *gasp* I guess when it comes to popularity and bandwidth costs... Sure.
Wow, can't think of a good reason why the public should be able to blog... Might lead to abuse or something. Ugh...? I dunno. One person writes vastly less than a group of people... And blogs are already difficult to read because there's so much to click on! I guess we'll have to worry about scalability later...
Okay back to my idea. My idea is... To imitate Everything2. I don't even know that much about Everything2!!! But here's the premise. The atomic unit of wikis is the edit, and the atomic unit of blogs is the post. Those are clearly not equal. And these atomic units produce different structures, so therein lies the problem. We have to somehow make them interact.
Edits edit existing content... Content we call posts. And posts are accessed by time. So far so good. Blogs have a time-aware interface. But what about wikis? Wikis are topical. So we need topics... But at this point, I'm going to call topics nodeshells and posts write-ups. Definitely terminology from Everything2. The way I see it... Posts are just that. They're like blog posts and you can view them any which way. But every now and then, a post becomes sort of... A document. An essay. Something more rich than a write off. But it doesn't have to be! But if it does. If it does... Then it can belong to a nodeshell.
This is where the Everything2 kick comes in. More than one post can belong in a nodeshell. I'm not sure why, but that's just the way I've thought of it so far. Maybe... Like more than one view point about the same topic from different people. Or... A disambiguation.
Here I remember one of my biggest gripes about the Wikipedia. I hate hate HATE with a passion disambiguation pages. We call the store Target TARGET, know what I'm saying? We don't call it Target parenthesis store parens close. I just... Want all my Targets on one page. But that's just me.
There was a page on Everything2 that said one could theoretically make Everything2 a wiki by placing everybody at editor power level and that'd be it.
So what am I trying to accomplish? How can I run a blog site for myself and a wiki at the same time? Well, I still feel the need to step in and grant myself some blog-like powers... The public would be able to add/edit anything, but I'd put rampant deletion to a minimum somehow... Like maybe only give me the power to delete? Then I had to think of this whole Graveyard setup for dead posts, ugh, it's a mess...
I dunno. I value my knowledge and my thought process a lot. I guess that's the allure to blogs. It crystalizes what I know and makes you read it. But if it's wiki content, then it runs the risk of... Being edited away. And I certainly don't want that.
So I've thought of adding a purity feature to posts. If I post something, unedited, then you know for sure it's me. But if someone... Touches the post, it gains a badge. Warning the public that we're not sure what changed, but I definitely didn't approve it.
And speaking of approval, there's user access levels... On wikis, there are no users, there are no editors, since all is nothing. There are just equal people who have different roles. But on my system, I see myself having some sort of power to approve edited posts and remove the badges. You know, like, I see you correcting my spelling mistakes, and I approve.
I dunno. There are still things to hash out... Like what comments are, exactly. In wikis, comments are content. They're so inline, it bothers me. But in blogs, comments are external. They're on a different plane than posts. And that, from a wiki standpoint, bugs me too. Sucks. I'm trying to think of this whole inline comments system for posts, but it's a mess too. Comments could be Simple Appends to a post... Comments could also be new writeups! But Everything2 discourages snippy commentary as entirely new writeups. Because writeups heavily aim to be articles. And quick comments under any nodeshell really doesn't help. And that assumes that we're in a nodeshell! See, it's a mess.
How would somebody comment on an individual post... Maybe both. If post, append. If nodeshell, create new article.
That's all I got so far. There it is. Nearly everything I've thought about for the union of a wiki and a blog. Hope it's of use to someone as it was to me.
Posted by Mark Canlas at February 16, 2005 12:41 PM