Blogging Roller

Tim Bray wonders why somebody would assert that blogs and wikis are converging because "in their essential nature, it seems like they couldn’t be more different."

Danny Ayers responds that "it’s not that they’re 'converging' it’s that they’re fundamentally the same kind of system."

My opinion? Blogs and wikis are similar in that they both aim to make it easy to "write the web" and as web systems, they both can benefit from many of the same technologies/features such as syndication, referers, trackbacks, WYSIWYG editors, etc. At the same time, they are different in essential nature, as Tim points out, but they differ in complementary ways -- and that's why they go so well together.

Blogs and wikis are merging. The evidence to support this assertion is the growing popularity of blikis or wikiblogs which include both blog and wiki capabilities. Some of these are wikis with blog features grafted on, some of them are blogs with wiki integration features, and some that are (or appear to be) designed from the ground up to be combined systems. Danny points out Bill Sietz's Wikilog and Martin Fowler's Bliki, but there are many more examples of combined wiki and blog systems.

For examples of wikis with blogging capabilities see TikiWiki, Meatball:WikiLog, and JSPWiki.

For examples of blogs that support wiki integration features see Movable Type (plugins WeblogWithWiki and MT-Twiki) , Wordpress (plugin WordPressWiki), Roller, and Blojsom.

For examples of combined systems look at Atlassian's Confluence, SnipSnap and SocialText.

BTW, I've written about this before.