Bliki For You, Bliki For Me
Krzysztof Kowalczyk rekindles the case for the inbreeding of two Internet first cousins, Blogging and Wikis. Krzysztof makes some great points and I think it is definitely worth reading in its entirety. For those that don't want to read, however, here's the 3 second summary:
Wikis are excellent for managing and accessing "knowledge", the tangible actionable snippets that we constantly refer to
Blogs are excellent for their simplicity, providing a strange reflective mechanism: "they are personal but oriented toward other people"
Installing Wikis is hard, installing blogs are easy. Both are important to to the other and should be merged (blog added to wiki more likely than wiki onto blog).
Source: Weblog Without Honor or Humanity, "Of weblogs and wikis." via Media Guerilla
Expanding a little bit on the potential of the integration, the relationship between knowledge and commentary should be noted. Wikis surely manage knowledge in a method that is both public and instructive. Observation of the change history alone provides a nested level of information that we've generally lacked in traditional contexts.
Blogs, on the other hand, are "conversations" in their most empirical form - conversations between an author and her audience. Of course, a natural by-product of conversation is knowledge itself. A wiki provides an optimized infrastructure for this derived knowledge, far superior to the search-and-link ad-hoc system used to leverage blogs in a similar manner.
There's more than one reason developers around the world are up in arms about the separation of presentation from content. Each has its own purpose and destination.