Choosing a wiki and a blog

I recently had to choose both a wiki and a blog. I also expected to find both functionalities within the same product or hosted service as they are not that different.

My requirements for the wiki were the following:

• Topic articles with versioning, attachments and discussions;


• Authoring of articles by invitation only, discussions opened to everyone;


• Hierarchical organisation of topics, ideally presented like online help: table of contents, index, search;


• Customisable UI (branding);


• Full-text search;


• Authoring using Word;


• Preferably a hosted service with a friendly URL,


• Ad-free.

My requirements for a blog were very similar, except:

• Authoring of articles by the owner of the blog only;


• Organisation by category and by date.

My first observation is that you apparently cannot have both within the same solution.

http://www.wikimatrix.org/ is an invaluable resource to compare wiki software and two hosted solutions rise above average: jotspot and stikipad, although neither of them fulfils 100% of my requirements. Both products are basic but they do the job although authoring in Word, my top requirement, is not possible with these wikis.

I have not been able to find a comprehensive resource that compares blog software properly although there is some information at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/. The well-known products I have come across are Community Server (formerly .Text), Moveable Type and WordPress. The top services are Blogger, MySpace and MSN Spaces. There is now also a Yahoo offering based on Moveable Type. My preference is Blogger because there is a Word plug-in which works reasonably well and it is free. The main objection is that Blogger lacks proper categories.

My conclusion is that there is still a lot to improve on wikis and blogs especially to streamline the authoring process and to make navigation more fluid.