Sunday, July 09, 2006

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.

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