Gossamer Forum
Home : Products : Gossamer Links : Development, Plugins and Globals :

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??

Quote Reply
Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??
Everyone is looking at "blogs" and I wonder if it's the same myopia that causes people to obsess about SEO, and forget the goal is to create content-rich sites that users want to keep visiting and/or participate in.

Blogs are basically CMS (content management systems) that have a few extra features (and a whole host of missing ones). Specifically, the trackback, ping, blogroll, and other "announce" features are what most people fixate on, et, without something to announce, they don't mean much. Oddly, except for a few special instances, such as a breaking-news blog, those features really don't do much for the blog itself, and really increase the noise to signal ratio, and make it more confusing for a novice surfer (90% of what is out there) and very often the real target of the blog. Being indexed by the search engines for your content is how most people are going end up at your blog.

Most blogs are personal logs. Blogger software has been upgraded to do other things, but they were, and are, really a way for someone to get their own soap box, or newsletter, and get some feedback on it beyond the simple webpage.

What's the point of "publishing" your blog, if it's just being thrown in with a million other blogs, sort of like standing in the middle of the down town and tossing your entire handfull of leaflets in the air, and walking away. There is a much higher yeild if you hand them out one by one.

Right now, Links can do most of this, with the reviews system, and the soon to be released comments system, there is very little that can't be done within the core links modules to create an interactive blog-like system (without the "publish" features which I'm really still trying to understand their function).

Ok, that said, what *most* requests seem to be, are *really* Wikis. Where people can interact with, and comment on, and update/change the base content.

For instance, the http://www.wikipedia.org is the classic example, and everyone has bumped into it at one time or another.

While a wiki is too close to anarchy for me, there is another type of system, exemplified by Scoop, that is between a closed CMS and an open "wiki". What it allows is for the user community to post, vote on, publish, remove, etc articles in a somewhat majority/democracy rules system. Some people talk about this as a completely admin-less system, where it's fully user-driven. It's a very advanced "karma" system, where users, messages, posts, comments and such are given "karma" like points, and that determines if they live or die, where they are ranked, and if they come back to life.

What people seem to be asking for, rather than the spam-announce-publish system of the blogs, or the total anarchy of the true wiki, is something along the lines of Scoop. http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/ It seems to be a CCMS -- collaborative content management system.

A description/explanation is here: http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/special/whatisit

The IMDB (http://imdb.com) may be the biggest of the projects, but uses a fairly closed system, where your updates are reviewed by a panel, not the user base at large.

I think the current implementation of scoop is too cumbersome to install, and too locked-down in it's legacy code. A version 2.0 seems to be being planned, but looks like it will be a complete rewrite.

In analyzing what is going on with the various Wikis and with Scoop, it seems possible to create what a version 2.0 of Scoop should be with Links. *AND* the install, maint, and upgrades would be easier.


Most wikis are not using a MySQL database, and that limits their size and power. It's the same issues that started to limit Links 2.0 before Links SQL was introduced.

The idea is to look at a Wiki in terms of Links SQL, and controlling the "anarchy" by using "karma" points.

Because of some limitations in Links, it would be helpful to do a little mapping of terminology.
  • Wikis have "webs" which are similar to what we'd consider "Main Topics" or root level catagories.
  • Wikis talk about "topics" which appear to be just web pages, but there are subtle differences.
  • Topics are linked by using "WikiWords" which are strings of capitalized words run together ThisWouldBeANewTopic
  • In display, ThisWouldBeANewTopic would be hyperlinked to the "view" script (page.cgi) with ThisWouldBeANewTopic as the p= parameter.

This is where it starts to break down, if the use of a MySQL database was to be optimized.



I'm going to stop here, before wandering into more technical details, in order to get some feedback. Blogs, Wikis, CMS, etc. What is it you are looking for in your site development for how users interact with you, and vice versa.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
Subject Author Views Date
Thread Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis?? pugdog 3420 Apr 24, 2005, 10:53 AM
Post Re: [pugdog] Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??
Jag 3360 Apr 24, 2005, 3:15 PM
Thread Re: [pugdog] Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??
loxly 3351 Apr 24, 2005, 5:20 PM
Post Re: [loxly] Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??
pugdog 3318 Apr 25, 2005, 7:43 PM
Thread Re: [pugdog] Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??
pugdog 3286 May 1, 2005, 9:37 AM
Post Re: [pugdog] Blogs, Blogs, Blogs, what about Wikis??
gaorenst 3131 Jan 12, 2006, 11:06 AM