After The Blog Is Gone: SnipSnap Plays Bliki

If you haven't heard about Blikis yet, it is now time you do. A bliki is a blog that also has wiki capabilities. That means, an easy-to-use online publishing tool, that a non-technical person can operate, and that integrates the ability for readers of the content to easily add, edit, revise and change it without needing to know programming or code. If you are looking for a collaborative tool that would support collective gathering of resource lists, the refining concepts and ideas through an asynchronous process, or one of the many other possible asynchronous collaborative applications, you may indeed find that the concept of a bliki may have a lot of appeal going for it. Here some of the features a bliki like SnipSnap may have:

a) Direct publishing to the Internet with no coding/HTML knowledge

b) Simple and straightforward publishing workflow

b) Simultaneous output to XHTML and RSS/Atom

c) Trackback, auto-pinging ability

d) Content categories

e) Support for international character sets

f) Notification of new content via IM

g) Integrated full-text search

h) Fully standards compliant - XHTML 1.0 and CSS support

i) Integrated SQL Web server

j) Multi-user

k) Multi-blog

i) Support for images, SVG vector files, attachments

l) Support for GeoURL

m) Open Source

Called SnipSnap, this is a Java-based weblog+wiki that can be put to use in no time at all. SnipSnap is also cross-platform as it is written in Java and it can be used on a variety of computers. "So why didn't it happen yet on a large scale? Why we don't see every weblog tool shipping with a built-in wiki support? Looks like demand for that isn't there. But why? Is it because it's not something that most people want? ... some things need to be experienced to be appreciated. Wikis are valuable addition to weblogs but people don't ask for them because they don't know how wikis could be useful for them. A classic chicken and egg problem." (Krzysztof Kowalczyk). For an excellent introduction to Blikis and some great reference and background reading check out Amy Gahran recent post on this topic.