2002 • September • 18

MT-Search + Wiki for K-Logging?

A very interesting side-effect I hadn't thought of yesterday when I integrated MT-Search into my wiki is that every wiki page is a mini-content index to my weblog. Even the really sparse wiki pages where I've only blurbed a sentence or so about a topic - now they have some decent content in their pointers back to the weblog where I mentioned them.

One idea that immediately strikes me is that I need this at work. I've got a barely attended-to experiment in journalling started there, using a LiveJournal installation. If I could get a similar search hacked into LJ, or scrap LJ and give everyone a MovableType weblog... we could very easily integrate up-to-date topic indexes into our existing company wiki.

For instance, wiki-word-ize a client's name, and create a short wiki topic page for that client. Or, refer to the wiki words belonging to our products. Then, be sure to include those topic strings in any weblog entries you post internally, and those wiki page will pull in your contributions. The cross-threading of this seems great to me. Show me all mutterings about ?ClientAlpha, and then show me all mutterings about our ?InstantWin product. In some cases, a particular weblog post will appear in both.

Wow. That's getting very close to what I wanted.

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Archived Comments

BillSeitz

2002-09-18T15:55:07

I can't help whether it wouldn't make sense to just implement weblogs in a wiki... :)
l.m.orchard

2002-09-18T16:41:52

I may end up there eventually. Right now, though, I can't help thinking that that overhead to provide things like BloggerAPI / MetaWeblogAPI hooks and archival and all that would eventually lead me to implementing a MovableType work-alike with the Wiki just being a sort of storage layer. So, my first stab here is to try to join the two with as simple a collection of glue parts as I can find, with the assumption that the wiki does wiki best and the weblog does weblog best. That appears to be working, so at least now I can see how much a pain in the butt it is after using it. :) I might take a look at how hard that layer atop a wiki might be, though.