Some assorted British bloggers have been setting up Wikablog and I’ve seen the odd blog post (and even an email from Tim Worstall) shilling it for all its worth. Wikablog does exactly what it says on the tin - it’s a wiki for blogs. You list your blog there and people can add content about it. Nice, convergence of two technologies and all that, but… so what? It doesn’t actually really do anything. From the homepage, Wikablog’s justification says:

…there are a lot of blogs out there — a billion trillion gazillion, according to some experts — and it’s difficult to find out what they’re all about without visiting every one of them and reading it. How tiresome.

But hang on - we already have lots of ways of doing that. One is the blogroll. Nearly every site has them - if you’re reading the HTML version, my one is in the right-hand column of this page. And the great thing about blogrolls is that they provide a weak kind of identity and authority - the blogroll of someone whose blog is well-written, intelligent or even compelling is more trustworthy and almost certainly more useful than a randomly anonynously-maintained wiki.*

Technorati searches are another way - by looking up who links to interesting URLs you can find out blogs on particular topics quickly; Technorati’s metric of blog popularity and sort functionality means you can also have a rough guide to the authority and quality of a particular blog.

Wikiablog is nice idea, but it’s destined to die on its arse in several months’ time. It doesn’t support account creation or any other way of linking a blogger’s identity with the material they contribute to the wiki; without identity, there is no community, and without community, there is nothing to keep it going. Once linkspammers find out about it (and trust me, they will), it’ll be a target for repeated attacks and modifications. Will there then be people with the time and energy to continually maintain it? With its lofty communal ideals and strong sense of social norms, Wikipedia generally copes well (though by no means perfectly) with vandalism and hijacking; that’s why it’s a comparative success. Wikablog is a personal promotional tool, though, and not subject to the same ethos nor the same controls. While it’s a nice idea in theory, and implementing experimental ideas like this should be encouraged, I fear it won’t be around for very long.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 00:21:04 and is filed under General.