We’ve written a number of times over the last two years on various attempts to fuse the use patterns of wikis and weblogs — they are appealingly different in their uses but complementary in the way their users value them.

Here are three recent entries in that category:

TiddlyWiki, a wiki-patterned note-taking app written by jeremy Ruston and designed to run entirely in the browser. No set-up at all, with the acknowledged skeleton in the closet that it can’t save things easily without access to a server. PhPtiddlyWiki is Patrick Curry’s attempt to fix that omission by tying a TiddlyWiki to a MySQL db through PHP.

The fascinating thing to me about TiddlyWiki isn’t so much the lowered set-up costs as the way a user page is built up during a session. Content creation is pure wiki, down to using CamelCase to specify new bits of content. The units of content themselves, however, are pure blog — post rather than page oriented, with multiple posts per page. And the user interaction is, I think, unique. Clicking on a post moves that post into the blog-standard central column, placing it underneath any posts the user previously clicked on, so the page is not reverse-crhonological by date but reverse-chronological by user interaction — page depth as history (though oddly it switches modes when you are clicking on content within a post in the center column — there the content opens under, rather than on top of, the most recent item.

Anyway, a lot of words to explain what is a very natural feeling but novel pattern of interaction — well worth a look.

The third item is Web Collaborator, a wiki/discussion board fusion, designed as a free collaborative space. The bet there seems to be that the free-formness of the wiki can be imporved upon by making two categories of social behaviors on wikis explicit in the tool. First, they make a distinction between discussion about and creation of shared content, and provide a discussion board for the former. Second, the provide a contact list of people on the project, with some nesting of editorial controls.

I’ve just watched student groups in this semester’s Social Software class use a wiki to coordinate group work, and most groups did both — listed their contacts as the frist thing they put on the wiki page, and shuttled, sometimes uncomfortably, between conversation and shared editing modes. And Liz will be pleased to see that it passes her “Is it ugly?” test for wikidom generally.

However, the discussion board on WebCollaborator seems badly designed, suffering from tUI issues — too much white space makes comments standalone rather than conversational — to a disconnect with the mission — the conversation is all macro, and I couldn’t see any way to tie a particular discussion to a particular piece of shared content, making it hard to focus the group on proposed edits or changes.

The overall pattern is interesting, however, and they seem to have come with an appreciation for the wiki form and a desire to make a few simple changes that support existing social patterns, rather than a wholesale makeover.