I spent many hours this weekend trying out server-side apps that combine the functionalities of blogs and Wiki. In my cursory study of wikiblogs, I found only three that seemed mature enough to allow one to focus on communication as opposed to coding: Vanilla, PikiePikie, and Erik Benson's Salieri. Each is impressive and, at the same time, frustrating.

First off, there doesn't seem to be any way to get the source for Salieri. I've written Erik about this a couple of times, but he's busy writing and I haven't heard back.

The other two platforms, Vanilla and PikiePikie, are written in Rebol and Python respectively, languages that I am not familiar with. I've been able to get them both running, but it was non-trivial and certainly too much for the turnkey Blogger crowd.

They both have an unfinished feel to them, mostly because of the lack of clear documentation. Installation is actually quite straight-forward, but one with Pikie, for example, one has to try to determine why the config file suggests a directory structure different from the instructions.

My feeling is still that Wiki could and should be quite popular as an extension of current blog platforms. From what I can see, adding wiki capabilities to the main blog platforms (Blogger, Movable Type, Radio Userland, etc.) would be fairly straightforward.