One of the main reasons that makes blogging so popular is the process of publishing: A quick "single button" with help of tools such as blogthis.

Perhaps the important part of this experience is that you know how and where exactly content is going to be made visible: At the top of the page. This doesn't seem important. But when you see this in context of wiki's where "where you put content" is not so obvious unless you navigate till the destination. And if you are maintaining page such as FAQ, then it is another level of "decision making".

But seen from different context, it seems to me that wiki's can fill in a requirement which so far has been a difficult process: Publishing information on intranet portals (containing announcements, key links and so on).

The idea is to create mechanisms that will generate content on portals with single "publish this to portal" button embedded within the wiki topics. For example, if you have "FAQ of the Day" published on the portal page, then have a 'publish this' button in your wiki where you are managing all the FAQs. Similarly, if a particular department is managing their announcements on long term basis, it makes sense to manage these within a wiki, and have a "publish this" button that pushes selected information to portal.

So, we have wiki to manage various contexts (especially when you are part of group), comments and personal thoughts go to your blogs (ref to my last blog on this), and "publish this" completes the picture for public consumption via portals.

Let us hope wiki authors implement this capabaility and do to portals what blogs did to individual publishing!

permalink 7:41 AM