SnipSnap is a bliki

Ralf has posted to the epedagogy blog in response to my posts about this site. He suggested that perhaps SnipSnap might be an off-the-shelf solution to our bliki needs.

I looked at the site. It is written in Java, which may or be a good thing or a bad thing. It seems as though it is far from complete (which may be a good thing or a bad thing). I suggested to Ralf that we should see this as an opportunity. If we have two incomplete solutions then we can run some comparative tests. I am not meaning technical tests, although they might be interesting. I mean that we can test the underlying assumptions in each project about what makes a bliki, which should reveal some of the asumptions about whay should a thing would be useful or valuable.

Later I talked with Aki, a student who is interested in this sort of thing. He has been looking at the techniques Technorati spiders use to gather information about blogs and, as I suspected, it is based on the existence of tags, or more specifically on the existence of certain attributes or classes within tags on a page.

This means that converting this to be Technorati-compatible (which it appears not to be at the moment) is well within the realms of possibility. Hell, I might do it this lunch hour.