First service launched to provide alternative to "traditional" weblogging.

Bill Seitz has launched the first hosting service for wikilogs publishing, an alternative to the established-but-growing weblog format. He's combined the easy authoring and chronological view of the weblog with the automatic linking of the wiki, and packaged it as a service so that anyone can use it through their web browser.

Bill Seitz has launched the first hosting service for wikilogs publishing, an alternative to the established-but-growing weblog format. He's combined the easy authoring and chronological view of the weblog with the automatic linking of the wiki, and packaged it as a service so that anyone can use it through their web browser.

Ward Cunningham created (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory) the initial wiki software, and launched the first public wiki website in 1995 as part of the "software patterns" movement. Wikis traditionally allow anyone (who can access the webserver) to edit any page. But even in a single-author environment, wiki's unique characteristics" (http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WiKi) make it an ideal hypertext environment for breaking down and refining ideas.

Bill Seitz started blogging in 1998, discovered wiki in 1999, and combined the two for his own (http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki) purposes in late 2001. As 2003 seemed to become "the year of the blog", he decided that the wikilog approach deserved some evangelism. He decided that the need to run one's one dynamic web server was a significant barrier for most people, so he decided to launch the wikilogs.com hosting service.

Seitz says, "Traditional blogging generates a 'stream' of thoughts that flow past and disappear - they're write-once, read-once. The automatic linking of wiki (triggered with 'SmashedTogetherCapitalizedWords') encourages breaking ideas down into components and mixing them together in various ways to explore their relationships."

So far, Seitz has made two twists to the wiki software to make it more comfortable for the average reader. First, his software expands those 'SmashedTogetherCapitalizedWords' so they look more normal (and so they also get recognized by search engines). Second, he replaced the create-new-page flag from the wiki-standard question-mark to a set of square braces around the future page's label. He has additional improvements planned for the near future.

New customers can read more about the service at http://www.wikilogs.com and then sign up online. The cost is $40 per year.

Contact: Bill Seitz, wikilogs@fluxent.com