What is a gist, really? Is it a versioned, modifiable and referencable publication? Can I store it in my github repo? Should we be using gist as a model for info packet? is there an "API"? If someone could explain their understanding of a gist, I would appreciate it.
A gist is basically a mini-git repo. There is a revision history and they are attached to your github page. You can also folk or edit them and there is a permalink to each revision.
There is programmatic access to gists via the github API.
Very interesting - I also noticed that gists have comments -- I'm not sure how those are handled. Doesn't this mean that gists are the ultimate blog? Can you even create them locally and push?