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?
There is programmatic access to gists via the github API.
This might help clarify: An example of using gist.io: http://gist.io/3135754 The underlying gist: https://gist.github.com/3135754