Blogs vs. Wikis

Blogs and wikis have become essential examples of new media, and while they may seem similar, they must not be confused as interchangeable. In her paper "How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere?" Kathy Gill states blogs emerged in the late 1990s and by 2002, there were an estimated 500,000 blogs in the universe, and possibly somewhere in the millions today. Wikis became popular in the late 90s, with the first wiki software developed in 1995 by Ward Cunningham as a way to manage site content. Of course, one of the most popular wikis today is Wikipedia. 

So what's the difference between these two? Well there a quite a few.

Gill states in her article the "Primary characteristics of a blog include: 

• Reverse chronological journaling (format) • Regular, date-stamped entries (timeliness)

• Links to related news articles, documents, blog entries within each entry (attribution)

• Archived entries (old content remains accessible) 

• Links to related blogs (blogrolling) • RSS or XML feed (ease of syndication)

• Passion (voice)" 

Blogs often have one author and sometimes a few contributors, and tend to be opinionated. On the other hand, wikis are meant to be collaborative on shared knowledge, and are constantly being updated. In the article, "How To Use Wikis for Business," the author explains how a Los Angeles Times wiki failed as the Times tried to make an opinionated article into something conversational, which would have worked well for a blog but not a wiki.

Convergence has become very important in today's networked world as more and more people begin to contribute to and share information available to either groups or the public. Converging allows for different media platforms to come together, so kind of like the emerging of wikiblogs, or simply news platforms adding rss feeds or wikis to their sites.

This brings me to the importance of collaboration, especially with blogs. Nowadays, blogs are used for collaboration with the public or within organizations, just to simply share experiences or opinions or knowledge. For example, Blogs@Baruch were introduced to most of us freshman year as a way to share our stories and experiences at Baruch with students in our class. Another example is business blogs where the authors share their opinions or experience with certain strategies or ideas and other bloggers tend to reply with their thoughts. 

Blogs and wikis are truly interesting new media technologies that are leading to more convergence and collaboration online. Maybe a possible future use for wikis can be for group research projects in Baruch (even though I'm sure some other universities may do this already).