Blogs vs. Wikis

Blogs and Wikis are two different, yet similar things. To adequately discuss this, it is necessary to break down each individually, and then come back to highlight how they relate to each other.

We'll start with blogs. Blogs have revolutionized the world, most notably in news media. You used to have to be a journalist to report on a story and have it published. Blogs changed all of that. Now, anyone can start a blog and say just about anything they want, on any topic. A person can have a news and opinion blog without a college degree. Or they can have a personal blog that functions as a sort of diary. The possibilities are endless. A key feature is that there is no "editor" aside from the blog writer. For this reason, blogs and bloggers have drawn criticism for being insensitive or inaccurate in their "reporting" over the years.

But there is a good side. Blogs offer a raw, first hand account of many things, from news to personal matters. New blog posts can be made at any time, and can be accessed by anyone at any time. As said by Kathy E. Gill in "How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere?":

"Blogging can empower a new group of writers to challenge a storyline presented by mainstream media. It can empower them to move from observer status to commentator or even shaper of events. When this occurs, journalists may find themselves being questioned, not the questioner."

This perfectly captures the spirit of blogging, and shows how amazing they can really be. The rest of Gill's article can be read here.

But how can blogs be used for collaboration? Rather easily. Through posting and commenting and replying, bloggers establish blogospheres. The bigger the community, and the more active the posting and commenting, blogs go from simple posts to creating stories in themselves. For example, a celebrity can post on their blog an idea for a contest, stipulating that the comment with the most replies will win. With the comments on that blog post, a sort of collaboration towards one person winning that contest develops.

How about wikis? Wikis are massive collaborative websites on any topic, a bunch of topics, or on every topic, like Wikipedia. Users can create, develop, and edit pages on a particular topic, with one person contributing one thing and another user contributing even more. Wikis are the epitome of collaboration in new media. Wikis are often at the top of a Google search results page, offering the most relevant information on the search.

Wikis can be used in so many ways, including in business. As founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales puts it in this article by Gardiner Morse: 

Pretty much any sort of knowledge sharing that is enhanced by open, flexible, rapid collaboration, particularly in contexts where people are separated geographically and relationship-building is important. Wikis are great tools for helping people to come to consensus quickly, whether about what to put on a meeting agenda or how best to meet customers’ needs.

The rest of Morse's article can be read here.

I think a good idea for wikis that has not been used yet is in showing timelines of events more clearly, perhaps in a visual way. Wiki pages are traditionally largely text based, and trying to read a timeline of events down a page can be cumbersome. If wikis allowed for a more visual, picture based timeline structure, pages detailing events over time will be much more reader friendly.

So now we have arrived at the central question: blogs vs. wikis, and the issue of convergence. To contrast the two, blogs have authors, while wikis have contributors. In my opinion, wikis are sort of a progression from blogs in that they take blogs to the next level in the collaborative sense. Both wikis and blogs have users that contribute to a topic, though in different ways. The two will always be different, but they are really two sides of the same coin.

Convergence happens all around us more and more. In today's networked world, convergence is very important because it streamlines the huge array of options we have available to us as consumers of new media. The biggest example of this was when Google acquired YouTube (incidentally, blogger and blogspot are parts of Google as well). Google is the king of convergence, in my opinion. Their most recent endeavor, which is neither successful or unsuccessful as of yet, is their new social network, Google+.

Blogs and wikis will always be separate entities, but perhaps one day we will see a major blog site and a major wiki site converge.