Blog v Wiki

Blogs and Wikis both are remarkable pieces of technologies of new media. Both of them provide such a great medium with many different ways to quickly share the information with others on a site, without requiring knowledge of advanced tools and expertise. They are much easier for people to update and change the material comparing to a formal document or a traditional website.

Blog is a shortened version of Weblog, which is a term used to describe websites that maintain an ongoing journal of information. Blogs are those websites which is used to reflect and review. They contain posts, sometimes similar to journal entries, from usually a single person, but can have multiple contributors or a group of people. The posts are dated and listed in reverse sequential order.

In contrast, a wiki is a website that enables users to collect team knowledge, planning events and activities, or work on group projects together. They are used to collaborate and construct together the intended material. People can easily add new content or edit existing content. It changes continuously and is designed with intent of communication and it grows rapidly compared to blogs.

There many similarities between blogs and wikis. They both are published on web, they can be used to collaborate with a group, they both provide medium to post thoughts opinion and ideas and allow others to comment and contribute. In addition, both mediums provide people to posts links to related sites, photos, and blogs.

As we are becoming a global village, convergence is becoming more and more important. News delivered through the new media is an excellent example of our networked world. In just few hours, now it has the potential to reach millions of people and could rapidly help to change one's opinion on a particular issue. Blogs are a great resource for collaboration. They bring many people together through their share, comment and link others blog features. With these tools in hand, a person can share his or her opinion on particular matter to millions of people in a very diverse demographic.     

It's amazing to see how quickly people adopt new technologies a modern example for wiki's will be Evernote or Microsoft Notes although they are not published on website but one can imagine that these products are derived from the same intent to collaborate with a closed group and share with other people. In my personal opinion, I think the new uses of wiki will be to implement this technology in more government sectors as it is implemented in the private sectors.