BLOG: Blog v Wiki

Communicating information in today’s world transcends distance. With the rise and popularity for blogs and wikis, it seems that research, opinion and education find its perfect mix between the two mediums. But even with similar goals, blogs and wikis differ in their users.

Blogs are generally opinions, thoughts, and concerns; thus, anything that involves a stream of consciousness. It is generally not backed by facts or case studies – rather, it follows a popular culture of “sharing” online. Places that feature microblogging such as Twitter and Tumblr are high-traffic websites that mainly consist of people posting their favorite pictures, quotes from celebrities and even GIFs to react to others with. Consequently, blogs are social media – popular at that. An example of this popularity stems from Yahoo’s acquisition of blog-dominated site Tumblr, in which Stan Schroeder of Mashable explains, “Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts, 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 daily signups” (Schroeder). The sheer volume of users alone explains the active blogging sphere present in today’s world. And with this volume, there can be collaborative effort. Some blogs will team up with each other and create a joint blog where there are multiple admins posting different thoughts, pictures, and other media throughout the venture. It’s not about delivering information for the sake of information; rather, collaborative blogs are about creating or reposting different thoughts and medias that may or may not be opinionated.

In comparison, wikis are less personable. They’re much more collaborative, rather than single-user based. For the most part, wikis are dedicated to research. Whether it is for Game of Thrones, or the Civil War, wikis play an important part in delivering (generally) accurate information. Groups modifying and delivering content are the sole investors in wiki pages. Popular site Wikipedia explains its own wiki on its wiki page (very inceptive) as, “Wikipedia is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, one for each language. There are tens of thousands of other wikis in use, both public and private, including wikis functioning as knowledge management resources, notetaking tools, community websites and intranets” (Wikipedia). In this way, we see that wikis are professional in their collaborative effort, regardless of whether or not the subject itself is professional. And because of this intense collaborative effort, there are numerous ways we’ve already unknowingly explored the realm. Google Docs to manage group projects and essays are an example of a type of wiki. Respectively, there might be use for wikis in corporate environments, in addition to the previously mentioned student effort. Corporate ethics codes and policies are usually documented in a hefty book that, realistically, people don’t read from cover to cover. Instead, companies can cut down on unnecessary bookkeeping by providing their own company culture cheat sheet. People in each department can collaborate and input best places to eat around the office, or document shortcuts to HR. It’ll be a great way for employees to get their foot in on helping a newcomer, as well as edit along the way if and when the culture changes.