Blogs vs Wikis

Blogs and Wikis are both new forms of media that make human interaction easier online. While blogs have only one creator/author, the audience/other online users can comment and express their opinions on the original posts by the author of the blog. On the other hand, wikis help a group of people to work on a single topic and make edits to the project simultaneously. To sum up, blogs provide a one-to-many mode of communication where as in the case of wikis it is many-to-many (at least for all the people given access to work on the wiki) However, I feel both of them are useful in collaborating groups of people.

As I mentioned in my previous post, blogs are used by celebrities to keep in touch with their fan base. They are also used by new writers and entrepreneurs to express their opinions or market new ideas. A very popular and obvious example of wikis is wikipedia. I find it a great source of information for most of my classes since it puts together all the general information is simple laymen’s words. The article “How to use wikis for business” tells us how annoying it can be in the corporate environment when there are a million emails of spreadsheets and documents and it is hard to find the most updated one. Wikis can thus be used in corporate teams to work on projects efficiently. The same article mentions that the word wiki actually comes from the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki meaning quick. Also the list of wikis on Wikipedia gives a list of some very useful sources such as WikiBooks, WikiHow, WikiAnswers, wiki news etc.

A new use of wiki I feel could be in the field of community projects. Being part of a volunteer organization I find it rather hard to recruit volunteers and keep track of them. A wiki could be formed for a network of volunteers, new volunteers being added regularly as we find them and each keeps us posted of the volunteer opportunities they are aware of. This way volunteers get their options and recruit more people for their events as well.