Blog v Wiki

Blogs and wiki's are often confused as similar, in several different aspects. Though, they are entirely different stemming from number of authors and even credibility of posts. Blogs have a single author for the most part, but others cannot edit the content without explicit permission of the blog owner. Wiki's have multiple authors, and with a diverse set of authors wikis can be more credible than blogs. This is because wiki authors can remove biased opinions, resulting in content that is based on information instead of opinions. A wiki can continuously grow and is intended for group communication, while a blog holds a journalistic model of presenting content to many individuals.

Additionally, a significant difference is the relevance of when a post on a wiki or blog is uploaded. Why? A wiki is constantly updated by multiple users, allowing the content portrayed on the wiki to remain up to date, while a blog post is not necessarily regularly updated therefore you may be reading outdated information. Wiki's continuously link users to other wiki's when the post brings up other ideas or information that is in the realm of the wiki's theme. As Ward Cunningham stated in the wiki page of Wikipedia, a wiki is to promote topic associations and making those topics easily accessible for the user. Every wiki page has highlighted items that allow the user to access other user generated topics.

One of the important similarities between the two, user generated content. Blogs and wikis give ordinary people a change to be a curator of information and content. This is a luxury that the average person could not do 20 or so years ago. As mentioned in the NYT, blogs serve well in corporations as well, contrary to the belief that corporations benefit only from wikis.

Blogs can be used for collaboration through utilizing the comment section and having an active editor of the blog. The comment section can be used to point out errors, fact check, and even discuss bias sections of the blog post. This can give blog owner's who are looking to remain unbiased to meet their goals.

Wiki's serve well in the workplace and can be used to allow employees edit and manage an agenda. This agenda can be for meetings, conferences, short-term goals, and long-term goals.