Blogs vs. Wikis

Blogs and wikis are great new medias to collaborate on the internet. They both communicate information about a certain topic or idea. They both are user generated information and promote the 5 C's (collaboration, communication, community, creativity, convergence). Although they may have similar characteristics, they serve entirely different purposes.

There are many different kinds of blogs. Some people may write blogs about their daily life while others might blog about a subject or idea that interests them. The blog owner has control over what they want to write and what to be shown on their blog. People who are interested in reading these entries are free to respond and comment to these entries which form a sense of community. These comments may lead to a bond between the reader and the poster and it may even lead to collaboration of future blog entries. The comments may help fuel for ideas for the next blog entry. In fact, one blog even helped provide information that led to a drug raid according to the article "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" by Michael Wilson. The blogger started off blogging about apartment sales and plumbing tips but eventually started to blog about shady occurrences in his neighborhood. People who also encountered this in the neighborhood would reply and it led to a small community of bloggers talking about the shady stuff they saw in their neighborhood of Bayridge Brooklyn.

Wikis are a little different from blogs because anyone can contribute to it and have power to communicate. Wikis usually are very informative and describe a certain idea or word. They are more organized that a blog and usually written with more care and etiquette. Anyone can edit and update a wiki so the information may not always be reliable. According to the article titled "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People" by Noam Cohen, Wikipedia (most popular wiki site) has to limit the power of the users because people can edit anything in these wikis. Wikipedia wants to make the site more "mature and dependable". I feel that wikis are the ultimate collaboration projects because everything is user generated and the finished product can sometimes be amazing.

Convergence is very important in today's networked world because new ideas are growing rapidly and we have to be able to capture it and utilize in the best way possible. It has helped us do stuff more efficiently and we are finding new ways of connecting to each other and sharing ideas.