Blogs vs. Wikis

Bogs and Wikis are both sources of new media that let users collaborate, exchange information and express their opinions, but when is one better than the other?

A blog usually has one author and lets the followers leave their feedback, on the other side Wiki is a more collaborative tool and lets all participants contribute information and be a part of creation process . Wiki knowledge comes from many sources, therefore a wiki page is constantly updated as opposed to a blog, where one post becomes stale overtime. A blogger shares his opinion and wants to get feedback from the followers, on the other side wiki participants share knowledge to reach final solution or result for a project or initiative. So not only wiki is the place for collaboration but it's is also a knowledge database which manages and updates itself. Wikipedia is the greatest example of all. The biggest disadvantage of wiki is that noone has the full control over the content which can be a critical downfall for many organizations. Therefore you need to properly pick between the two mediums based on your personal goals or the goals of the organization.

Ezra Goodnoe in her article "How To Use Wikis for Business" discusses cases when you should consider using wikis for your organizartion and when wikis will be a bad fit. For instance, if the project requires lots of shared documents and reviews of multiple people, then wikis can be really helpful, and if you want to exchange opinions and preserve them then wikis might not be an appropriate tool.

I believe that wikis should be utilized in school group projects. It will make "easier to gather and share information as well as record discussions about a subject" (Margaret Locher) as opposed to using email trail among a number of people.

Convergence is very important in our changing fast-paced networked society. Intersection of old and new media shift social patterns and makes people create new experiences and seek new information.

Analysing Twitter...

  “Web 2.0 has brought about several new applications that have enabled arbitrary subsets of users to communicate with each other on a social basis.”  (Balachander Krishnamurthy) For my term project I decided to conduct analysis of Twitter – a web based application that allows users to send and exchange short messages.  I want to explore why people tweet and what are the potential positive and negative effects of Twitter on our society. So is it a new beneficial to our society medium of information sharing or is it destroying our communication? We shall see…