What are Blogs and Wikis? They have been around for quite some time now, but until now they have been in the shadows. Blogs and Wikis are being used more and more in everyday life be it in our personal lives and in our professional lives.
Blogs and wikis are similar in some ways and different in others. One main difference between them is the fact that blogs are posted by a "blogger" and cannot be edited, but wikis are created by an individual and can be edited by anyone who may want to add or change the information on the wiki. Another difference between them is that blogs are used to extract information as noted in a New York Times article titled, "Wal-mart Tastesmakers Write Unfiltered Blog," which notes how Wal-Mart, who has strict policies, created a blog called checkoutblog.com that differs from traditional corporate blogs by allowing its buyers to write unedited comments to help them better serve their customers. Wikis on the other hand are used for providing information, where a user will create a wiki page with information on a certain topic and others are welcomed to edit and update the information to make it more accurate.
Similarities between the two social media tools is that they can be accessed by anyone in the world, they can be edited easily, they provide updated information, the information they provide may not be reliable, and they both bring people together. An example of how blogs can be used to bring people together is shown in this New York Times titled, "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid," which depicts a story of how bloggers in the Bay Ridge area posted comments about suspicious activity that was occurring around their neighborhood. The posts by the bloggers and their concern for their neighborhood brought them together as these individuals who were strangers came together to bring the events that they observed to light by going to the Community Board meetings and precincts to voice their concerns.
As shown by the previous example of how the blog brought the people together which ultimately ended in victory, tools such as blogs do promote collaboration by encouraging others to voice their opinions on certain topics. The option to post a comment anonymously also helps one to voice their opinions if they are unsure of what others might think of their thoughts.
It's true how blogs and wikis are not as known as social networking sites such as Facebook although blogs came first, if I'm not mistaken. Although blogs and wikis are very helpful in the cases you mentioned, there also has to be a degree of validity with these new media channels. As wikis are open source and blogs can be created by anyone, there is also a lot of false information created using wikis and blogs. Luckily, the Brooklyn blog turned out to be accurate as it helped cops bust an illegal operation within the neighborhood.
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