Friday, February 26, 2010

Blog vs. Wiki

Blogs and Wikis have some similarities but mostly have stark differences. For one Blogs can be created by one person in order to communicate with the world. People may comment on a blog post but they can not edit the post or contribute to the post. Wikis are very different in the sense that many different people can contribute to one post or one thread, thus adding to the content of the topic.
In the article Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West? by John D. Sutter points out the philosophy of wikis that "users can control the content of the Web" and contribute to the site. The problem with this is that it can lead to inaccurate information being contributed to the content, like was the case with Wikipedia the "user-written"online encyclopedia. Thus leading to regulation of its user contributed information. With blogs people usually are free to post what they want without regulation and people free to comment.

Convergence is important to networking because it allows many different elements of new media to be integrated into one. Making its access more convenient and more worth while. Giving access to different sources at once cuts out the middle man and gives you more options at your finger tips at once.

Blogs can be used for collaboration also because it gives you a voice, and lets others know where you stand on certain issues. Online users can collaborate with each other on different ideas and topics. The fact that people can comment on your posts can allow you to see other perspectives and invite the opinions of others. Which is essentially like working in a group towards a common goal.

I think they should make a wiki slang dictionary. Since people usually make up slang terms any way that are not normally apart of the official English language, it would be good to archive these slang terms, which im sure would serve useful to some people out there. Anyone could contribute content because everyone has different slang terms for different things, and since slang is so popular among networking sites I think it would be a good idea.

1 comment:

  1. I completely agree with you on wikis. I have heard of people purposely going into wikis and changing the content of the information because they get some sense of enjoyment out of it. They would simply change the information to false information which sounds believable just because they can.

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