BLOG: Blog v Wiki

After I read the articles about wiki and blogging, I learn that there are many similarities and differences between the two.  A lot of people write a blog to share happy moments or things they find interesting to other people. They can write on their blog without limitation and other people can have free access to their blog at any time. Blogger can post a picture taken during a family trip or a video about her niece’s birthday. It is easy to use and it is a good way to keep and share good experiences. On the other hand, the wiki is more academic. People often use it as a tool to collaborate and communicate academically It gathers information and knowledge that people have and provide a platform for people to share and edit.

The blog can be used not only for sharing daily lives but also for collaboration. According to the article, “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid”, police uses the information from a blog post as a source to raid a drug dealer’s house. From this, we can see that blog can be more than just a place for people to share information, as their information is helpful to the police and them kind of collaborate on reducing violence and drug selling activities. However, this can also be a problem because the first intention of the blogger is not to snitch information to police and that means we have no control over how the information can be used.

Wiki is another tool that people use to contribute their academic works and knowledge collectively to the online database. According to the article, “How To Use Wikis For Business” from InformationWeek, “Although wikis have been around for a decade, they're just starting to take off in business. Like the Web did when it first caught hold in the corporate world, wikis will likely go through a period of wild growth, fierce competition, and inappropriate usage.” In other words, the wiki is going to get popular in the next few decades. One of the big reason is that it has a low cost. If cooperation publishes and shares information in a traditional way, it would cost them a huge amount of money. However, thanks to the free access to the internet, it is relatively cheap for them to do so and implement a system that is based on open-source rather than having an expensive enterprise application which requires a sophisticated information management. In my opinion, having students use the wiki and contribute works and information to a database can be a new way to use the wiki. Since people are more focus on just getting information on the wiki rather than to make a contribution and to improve it, we can help invite and motivate people to edit on the wiki. Although information added to the database might not be accurate, it is a good starting point for us to sharing academic information to our peers and learn how to do it as it is the big trend of how large cooperation store and exchange their information on hand through a database.

Overall, I think both the blog and wiki are great tools for people to share information and work collectively. For us, it is a good starting ground to learn how to use them so that we can master these skills and apply them at work.

Work cited:

"How to Use Wikis for Business," by Ezra Goodnoe, Information Week, August 8, 2005, http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=167600331 

Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid By MICHAEL WILSON The New York Times June 26, 2008 available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html