MLA Week 2.0 - Blogs and Wikis

Blogs and Wikis are both fairly easy to use content management systems, so they allow people who don't know HTML or do much web development to create usable web resources and share them widely, as well as to collaborate with far more people than they could if working only locally.

Blogs seem better suited to things like news and discussions - where you write chunks of text and have a few images, links or media files embedded in them to liven things up. Being reverse chronological in order they make sense for current awareness sorts of things but aren't necessarily a good way to organze things. Good for capturing ideas or information quickly, then perhaps mining it for the ability to link to it or just refresh your memory later (esp. if you combine your posts with tags). Its also perfect for discussions, as comments are attached to posts and you can comment on a post or a comment.

Wikis, by contrast, seem better suited for things like shared resource listings and the ability to create web pages rather than web page based discussions. Because you can edit the whole page you have more flexibility than you do with a blog, with the caveat that to do much more than basic formatting you'd need to know HTML pretty well and be working at a site that doesn't lock down what code you can use - if the wiki doesn't work well enough for your needs you might be just as well to get web hosting and create pages that way. Wikis also have ability to have discussions though the formatting is closer to a chat room than a discussion, so most wikis I've seen don't have much, if any, discussion there.

Blogs and Wikis can be used in really creative ways and I've seen people do all sorts of things with them. Intranets are actually one use that looks like it may work well (its hard to know without actually being involved with a project whether it actually works for its audience or just looks like it does, or doesn't for that matter). They both allow for sharing of editing (though earlier in blog history they were mostly sole proprietorships they seem to have become more of a community thing - among the posters and the commenters), they both allow linking and both have WYSIWYG interfaces so they're good for people who don't want to get into the HTML angle, as well as people who don't have the support to do web development for financial or security reasons.

I've gotta say I'm a little jealous when I see some of the great stuff out there people have done and wonder why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I think that often its not the tool but the people, and some of these great projects must have great teams of people behind them - high tech or low tech, its more the people than the tech :-)