More on blogs and wikis…

A few webloggers noticed this quite fine comparison between blogs and wikis from that course I linked to below.

A few selections from the complete document:

blog

* personal, less collaborative.
* a posting is owned by poster
* tends towards long scrolls (Bernstein)
* monological: typically monologue with audience commentary
* temporal: last in first out
* captures change in thinking/self/ideas
* links used to connect outside the blog
* knowledge accumulates at the top
* knowledge is static but contextual: situated
* dominantly chronological – but essays are possible
* immediate: written in the moment, written of the moment

wiki

* can be personal but open to collaboration.
* a node/topic is considered public space
* aim is creation of documents (individual pages as well as the entire wikiweb)
* tends towards expressing ideas as relationships between pages (Bernstein)
* captures (and then erases) the processes of writing
* doesn’t capture changes in thought/ideas, but creates artifacts of those changes
* hypertext linking central to text creation
* knowledge is ephemeral: it changes, can be changed

And thanks to carvingCode for pointing to this National Public Radio piece on wikis. It’s a competent overview, and nicely captures the vague sense of disquiet and outright disbelief that the concept of wikis provoke.