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A Weblog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. The term "blog" is a portmanteau of "Web log". Blogs are good at presenting ongoing data and encouraging Socratic-style dialogue about it. They are also very simple to set-up and use - the simplest of the tool sets. However, it can be difficult to keep a discussion active for longer than a few weeks at best. Partly this is due to their linear nature where information is treated or added as a flow, in chronological fashion. The same topic is sometimes raised in successive posts, and re-discussed, frequently covering ground that has already been covered better previously. |
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A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows others (often completely unrestricted - unless it is in an enterprise environment) to edit the content. The term Wiki also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website. In essence, the wiki is a vast simplification of the process of creating HTML pages, and thus is a very effective way to exchange information through collaborative effort. Wikis are good at sifting and synthesizing knowledge from data. This is an ongoing and collaborative process, undertaken by many people, contributing to and editing the data flow in an attempt to derive meaning from it. Wikis avoid the linearity intrinsic to weblogs by being an interconnected web of data. Nothing ever goes out of date on a Wiki, and any old post can be refreshed and revived when it becomes relevant and interesting again. |
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... a Social Networking Site ? |
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Both weblogs and wikis qualify as Collaborative Hypermedia, but they approach the function differently. Wikis treat media as a shared endeavour, or a set of knowledge to be built. Weblogs treat it as a flow to be discussed and commented upon. To put it succinctly, wikis manipulate the data, weblogs comment upon it. The basic gist is to marry a wiki's ability to create complex nests of knowledge with a weblog's encouragement of dialogue, and you then have a very powerful space for community. Custom built social networking sites incorporate many standard components from both wikis and weblogs, providing a place for people to gather with a shared enterprise for them to engage in. Where standard functionality falls short of the task of community-building, custom functionality is developed. In specific cases, as in a music focused site, functions specific to music consumption are added like streaming, downloading, tagging favourites, etc. |
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