Blog v Wiki

CNN's article, Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West? observes that that "today's Internet is governed by the idea that crowds of people can create the news, share information and collaborate on online projects". Both blogs and wikis are vehicles for this kind of user driven media content. Where once access to easily circulated media was restricted to publication and corporate broadcast, blogs and wikis have made content communication both easily attainable and intuitively interactive. The two platforms have a lot in common. Both are structured with the casual user in mind; individuals who don't know complex coding or software. They are both built upon a common ideal of accessibility. For this reason, they are both instrumental tools in building and connecting a community with the goal of sharing ideas, thoughts, and knowledge. Both forms also integrate various types of media which include not only text but also images and sometimes even audio and video. Both also thrive through inter connectivity, linking to other wikis, blogs, and sites as a means of cementing relevance, building community, and expanding upon information.

Where blogs and wikis diverge is at the functional and executive level. Blogs are "serialized", evolving by way of separate entries presented in reverse chronological order. A blog invokes thoughts of punchy, memorable personalities and a distinct voice fueling it's content. This is because they are typically personal and individual, usually manged by a singular (or very few) author and more likely to be geared towards personal opinion and commentary. Collaboration (in the form of comments) is entirely reactionary and occurs as an add on to the primary content (the entry itself). In contrast, wikis are predicated upon collaborative content. A wiki's primary goal is information sharing and therefore it is invites multiple contributors who add, edit, and update the content. Whereas blogs are geared towards "communicating with", wikis are more concerned with "communicating to".

Although blogs do not have the same communally contributive nature that wikis do, they can become collaborative by way of engagement and connectivity. Comments allow for the insular singularity of a blog to be penetrated by outsiders who read, digest, and then react to blog's author, thereby facility conversation. This engagement also serves a collaborative agenda by influencing the decisions and writing of the primary author. CNN reporter, John D. Sutter, observes how "YouTube relies on its community to make decisions about what's important and useful". The same is true of blogs: community reaction drives bloggers in how they choose their content. The interlinked aspect of blogs also lends itself to collaboration by creating a community among other blogs linked to each other, often driving readers of one blog to others affiliated with and thereby creating a shared (or at least overlapping) reader-base.

The matter of reader-base of audience engagement is particularly central in the present media climate. Social networking and convergence has made the act of audience participation in content bigger than ever. In her essay "How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere?", Kathy E Gill notes the impact that blogging and social media has on everything from business to news to politics. Gill notes that "bloggers are influencing the world outside of the blogosphere, as measured by audience reach, media adoption and political necessity". Henry Jenkins, an media scholar, once described media convergence as being a top-down corporate driven process, in which companies attempt to maximize their revenue opportunities by accelerating the flow of media content. Their products are no longer singular products but rather an multi-platform universe, which links together different forms of media and invites the consumer to connect through the product through a variety of channels (television, twitter, webisodes, games, etc ) in order to get the full experience. It is also a bottom-up consumer driven process, in that the audience/consumer is actively trying to be more involved in the content, taking control of the flow and production of the media and communicating back to mass market content and it's originating producers. Thanks to convergence, media is no longer a one way street, it has become unequivocally bidirectional.

Citations
Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West? by John D. Sutter, CNN.com/technology, August 26, 2009. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/26/wikipedia.editors/index.html

How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere? by Kathy E. Gill. Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem, May 2004. available from: http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/everything/gill2004a.pdf