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When to Wiki, When to Blog - is either ready for your business?  For anyone disseminating information (and who isn't?) the current buzz is around Blogs (web-logs) and Wikis. But what are they? And are they for you? Blogs started out as personal on-line journals but have rapidly evolved into a strong business and marketing tool in which companies keep both customers and prospects informed of product development and corporate, or industry, news and events. A blog is structured simply as a chronological series of postings with the most recent entries displayed at the top of the blog's webpage (sort of like a backwards diary). Content is differentiated solely by date and time. However within this simple timeline structure it is possible to apply sequences of "tags" allowing a series of posts on a similar theme to be collected and read together as a single archive. A limitation is that tags can only be applied to the entire posting not to the content within.
Unlike blogs, which originated as a place for individual users to post information, wikis were developed from the start as a way for many people to collaborate, and to produce a unified pool of information. As a result the emphasis is on providing information of lasting value. Put at its simplest a wiki is a piece of software that allows users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser. Structurally the wiki consists of a series of web pages each containing hyperlinks to other pages within the wiki or to external sources.
Since the links can be applied at the word level, a single wiki page may contain many links. The wiki model is closer to that of the World Wide Web itself, with the added functionality that it may be written, edited and updated by many different people. This concept is sometimes known as "open content" or "open editing." Both blogs and wikis have developed to the point where they share many of the same attributes. Both use search engines as the primary means of navigation, both are easy to update and edit. Neither require any specialized HTML knowledge to either set up or update. Both use the latest Web2.0 concepts of categorization and tagging. Ultimately the choice between a blog or a wiki comes down to the intended use of the content. If the content is designed to tell people about what's happening in your business or is of a fleeting or time critical nature, then a blog is the best choice. If your content is designed to be around for a long time, be it a knowledge base of products, an encyclopedia, or even your corporate best practices and policy manuals then a wiki is the preferred solution. DCLnews Editorial
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