Blog v Wiki

Blogs and Wikis are both online mediums of sharing information, with the key difference being that Wikis are able to be edited by numerous people and blogs are usually managed by one individual. Essentially, people are allowed to collaborate in order to contribute to a wiki and it is not expected of one person to be fully responsible for it.

The trend these days heavily emphasizes the importance of convergence and collaboration. You don't have to look beyond Wikipedia, the most well-known example of a Wiki, to see that that a plethora of information can be successfully gathered in one place by allowing various users to edit the information. One way that blogs can be used for collaboration as well, despite being the work of a single individual, is the Blogroll. The Blogroll is a feature in Blogger that allows the user to link any other blogs that they feel is relevant, which can be used to connect different blogs together.

I also found it interesting that in Yahoo's Next Problem: Tumblr's Traffic Isn't Growing, Tumblr's audience of users plateaued since its purchase by Yahoo. The article also hypothesizes that Tumblr users who consume content simply moved onto different platforms such as Buzzfeed, showing that maybe blogs are on a downward trend.

By reading "WHAT MOTIVATES WIKIPEDIANS?", I was able to learn more about why these volunteers spend their time contributing to a Wiki. Some of the answers included the fact that these volunteers can enhance their own knowledge of the subject matter and even use them to prepare for a new career, but the most significant motivation seemed to be that these volunteers found it to be fun.