Blog v Wiki

According to blogger.com "A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world". A blog is a websites that serves individuals or groups to record their opinions on a regular basis. Blogs are viewed as solo sport in where one person shares their point of view with the rest of the world. What people may not know is that blogs can be very useful for when it comes to sharing, shaping and even creating business value to organizations internally as well as externally. Blogs are a great tool in organizations for marketing purposes because it enables them to get readers back to their website, provides industry trends to readers and provides additional product or service information. Moreover blogs enable customer engagement and establishes customer retention and creates brand loyalty as well as long-term customer relationships.

A wiki is a website developed collaboratively by a community of users in which they can each add, modify or delete content via a web browser usually using a simplified "markup language" or "rich-text editor". A wiki uses specialized software and can be used by community websites and intranets. Moreover wikis have become very popular today. According to Noam Cohen's article "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People" says that about "60 million Americans visit Wikipedia every month. It is the first reference point for many Web inquiries — not least because its pages often lead the search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing". A wiki can serve the purpose of enabling knowledge management or note taking. Ward Cunningham (creator of wiki) describes wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". It is not surprising that the Hawaiian word "wiki" means fast or quick.

Margaret Locher's article "How to build your own wiki" describes how "diverse organizations, including businesses, schools and government agencies, are waking up to the benefits of wikis" and how "it makes it easier to gather and share information as well as record discussions about a subject, wikis (familiar as the software behind online encyclopedia Wikipedia) can help people improve their processes and get projects done faster. 

Convergence is vital in today's networking world since it gathers information together from different people allowing them to be informed on updates, be able to make corrections of things they were wrong and educate people on topics that they may not have much expertise on.

Blogs can be used for collaboration internally and externally. Blogs can indirectly stimulate collaboration by educating others about your area of expertise and gets people to contribute by commenting their opinions or beliefs on their topics of interests. It allows people to virtually support each other and it enables fast and convenient channels of communication.