Blogs and wikis

Blogs

Blogs are online personal journals that are frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. They use a basic form of web content management system  (‘blogging’ software) that allows users without any technical knowledge to add and update content.

The essential characteristics of the blog are its journal form which typically includes a new entry sitting at the top each day, and its informal style. Blogs generally represent their owner or their website’s personality and interests.

Along with online discussion forums, blogs are one of the ways to create an online community to allow constituents to voice their opinions, make suggestions and communicate with other supporters as well as your organisation's staff.

Blogs can:

• allow staff or supporters to post news and commentary that would be of interest
• serve as a forum for exchanging resources and information
• provide a comfortable atmosphere in which supporters can ask questions, give feedback, or share ideas
• keep track of meeting dates and events
• be a medium of communication for matters of general interest.

The access to ideas and opinions on the site gives each supporter a sense of being part of the organisation and part of a community.

See also Building online communities

Wikis

These are websites that can be collaboratively edited by a group of people. A wiki (‘quick’ in Hawaiian) allows a group to build, edit and modify a website with no programming or HTML whatsoever. It is effectively a very simple web content management system.

Wikis are different from normal websites. Normal sites are usually developed offline and then presented to users as a finished product. Wikis, however, are first presented to users as a blank slate – an empty page. A new wiki is an empty wiki, no pages, no links. Instead of a team of designers developing a website in private, a wiki is developed in public by the users of the wiki over the life of the wiki.

All wiki pages are equipped with a publicly available link that usually says ‘Edit this Page’ or ‘EditText’. Whenever a user wants to update or change a page, they click the ‘Edit this Page’ link, make their changes using plain text and then click ‘Save’ to finalise the change. It is this editing ability that makes a wiki so efficient in collecting information – users only need to edit a page to update the website – no programming skill is required.

The complete openness of wikis raises certain management issues:

• should there be some form of moderation e.g. for comment spam?
• should there be limits (e.g. a registration procedure) for edit access?