Blogs V.S. Wikis

"Today's Internet is governed by the idea that crowds of people can create the news, share information and collaborate on online projects", said by John D. Sutter in "Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West?".  Blogs and wikis are two good example for the statement. Both of them are collaboration of  information. Individuals or communities share information, opinions and news with others. Everyone has free access to them. Everyone is free to create a blog or wiki. Because of individuals' limitation of knowledge and biases, there is no 100% guarantee for the information's accuracy.  

However, there are some difference between blogs and wikis.  In my opinion, blogs are more like online journals. People can share information and opinions together. The topic could be anything, daily life, movies, politics, gossips and so on. Blogs contain more opinions than facts. However, wikis are online encyclopedia. Wikis have more facts than opinions. I believe that wikis should be more strict about the information's accuracy than blogs.  According to Ezra Goodnoe, "wikis are designed to facilitate the exchange of information within and between teams. Content in a wiki can be updated without any real lag...users/contributors (with wikis, they're one and the same) simply visit and update a common Web site". Besides, wikis can be edited by anybody, but blogs cannot. 

In today's networked world, convergence of information becomes important. Wikis and blogs converge plenty of information that help people save a lot of time and money on information research. Personally, I like the Wikipedia. Whenever I need to do the research, I research the Wikipedia first. Although Wikipedia might has some errors, it still help me get a general understanding of my research.

Blogs allow readers to post their comments and arguments. Therefore, blogs is a great tool for the collaboration of different opinions. What's more, blogs can be linked with each other, which create a large online community.