Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis by Ron Lichty

Enterprise collaboration with blogs and wikis Great InfoWorld overview of enterprise use of blogs and wikis.

To quote: “Blogs and wikis play opposite roles,” says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. “Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.”

Says the article, "A blog is like a presentation. It’s a one-to-many form of communication: a single person speaking to an audience who can comment on, but not change, the content. By comparison, wikis are a many-to-many collaborative tool. Anyone with access can add to, change, or delete information contained in a wiki. Think of it as a huge whiteboard, one where everyone has a marker and is welcome to scribble."

In that context, the article provides insight into how corporations will deal with, leverage and utilize these technologies, citing use of blogs by Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (his first blog while at NEC; Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and XML guru Tim Bray; and 3,000 active internal-to-IBM bloggers. And use of wikis by customer support personnel at a consumer bank to share, in real time, news of the latest cyberthreats devised by malicious hackers; and by a tech support guy for his customers to share issues and solutions not only with him but with each other.