Blogs vs. Wikis

 In this new or current age two most important social media networking channels are Blogs and Wikis.  Through both of these channels people all over the world, irrespective of their culture, class, race etc., can contribute their knowledge, ideas, believes and comments on different sites. These reviews could be about products, services, political and social issues, science, culture, tradition, thus on anything possible. They could be about any thing. It shows the fact that in today's networking world an individual's opinion matters.

The function of both blogs and Wikis is similar: to communicate and share information, but they do so in different ways. Blogs are consisted of different posts or entries by different individuals, it is open to anyone to post personal opinion on anything and anyone. Blogs present prejudice of one kind or another.  Unlike Blogs, Wikis are the not only opinion oriented but can be modified in a source of knowledge and information. Through wikis several organizations, institutes and groups can allow access to users to contribute and edit the content. Wikis are online databases where most of the times access is given to the user to edit, modify and add the text, images, media etc in several wikis, leading them to be unreliable in some cases. Classified internal Wikis can be created by different organization and access is given to certain number of users with expertise and knowledge about a certain area/category. Now slowly these wikis are moving toward unclassified approach as mentioned in New York Times article An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified an example of such a wiki is "Diplopedia" that allows access and contribution to all the people working in the United States.

Blogs can also lead to collaborations and can result in bringing a big change and overcome obstacles. As mention in New York Times article Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid  the community collaborated by posting complains and concernss on their blog to get rid of illegal activities in the neighborhood. The bloggers on BayRidgeTalk not only provided daily activities at the premises but also provided leads for police to investigate, take action and arrest the criminals.

Convergence is playing an important role in today's networked world by converting all the information to new modes of presentation and making them widely available in many forms of media: audio video, ebooks etc. However, it cannot be denied that the older form of information as books might become extinct. Nowadays, everyone can access movies to books on their ipad or smartphones that a hard copy of a book is hardly picked up. Almost all the magazines have online version to keep their readers involved. I think it is true for economically established countries than under developed countries where the technology is not as easily accessible/affordable as here. A message that is delivered in minimum three days can now be delivered in real time because the communication has evolved so much due to convergence.