Wikis Versus Blogs: This Time It's Personal

By Shannon Cochran

October 17, 2005

(Wikis Versus Blogs: This Time It's Personal :  Page 1 of 1 )

When the term "blog" first became really popular a few years ago, my friends and I mostly scoffed. After all, hadn't a series of links accompanied by opinionated commentary made up the bulk of most webzines and personal sites for years? As Linux developer Nick Moffitt likes to put it: "The insipid neologism 'blog' appears to mean little more than a Web site that *actually* gets updated, as opposed to one that *promises* to be updated REAL SOON NOW and includes an animation of a MEN AT WORK sign."

We didn't understand then how much appeal systems like Movable Type and Blogger would have to people who find HTML and FTP intimidating. We didn't realize how the simple ability to leave comments could transform a "web ring"—a once-popular but never very effective arrangement of sites all linked to each other statically—into a truly dynamic community. We didn't predict the "blogosphere" (and oh, that word still makes my teeth hurt).

But when another web-based technology with a funny name came along, we didn't laugh. We saw the utility of a site that anybody can get on and edit—a wiki—right away. We could plan our camping trips with a wiki! We could keep contact lists up to date! It was a truly new use of technology, not just something we'd been doing all along with a new user interface slapped on top.

Actually, wikis have been around since at least 1995, when Ward Cunningham created the Portland Pattern Repository. It was designed to allow anybody—even complete strangers just stumbling across the site—to modify pages and add new content. He called this paradigm the "Wiki Wiki Web," a play on the Hawaiian term for "quick." In 2001, Cunningham wrote The Wiki Way (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 020171499X), and that same year saw the birth of what has become the flagship wiki application: Wikipedia.

As Wikipedia defines itself: "Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia's articles and have their changes instantly displayed.

 Page 1 of 1