Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Choosing a publishing platform - Blogs, Wikis, Oh My

I was talking to a client the other day about the best way for him to publish on the web. Two obvious choices are to setup a blog or setup a wiki. But, how should he choose the right platform? After mulling this over, here's the advice I gave him:

Choose blog software your primary goal is the accumulation of information; choose wiki software when your primary goal is refinement of information.

At the risk of over simplifying matters: blogs are for quantity, wikis are for quality.

In other words - while both blogs and wikis are collaborative, and can start with a small seed of content, their finished products can look significantly different.

A few reminders:

  • There's free software for hosting your own blog or wiki available
  • There are free services that allow you to start blogging or wiki'ing with no tech experience needed
  • There are blogging options and wiki options that don't look like traditional blogs or wikis, yet allow you publish information as described above.

5 comments:

  1. well put... I'll be quoting you in the 'web2.0' plan I'm doing for work

    ReplyDelete
  2. How about:

    Blogs are for publishing; wikis are for collaborating.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nick - by all means :-)

    Grant -

    That's one way to slice things up. However, you can have more than one person publishing to a blog, which is kinda-sorta-a-way of collaborating. I guess you're collaborating less on the individual content and more on the building out of the site.

    But still, point taken.

    ReplyDelete
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