Blogs vs. Wikis

Blogs are a tool that individuals use to post their thoughts, commentaries, photos or videos.  Blogs are managed by its owner who can choose what to show in the blog or what not to show.  Other individuals can post comments on what's written or posted in the blog. However, they can not modify any other part of the blog, except for adding comments to it.  Blogs can be used for collaboration between individuals and can influence events in the real world.  This happened when the blog BayRidgeTalk.com helped clean up a Bay Ridge neighborhood in NYC from drug dealers and addicts.  In the online New York Times article, "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" by Michael Wilson, he writes that the people living in that neighborhood were concerned about the fighting and drug dealing that was going on near their houses and posted commentaries about it to their blog. The police then got involved and raided the houses with the drug dealers.

Wikis are online databases or encyclopedias that can be edited by anyone.  They are different from blogs because anyone can edit any part of the wiki or even create new wiki pages. Unlike a blog, no one person has complete control over the contents of a wiki.  It is a much more collaborative environment than a blog.
The InternetWeek article "How To Use Wikis For Business" by Ezra Goodnoe states that Wikis are also beginning to be used in the business world for collaboration. They can be a very useful tool for employees working together on a common project.  The Wikis would converge all of the project work into one place to which all employees would contribute. This would solve many problems such as passing around different version of the common documents by email.  Wikis are also simple to use because even a person without technical knowledge can edit or create new pages.