Blogs vs. Wikis
I presented at the Icohere conference on collaborative learning this
week, and during the follow-up question and answer session, I received
this interesting question from Adrian Ward. Shimon Rura has provided an
excellent answer which I thought I would also reference here:
Adrian's question: Thanks for
opening my eyes to the possibilities of enterprise knowledge and
learning applications for blogging. I haven't been that impressed
with the possibilities until now because of the difficulty in changing
peoples' behavior, including the need for many managers to think
they're still in control (as mentioned by several others here).
That kind of control culture needs to change and most enterprises
realize it, but it's taking an unbelievably long time to make this
evolution because of how deeply embedded these emotional needs are for
us intellectually strong but emotionally weak humans that drive our
innate need for control.
So the only way to bring about these changes in behavior, as I see it,
is to make it so easy for them that the change happens naturally,
without a focused change management effort (which rarely works
anyway). But with enterprise RSS, I can see greater possibilities
for knowledge sharing and collaborative learning because of how much
easier this can make it for people. They don't even have to give
up their precious email if they don't want to. They can blog just
like they write email and read others blogs just like they read email,
without any great change in behavior.
And management can still maintain a semblance of control by inserting
their “rules” into the system that determine the behavior of the
system. In fact, there are some rules they should be inserting
into the system even in a complex/self organizing system-based
organization. Even complex systems are based on sets of rules or
principles that drive the behavior of the system. Leaders need to
co-create these rules with the other players in the system in order to
ensure that the whole system is focused on the strategic intent of the
enterprise. So this architecture could enable either a control
culture or a self-organizing, participative, or collaborative culture,
at least as far as I can see it now, given my limited knowledge of
enterprise RSS.
So the prospects definitely look brighter to me. I answered “no”
to your question about who has an enterprise RSS at your keynote this
morning, but you're probably right that I will have one within a year,
just like you predicted.
I am also helping a client develop a knowledge sharing system (system
in the largest “whole systems” nature of that word, not just an
automated tool). Blogging and wiki's are going to be part of that
system, but now I can see how they can be a more important part of it,
and help enable some of the behavioral changes needed.
But I am still trying to figure out how blogs and wiki's best
complement and interface with each other, and how an enterprise RSS
would work with both of them if they were all part of a whole systems
architecture. My initial thoughts on them are that blogs are more
for recording ongoing individual streams of thoughts while wiki's
enable collaborative development of a core body of knowledge that gets
continually enhanced as people think of new twists to a given subject
or theme, have new experiences with it, or see the subject differently
than it has been presented so far in the wiki. I can see how
blogs could act as a means of enhancing this core BoK wiki, at least
conceptually, but right now I can't envision how the technology would
support this.. Any further thoughts on the relationship between
blogs, wiki's, and enterprise RSS, both technology and process-wise?
Shimon's Answer:
Adrian seems to have a very accurate understanding of the distinction
between blogs and wikis. Blogs are ideal for news and development
of relationships between people and teams. Wikis are best for
developing a shared body of knowledge.
One difference between wikis and blogs that affects Enterprise RSS is
the degree to which content modifications stand on their own.
With a blog, each post is separate, and while you might understand a
post better if you've been following the blog for a while, you can
usually just subscribe and develop your understanding
incrementally. With a wiki, on the other hand, a new participant
will typically start on overview pages that link to other pages in the
Wiki, eventually getting more involved in discussions around highly
specific topics. Good wikis encourage “gardening”, where people
who are deeply familar with the wiki organize it and write
introductions that help newbies find their ways.
These different goals imply that the meaning of news is different
between blogs and wikis. News in a blog means a brand new content
item. News in a wiki can mean a new page, but it can also mean
edits to an existing page, discussion about those edits, or something
semantically insignificant like a renaming. A long-term wiki
participant will have a stake in watching all edits around her area of
focus, but see no value in improved newbie-introduction pages. A
newbie will find the detailed recent-changes list incomprehensible, and
seek the introduction pages.
One straighforward way to connect a blog and a wiki is to let people
build a shared, organized “greatest hits” directory on a wiki, linking
different categories to blog posts. In a knowledge sharing
system, this is one approach to facilitating the social process whereby
ideas originating in individuals' minds become part of the collective
culture, enabling others to spread and refine the ideas.
Back to enterprise RSS. Enterprise RSS is an engine for filtering
news items and delivering them to people for whom they are
relevant. Because the nature of a news item in a blog is
different from in a wiki, they will both have different audiences and
different delivery/reading styles. A blog reader might use her
aggregator to read all posts, never viewing the blog website. But
someone who sees that paragraph three of SomeCustomerStrategy has been
replaced will probably need to see that page in context in order to
understand what has changed. On the other hand, some wikis might
evolve in increments that are more free-standing. It really
depends on the particular wiki.
Here is a blog post I wrote that can be mostly summed up as if it's not something that people will review and edit over a long period of time, don't put it on the wiki.
That post was mostly born of my own frustration about a workplace wiki
that became the place to post everything, because the only alternative
was email. And here's another (slightly more technical) post comparing blogs and wikis.
