Why internal Blogs are not Wikis?

by jaaron

Recently, I ran across the concept of an internal company blog whose intention was to increase the communication on the project level. The idea is to increase the transparency of what each project member is contributing. This is not what blogs, or web logs, are good at. Blogs are typically written by a single person to share links, topics, news, or today’s random thought, with a large audience. The reach is from one to many.

For blogs, the technology can often get in the way of being able to quickly and easily post the latest success or failure of a project. Often blogging software and platforms have restrictions on the number of authorized users who can create postings. Revisions and search capabilities can also be limited.

wiki – A collaborative website whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it.

A Wiki, or even Twitter for that matter, are far better collaborative environments than a blog. A Wiki offers easy and intuitive ways to not only post information but to link the information to other relevant posts. This interwoven material becomes a supporting backbone for any project or company initiative. For this reason, many corporations have completely replaced their corporate intranet structures with a Wiki. According to Wikipedia, the Wiki for encyclopedic information, a Wiki should have the following characteristics which are not found in Blogs:

• A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
• Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages
  by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing
  whether an intended target page exists or not.
• A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors.
  Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of
  creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site
  landscape.

Regardless the size of your company, a properly used Wiki can help your employees brainstorm, spread, evangelize, collaborate, correct, and create what matters.