Blog v. Wiki - What's the Difference?

A blog is a place that you can call your own - a place where you can share your opinions and design it how you please. A wiki is more concrete and collaborative - a place that you can go to look for solid, objective, information that is sourced by a group of people as opposed to one person. As a side effect of their collaborative nature, Wikis tend to grow very rapidly. Blogs are typically run by one person and grow slowly, one post at a time. In terms of discussion, Wikis will have an entire page dedicated to it (more of a forum style) whereas blogs will have a comment section dedicated to each post that is usually moderated by the blog's owner.

When most people hear the word 'blog', they think that it consists of one person sitting alone somewhere with a laptop and a cup of coffee, happily typing away. It doesn't have to be like this however - what if companies asked their employees to keep blogs (internally hosted of course) where they could write about their work or any ideas they have. Then their coworkers could read and comment on them, giving them the ability to provide feedback about the post/content. This type of blogging also helps to provide more personality to the corporate atmosphere, which is often very stale and drab, while promoting the ideas of innovation and teamwork.

Wikis themselves are a very powerful tool for business. Perhaps one of the best new uses that I've seen is product documentation for an internally built system. When a company builds a new software system, they could create a wiki (that only other employees can see/edit) which provides documentation about how to set up the system, get it up and running, trouble shooting, etc. This allows all employees who are working with the system (for some companies, that might be >1,000 people working on it at once!) to have easy access to help and information related to it. Even better, the information present on the Wiki is written in-house and is specific to that company, which makes it an even more powerful asset.

Outages and New Media: how do they impact clients and end users?

Here's a brief layout of how I want to approach this topic and the content that the paper will contain:

1. What happens when a new media platform goes down?

• number of affected people
• reaction of users
• 'flocking' to other platforms
• Damage control

2. What does it mean for businesses and end users that have a presence on that platform?

• financial hit for platform and clients
• reputation/brand damage
• alternative services may be looked into

3. What steps are taken to prevent outages/service disruptions?

• high availability/burst capacity options
• backups
• disaster recovery
• load balancing

     (All of this technical mumbo jumbo will be boiled down to tolerable levels)