ABC: An Introduction to Blogs and Wikis in the Business World

What are blogs?
"Blog" is a contraction of Web log, which is a website where users post journal-like entries that are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posting at the top of the page. Blogs can take the form of online diaries, personal chronicles, travel logs, newsy columns and reports from special events. They can include graphics, pictures, and even music and video clips. Blog postings often contain links to other blogs or websites. Blogs can be publicly viewable, or tucked safely behind the company firewall. Both public and internal blogs are often focused on a particular topic or issue. Virtually all blogs provide a vehicle for comments from readers, and the best ones-those that are most popular with readers, and therefore generate the most traffic-develop into a kind of conversation. And good blogs are frequently updated.

What are wikis?
A "wiki" is a website comprising text-based content that can be edited collectively by users at will. Unlike a blog, in which the authored posts remain unaltered, wiki documents can be modified by anyone with access to the website. It's a shared-authorship model; users can add new content and revise existing content without asking for permission to do so.
Typical wikis are based on a Web server, which can be left open to public access via the Internet, or restricted on a company's local area network. One of the largest and best-known examples of a wiki is the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. In business, wikis are increasingly employed as a new type of collaboration tool.
The term "wiki" is derived from wiki wiki, which is Hawaiian for quick, which underscores one of the model's key benefits: Documents on a wiki can be edited very fast. Fans of the form claim that the whole of this kind of collaborative authorship is greater than the sum of its parts.

What is social software?
Both blogs and wikis are examples of social software, an emerging IT category currently being applied to a range of application and platform types or genres designed to facilitate personal interactions over computer networks. Blogs and wikis are types of social software, as are social networking websites, such as MySpace and Friendster.
For the moment, social software is a flexible category under which some industry watchers would include virtual worlds, such as Second Life, instant messaging and even e-mail. However, at the heart of all social software worthy of the label is a dynamic group environment that allows individuals to interact in a way that essentially combines their intelligence and/or capabilities. As pioneering blogger and social software expert Tom Coates has defined it, social software supports, extends or derives added value from human social behavior. The groups of individuals gathered in this environment have been called "smart mobs." Author James Surowiecki has described this kind of collective intelligence as "the wisdom of crowds."
 
The current flexibility of space is exemplified in the emergence of the wikiblog, a hybrid of the blog and the wiki. Also known as "wikiweblogs," "wikilogs," "blikis" and even "wogs," wikiblogs combine the features of the two models: The entries or articles are arranged in reverse chronological order on the main page like a blog, but the content can be edited like a wiki.

Within this context, blogs and wikis have been compared to e-mail in terms of their potential impact on the enterprise. Instant messaging, which was once thought of as irrelevant teeny-bopper tech, only to evolve into an essential business tool, also comes to mind. Each form provides nontechnical users with uniquely accessible platforms for fast and easy information publication, interpersonal communication and team collaboration.

Why should I care about blogs and wikis?
Company blogs are fast becoming a corporate commonplace. Because they're inexpensive to set up and maintain, enterprises of virtually all sizes have them. Modern corporate websites look naked without at least one executive blog. General Motors has a corporate blog page; Wal-Mart maintains several. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, blogs; so does Boeing executive Randy Baseler. Blogs are now an essential part of mainstream business. Consequently, if for no other reason, you should care about blogging because the chances are very good that your competitors are doing it.

In the corporate world, wikis are emerging as flexible, easy-to-implement systems for shared-document collaboration and content management. These systems are inexpensive (if not free), relatively easy to implement and accessible from a Web browser. Because they're browser-based, wikis present virtually no learning curve, and they work as well behind the firewall as they do on the World Wide Web. Instead of exchanging e-mails and attachments, corporate wiki users can work together on private webpages in near real-time. Wikis serve as unusually dynamic communication environments that can help corporate teams remain agile and competitive.
How can blogs and wikis benefit my business?

The most obvious benefit derived from a blog is its ability to communicate a corporate position or message to the public. Through blogs, companies can also share expertise and experience in a way that positions the organization as an authority and a resource, and ultimately promotes the brand. Microsoft, for example, uses its blogs to provide tips and technical information to its customers, to answer customer questions and to host conversations among product users. Blogs have an advantage over websites for this purpose, because they're much easier to update. But perhaps more important, a blog can accept reader responses and comments. The result is a kind of conversation that can give a company invaluable information about how the public sees its products and services.

Purists will shudder at this suggestion, but no business can afford to ignore the marketing potential of corporate blogs. Unlike other traditional direct marketing media (mail campaigns, website advertising, e-mail), blogs generate feedback from customers, which companies are finding useful for taking the public pulse. Blogs can help a company refine its approach to the markets it knows, and even tap into markets it may not have considered.

Internally, blogs can be a convenient means for harried managers to get to know their employees and partners better, and to get a better sense of their customers' needs. Internal blogs are also proving to be useful communication tools that link members of distributed project teams, especially when those members are based in different time zones. They can save time by substituting for face-to-face meetings among parties with crowded schedules. And they can create a sense of community within a company.

Corporate wikis, on the other hand, provide project teams with a highly flexible medium for internal collaboration and document management. They are a central location for managing meeting notes, team agendas and company calendars. The content on a wiki can be updated with no real lag time and little to no administrative intervention. Wikis are browser-based, so distribution is automatic, and they can centralize a range of corporate data types-everything from spreadsheets to PowerPoint presentations to PDF files.

Wikis can be used to create "wiki communities" of special interest and limited accessibility within an organization. Companies are increasingly using wiki communities as ongoing collaborative spaces, typically devoted to particular products or product areas. IT organizations are using wikis to develop and maintain the documentation for their in-house software and systems.
 
What blog- or wiki-related challenges should I watch out for?
The most successful blogs are conversational, personal, newsy and friendly. Individuals blog about their passions, and a corporate blog should have the same feel. No one visits a blog that sounds like a press release or an annual report. And direct sales pitches are simply off-putting to blog readers.

Some companies encourage their employees to blog because of the buzz that can be generated about the company in a wide-ranging conversation. More bloggers means more hits, which means more people are talking about your company. Many consultants even warn against establishing a corporate blog culture in which only executives post.

However, corporate blogs must exist within boundaries established by management that aren't necessary for the individual, free-range blogger. You don't want a corporate blog to become a spigot from which your company's proprietary information gushes into the wide world. Neither do you want your employees posting embarrassing photos or making untoward comments. Without a clearly defined corporate blogging policy, this very useful tool can become a source of trouble.

As for wikis, at first blush they may seem to offer, well...chaos. But corporate wikis are not free-for-alls. Even the world's largest wiki, Wikipedia, has systems in place for source and version management. However, the structure of a wiki is essentially organic; once it's set up, a wiki is controlled by its users, not administrators. This can present some challenges. Consequently, corporate wikis are primarily implemented behind the firewall-which makes sense. Unless you're managing an open-source software project, there's little reason to publish the work-in-progress documentation of a company's activities on the Web. Also, limited-access wikis are simply less likely to be misused.

As with blogs, companies need to define their wiki policies. Some basic guidelines-what might be thought of as wiki etiquette-are required around things like deleting or modifying the contributions of others. The idea is to, literally and figuratively, get everyone on the same page. The last thing you want is team members keeping their own copies of earlier versions, which would negate the benefits of wiki-style interactions. Corporate wikis are most effective when the number of users is small, and the content is focused.

What types of blog technologies should I know about?
• Atom: Another type of Web/news feed format.
• Blog search engines: Used to surf the blogosphere. Technorati is one of the most popular; Google and Yahoo also provide blog search engines.
• Hosted blog sites: Websites like Blogger, Blog.com, Vox, Typepad and Xanga handle all the heavy lifting, allowing multiple individual bloggers simply to sign up for the service and start blogging.
• Movable Type: A popular, free (for personal blogs) blog publishing system. The developers of this system, Six Apart, also created the TrackBack feature.
• Permalink: A link that points to a specific blog posting. The link is "permanent" because it remains intact even after the posting has slipped off the front page and into the blog archive.
• Ping: A notification to another blogger that you have linked to, or commented on, something in that person's blog. (Ping is an acronym for Packet Internet Grouper.)
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary): Also called a Web or news feed, RSS technology syndicates website content and sends updates to the end user via e-mail or through a news-feed reader application. Used to provide users with the latest updates from news sites and blogs.
• TrackBack: A system that notifies you that another blogger has mentioned your blog posting in his or her blog.
 
What types of wiki technologies should I know about?
• Tags: The content of a wiki is edited by multiple authors, so the traditional hierarchical navigation systems you might expect on a webpage are replaced with internal HTML syntax tokens called tags.
• Wiki engine: The software that runs a wiki system. Typically implemented as a server-side script.
• Wiki software: Tools for developing group-editable websites. Among the best known for corporate environments are Socialtext, Clearspace, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, WakkaWiki, TikiWiki, Confluence and JotSpot, which was recently acquired by Google.
• Wikitext: A simplified version of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) used to write wiki pages.

What blog terminology should I know?
• Blogopotamus: An unusually long blog post.
• Blogosphere: All blogs, collectively, or what might be called the universe of blogs.
• Blogroll: A list of links to other blogs, typically shown in a sidebar on a blog index page.
• External blogs: Blogs that can be viewed and responded to by the public at large through a Web browser.
• Index page: The first page of a blog site.
• Internal blogs: Nonpublic blogs, usually accessible only on the corporate intranet by a company's employees.
• Linklog: A blog that is mainly a collection of hyperlinks to other websites.
• Vlog: A video blog.

What wiki terminology should I know?
• Comment spam: Blog comments added to the discussion for the sole purpose of driving traffic to a site.
• Wiki farm: A server farm designed specifically for wiki hosting.
• Wiki node: Pages on a wiki that describe related wikis.
• Wiki page: A single webpage on a wiki.

Wikis and blogs are harbingers of a paradigm shift that is already changing the way people use computers and networks to interact. For the enterprise (for now), they are the most immediately useful examples of a new genre of software for personal interaction. Wikis can provide a uniquely dynamic environment for collaboration that businesses are all but certain to find indispensable. And blogs offer management an incredibly powerful means of communicating with customers, partners and employees.