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Making Sense of Blogs & Wikis. Kurt Voelker Managing Director, Forum One Communications Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for Government June 15th, 2006. Making Sense of Blogs and Wikis. Blogs and Wikis, What’s the big deal? What they are and how they are different - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Making Sense of Blogs & Wikis
Kurt VoelkerManaging Director, Forum One Communications
Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for GovernmentJune 15th, 2006
Making Sense of Blogs and Wikis
• Blogs and Wikis, What’s the big deal?
• What they are and how they are different
• Why they work and why you should care
Quick Blog Numbers
January 2005: 118 million American adult internet users
8 million (7%) have a blog
32 million (27%) read blogs
11 million (9%) read blogs frequently
14 million (12%) have posted comments or other material
6 million (5%) use an aggregator or newsreader
Pew Internet & American Life Project, The State of Blogging, January 2005
Google Search Trends
• Blog • “Website”
Wikipedia v CNN.com
What makes them different?
Blog = Wiki
Beyond the fact that both Blogs and Wikis have a component of user participation, they are very
different tools indeed. Each with specific strengths and weaknesses.
Blog, quick and dirty definition
• Simple administrator tools to create and manage web content (posts), and user feedback
• Simple user tools to provide feedback
• Content syndicated in a standard format for easy consumption by other web sites, systems, and users
NNLM.gov – Regional Blog
Wiki, quick and dirty definition
• User editable website, based on “pages” – click “edit page” and change it right there.
• All page histories are available
• The site is the administration interface
GSA Intergovernmental Solutions Divisions Collaborative Wikis
So Who Cares?
Why Blogs Matter for Government
They give your content context
Government content is often dense material not easily consumable by web visitors, and its relevance to the current conversation is not evident by simple perusal. Blogs let you drive users to your “deep information” in the context conversations that are happing right now.
Why Blogs Matter for Government
They make your content discoverable
Blogs are an emerging standard for connecting your voice to the global conversation. Technically it is happening with RSS (xml), trackbacks, and blogrolling - but it's not the technology that is important. What's important is that there is an unwritten, but agreed upon and emerging standard for discoverability
Why Blogs Matter for Government
They increase transparency
The defacto tone of any blog is open and human. The ever-sophisticated content consumer is sick of spin and wants to hear what your people are thinking - and they are smart enough to recognize and appreciate your openness, and reward it with meaningful engagement.
Why Wikis Matter for Government
They can instantly support existing
communitiesYour organization is full of existingcommunities – internal research, cross-agency research, conference & workshop attendees, policy & procedure manual maintenance teams – wikis are a simple way to ease collaboration at its point of origin. But be careful – don’t encourage silo’d content.
Why Wikis Matter for Government
They keep your content producers focused on content, not ‘web site
design’
Even simple internal documents can suffer from “I want to be a web designer’itis”
Blogs for: Wikis for:High velocity content Evergreen content
Establishing groups Supporting established groups
Getting the word out Maintaining or evolving the word
Ideas & thought leadership Dense information, research
Building buzz for an offline event Creating an online space for a real world event
