As recently as yesterday (in this article on Blogs as a CMS by Dr. John Baggaley of Athabasca) I’ve seen people equate blogs and wikis (cf. ‘a new variant of the blog—known as a “wiki”‘). Well, they simply aren’t the same thing. Sure, they both provide ‘easy’ ways of creating web content. They both started to get hyped around the same time, and you can find more and more software that either combines both types of functionalities or provides feeds from one to the other. But if this particular author had actually read the source he was citing (http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/emerging/default.html) he would have seen that they weren’t being equated, simply mentioned (as is now often the case) in the same breath as new “Environments for On-line Collaboration”.
It’s not really fair to pick on this particular author, as these two different phenomenom are more and more being conflated. But it highlights for me why the seemingly interminable blogging about blogging (and I suppose wiki’ing about wiki’ing) is still so prevalent – there isn’t necessarily a deep understanding yet about these phenomenom, and regardless of recent articles that make these technologies seem widespread in their adoption, we are still very much in the early adopters phase if we look at the internet’s population as a whole. </rant> – SWL