Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In every case, the author interacts with their blog through his or her web
browser, and the procedure is fairly similar. Creating an account and a blog site
on blogger.com is described in great detail in Sauers (2006). The main points
are visiting the blogger.com site to first create an account, which is a Google
account (and allows access to other Google services). Then you choose a name
for your blog and a template which controls the appearance of the blog site.
Once the blog site is successfully created, you can create posts. You may either
compose in raw HTML, or create with a visual editor. Among the many other
options that can be controlled, are whether other contributors can create posts
on the blog, whether or not comments will be moderated, and how often posts
get moved off the main page and into the archived section.
Wikis
Wikis are similar to blogs in that they are user-generated web sites, but differ
in that the document itself is allowed to be modified by multiple authorized
users of the wiki site; it is a way of collaboratively creating and editing a docu-
ment. A wiki is typically not a simple document like a journal article, but is
often a complete website with different pages linked together. Wikis are gen-
erally not aimed at the general public, but are more often for the internal stor-
age display of accumulated knowledge, and are therefore usually not fancy
looking, but there is no reason they cannot be visually attractive. The name
“wiki” comes from the Hawaiian word for fast, and is named after the Wikiwiki
Shuttle at the Honolulu Airport.
The grand-daddy wiki is, of course, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com), an
enormous collection of user-contributed knowledge. Anyone may request a
log-in to Wikipedia and create an entry; there are currently over a million reg-
istered users. It is this openness that has made Wikipedia such a wide resource.
There are some controls to limit vandalism of the site, but mostly the fact that
every entry can be reviewed and edited by others generally pushes all entries
towards greater accuracy. Comparisons between Wikipedia and standard
encyclopedias show similar levels of errors (Giles, 2005). The advantage of
Wikipedia is that, even if the errors are more frequent or greater, they will also
be fixed more quickly in all likelihood.
The server technology behind wikis is the same as for blog sites. They
require a log-in authorization system, graphically oriented web page editor,
and a content management system, including a database back-end for infor-
mationstorage.SomewikimanagementproductsareMediaWiki(www.mediawiki.
org/wiki/MediaWiki) (used by Wikipedia), and MoinMoin (moinmoin.wiki
wikiweb.de). Wikis do not generally have fancy visual editors, but rely on a
simplified mark-up language to create web pages that include a subset of the
full capability of HTML mark-up.
