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

THANKS!Kurt Voelker

kvoelker@forumone.com