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 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 communities Your 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 contentEvergreen content Establishing groupsSupporting established groups Getting the word outMaintaining or evolving the word Ideas & thought leadershipDense information, research Building buzz for an offline eventCreating an online space for a real world event

THANKS! Kurt Voelker