Blog v Wiki

       The emergence of Blogs brought about a personalization aspect that had not previously existed in such a simplified format. Blogs allowed any given person to voice their opinions and showcase their talents and experiences. The format and layout allowed for easy access to the content provided through the blog. Blogs brought out the possibility of interacting with people close to you or strangers around the world, each sharing their own thoughts an experiences giving people a glimpse into the lives of different people and different cultures. Aside from the personal content, blogs were also used for many things such as advertisements, businesses, and most prominently, journalism. As Kathy E. Gill stated in her "How can we measure the influence of of the blogosphere?" article, she says "Bloggers can serve as grassroots reporters or fact checkers...". Local news and events that aren't considered mainstream have a chance to be exposed through blogs. Blogs can be used for collaboration for businesses that create and manage company events and announcements. It can also be used for collaborative news story telling where different bloggers get their angle of the same news story and put it together to make one fully fledged news reporting.
       Blogs can be used for a plethora of things but its mainly used for personal or opinionated content, Wiki's slightly deviate from this notion. Wiki's are primarily used for the collection and corroboration of factual knowledge and information. Similar to blogs, wiki's can be run by anyone with the difference that wiki's are mostly purposed to provide objective, factual content compared to the subjective and personal content provided by blogs. As Oded Nov states in his article "What motivates wikipedians?" he says "Wikipedia is a prominent example of a collaborative user-generated content outlet based on the open source model, and a promising model for knowledge sharing." Convergence is important in today's world because of the importance of information. Wikipedia has brought essentially almost infinite knowledge in one easily accessible format. The sharing and distribution of knowledge and information has become invaluable and blogs and wikis allow for a very easy distribution. Wiki's can be potentially used to provide live forum of discussion for an big news events.