This afternoon, I’ll be co-presenting a session with Steven M. Cohen (people, make sure you spell his name correctly – I’m just saying!) about blogs versus wikis. We’ll look at the Open Internet Librarian Blog and the Internet Librarian Wiki and compare what’s working and what isn’t for both types of tools. The session will be a bit improv, but here are the thoughts I plan to share:

Advantage: blog

• Easy to post information
• Chronological order
• Automatic RSS feed
• Comments can be attached to each post
• Only blog authors can edit the content of a post

Why might the blog work? Because it gives non-bloggers a place to post thoughts and it could be easy to audioblog.
Why might the blog not work? Because bloggers already have a place to blog, and non-bloggers don’t want to blog.

Advantage: wiki

• Anyone anywhere can contribute
• True equalized collaboration (when accounts aren’t required)
• Can create any order/flow to the information (sometimes chronological order doesn’t work well for the type of content)

Why might the wiki work? Because anyone at the conference or offsite could add content.
Why might the wiki not work? Because no one is sure what to put there (versus somewhere else) and wikis are still a little difficult to use (see Meredith Farkas’ advice?). Plus, they need a password to edit it, which might be too much of a barrier at this point.

Personally, I think the tool that ended up working the best in this situation was Technorati. It was the one spot everything was pulled together.

Advantage: Technorati (view the IL05 tag)

• Automatically brought together all pieces that were posted anywhere (as long as they were tagged and the sites pinged Technorati)
• Made it easy to find things; one-stop shopping

I would also argue that we’ve had a lot of fun and socialness with Flickr. Of course, you had to know about Flickr, have an account, and know what you could do. I wish we could have done a whole session just on Flickr.  :-P

Advantage: Flickr (view IL05 photostream)

• Mass tagging
• Human beings
• Fun, fun, and fun!