Here's a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of blogs, wikis, and mailing lists. Since I run a blog, designed a wiki, and participate in several mailing lists, I find the subject very interesting. However, I feel the subject could be taken a lot deeper. For example, I feel like the guidelines presented for when to choose a wiki vs. a blog vs. a mailing list aren't sufficiently robust -- they came from just a few datapoints, so it's hard to decide to what degree the conclusions are repeatable, or just noise.
I think the most useful conclusions from the presentation are probably the comments about how people interact. For example, I've seen at least a dozen instances of the phenomenon where you have a highly technical subject, and most of the readers simply can't follow along, so they stay quiet. But then a trivial issue arises, like how to choose names, or whether indentation should be significant, and suddenly everybody not only has an opinion, but feels that they need to share it with the world. This gets really annoying, but I know of no way to effectively counter it. (It would be nice if there were some terse latin phrase for this, like post hoc ergo propter hoc, or ad hominem, that you could just reference and have done).
The comment about how weblogs and wikis are subject to positive feedback is interesting, but I think it could be developed more. There are two reasons for this phenomenon: weblogs and wikis have urls, so you can quickly point random strangers at them. Mailing lists don't have this feature (web-based archives not withstanding). Also, weblogs and wikis have quick, simple techniques for letting strangers add comments. Mailing lists require more effort to contribute (you typically have to subscribe), so offhand comments from strangers are discouraged.
The comment about how mailing lists attract flamebait is also very interesting. This time, the reason is explained: wikis let others water down inflamatory wording, while mailing lists and blogs make revision difficult or impossible, even by the author.
(Via John Sequeira).
Posted on February 16, 2004 11:47 AM
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There is a name for the "everyone stays quiet during the technical bits but loudly argues the trivial parts" phenomenon: it's the Bikeshed Problem.
Posted by: Gnomon at February 16, 2004 01:33 PMIt would be interesting to see how Everything fits in to this.
Posted by: aaa at February 16, 2004 06:34 PMOne other thing really cool about links as implemented by weblogs is that they can be traversed BACKWARDS. I found this page through technorati, but I could have also simply trackback enabled the presentation, or even looked at the referrer logs.
I call this cohesion.
Kim, if you want to take a pass at drilling this down a bit (adding data points and your point of view), take a stab at it and ping my using any means you like, and perhaps we can collaborate.
Posted by: Sam Ruby at February 16, 2004 07:55 PMWikis are great for Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and project management. For personal opinions and debates, blogs and forums (mailing lists) are more suitable.
I use TikiWiki CMS/Groupware so I can have all three in one neat package.
Best regards,
M ;-)
http://marclaporte.com