Beyond the sandbox: Wikis and blogs that get work done (SIG STI)

Abstract

Emerging at first as popular culture phenomena, wikis and blogs have become information tools that many professionals use every day for scholarly and corporate collaborative work. Wikis are any of a variety of online publications collaboratively and openly authored and edited. Typically, any visitor to a wiki can add or edit existing content. Blogs are a genre of website that are updated frequently and arranged by date. A variety of software systems, aggregating and tracking protocols, and syndication standards have evolved to service blog and wiki users, and communities have sprung up around both of these sets of technologies. Three leaders in the field will discuss wikis and blogs as community building technologies, and will address issues of creation, maintenance, and evaluation of the tools. (Cameron Marlow) The Blogdex project was launched in 2001 as an effort to track the diffusion of information through the weblog community. The system tracks over 30,000 weblogs to capture hyperlinks used in blog entries. These links are aggregated into an index of the most rapidly diffusing content at any given point in time. The network of links serves as a proxy for social structure, constructing a representation of the social networks of weblog authors. This presentation will discuss the social nature of the weblogging medium using data collected from Blogdex. First the social structure that has evolved over the past 5 years is analyzed using social network analysis. Second, the role of information in this process is addressed, looking specifically at the process of media contagion. Finally, we will look at how the various tools used to generate blogs affect the processes of social interaction and information diffusion. (SunirShah) Since the invention of the printing press, academic research has become a major industry. Accordingly, the academic publishing industry has become a massive enterprise, with resulting costs in terms of “lost” research, insufficiently peer reviewed articles, and errors in articles that must be fixed with subsequent publications (if at all). Wikis provide an opportunity to change this model. Rather than forcing researchers to write new articles, wikis accumulate and organize new knowledge in small pieces. By maintaining a community of like-minded researchers, peer review is conducted by readers rather than referees for hire. Detected errors become corrected in place. Most importantly, collaboratively published works can complement, rather than compete, with existing academic publishing schemes. (Ross Mayfield) Beyond the social and academic spheres, wikis and blogs are being creatively adopted by industry. Capitalizing on the social and collaborative nature of both genres, companies are using these tools to guarantee that project team members are literally “on the same page.” Social text uses customized wikis and blogs to ease the crunch of e-mail lists, project management systems, and ever more complicated schemes for managing differing versions of documents. Mayfield will present case studies of organizations which have implemented Social text's products, which consist of open-source software, pre-configured servers, hosted “Social text Workspaces,” and consulting services.