Yesterday I attended one of the Nielsen Norman Group User Experience 2006 tutorials in London titled “Lightweight Content Management: Blogs and Wikis” presented by Dan Brown

It was a highly interactive gathering - it was almost like Dan was chairing a discussion - a great experience, and I’m really glad I went. One of the big problems we had was agreeing what blogs and wikis are - i.e the nature of bloginess or wikiness.

We examined examples of each, their similarities and differences, and discussed various aspects. I thought that I’d like to document the conclusions I came to.

Blog - a series of posts referenced chronologically. Secondary factors could be identifying the author of the post, allowing articles to be tagged or put in categories, or allowing commenting on the article. The blog tends to have a theme or personality, present opinion or news, but the bit that makes it a blog is the reference to the point in time that the article is posted.

Wiki - a series of pages allowing collaborative authoring. It’s harder to come up with a neat definition of ‘wikiness’ but it has to be related to the mechanism that allows the collaboration - a combination of a lightweight editing environment, some form of markup allowing formatting including creating links, following a link to a non-existent page gives the author the option to link to a page, and history of changes to a page is maintained.

The semantics of what makes a blog a blog etc. is a minor amusement to me, but the thing that led me to attend the conference in the first place was an interest in the different ways wikis can be used, success stories and that. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have a massive opportunity to really explore this, because of time factors but also because many wikis are used in a closed environment for example Intranets.

Of course one classic public example is the wikipedia which in my view is becoming one of the phenomena of recent times - it’s starting to have as much imapct on me as google.

However, I was able to pass on something I was aware of relating to a very interesting experiment launched in August 2006 by DEFRA to use a wiki to develop an Environmental Contract. Credit where credit is due to David Miliband for having the nerve and imagination to try this, but he was the first cabinet minister to start a blog.

I’m sad enough to visit the defra website every now and again and was aware of this wiki before it had a bit of a hiccup. I have to admit I was surprised that editing of the wiki was open and anonymous when I first became aware if it - I can imagine this step was a bit of desperation to try and get things moving, but I did think someone could have some fun if they wanted. Then the wiki received some publicity in the order order blog, and the fun did start!

I see the wiki is back up again, and it seems it’s being used, although you do have to register again. I wish I could get excited enough about the subject to get involved and participate in the experiment, but I’m not that sad.