Blogs v. Wikis

Blogs are online journals that anyone can see and (usually) comment on. Wikis are online encyclopedias that anyone can edit and contribute to. At their core, both are new media technologies that encourage collaboration among the communities that gather around them. Their similarities include being accessible from anywhere and by anyone, being able to be changed (to different degrees) by any users, and requiring no HTML knowledge to use at a basic level.

Although blogs and wikis are both new media technologies that do have some similarities, there are several key differences between the two.
In terms of control, blogs can only be changed as far as the comments go since commenters can't edit the actual layout or the posts of the blog. Wikis, meanwhile, can have entire pages changed by any registered user.
Blogs are also more personal reflections on whatever subject they cover from the blog owner's point of view while the comments are usually left as they are. Wikis, meanwhile, tend to be more objective in nature because they have to match the expectations of the most common user so the articles aren't changed because of inaccuracies. Wikipedia, for example, requires citations for nearly every part of its articles to ensure their accuracy.

This isn't to say blogs can't be used for community collaboration, however. Although the blog owner is the only person able to make posts on the blog itself, it's still possible to encourage collaboration among groups through inventive uses of tags and blogrolls. Each collaborator may have their own account that links to one central account that contains all of their posts that contain a certain tag relevant to the group's interest.

As stated at the beginning of this post, wikis are essentially online encyclopedias. In comparison to actual encyclopedia software, however, they still lack media functionality outside of displaying images. Music and videos, for example, can't be embedded into a wiki and can only be accessed by outside links. One potential addition to wiki software could be to allow for the embedding of such media files to give them that extra functionality.