OK, I can't wait to hear what you guys have to say about this.

So now, evidently, there are these new tools that allow regular people (even silly customer experience people like me) to create wikis (aka, web sites that are easy to build, edit, and collaborate on without much fuss). Which makes me think about a new set of underpants: technical underpants.

Wikis are intended to be collaboratively created and maintained. Basically, this means that on most pages on this site you can click the 'easyedit' button and do whatever the heck you want to what I have written. Or, I can 'lock' pages, which will still allow you to comment on my words of wisdom even though you won't have the opportunity to muck up my fabulous prose.

Together, we can create a taxonomy (aka a navigation structure) to the pages. We can decide there will be a category called 'knickers' (if we want to) for european corporate underpants issues. All of our work will end up on pages that can be navigated to with the left-nav links and/or the tags that we add to them.

Blogs, on the other hand, are designed to allow a single person (or identified group of people) to add daily (or so) to what becomes a long stream of thoughts. Many individual's blogs are like a long journal, filled with lots of entries that are around a paragraph or two long. These entries are available long after they lose their home-page placement, but in most of the blogs I've seen the only ways to get to previous entries is to use a monthly archive link (e.g., now that it's May, you can click a link to see the April entries) or with a search. But these methods aren't great if you don't know when an entry of interest was created, or if you have no idea what to search for (this movie blogger that you love used to blog on books, but not since last year. How would you know to search for 'books' unless she told you?).

So blogs are great for following a stream of consciousness, or for highly date-relevant entries, but they turn out not to be so great for topics like...well...for example....corporate underpants. Just because I want to talk about search engines in April and home pages in May, the information about the search engines doesn't necessarily become 'old' once May rolls around. Hence, I waited for a wiki option. Sure, some of the content will get old--but the site won't become a long scroll that makes it as tricky to get to a previous posting as it is to remove the middle sheet from a new roll of toilet paper (btw, I don't recommend you try this.)

So. Wikis? Blogs? Thoughts, people?