I don’t find wikis all that helpful – they seem to get used and then forgotten owing to gaps in the response loop; but then the culture that I’m working in is actually not that familiar with any of this.

I’ve seen Ning, which I rather liked, and am currently using a version of Drupal – both of those offer ways of making custom communities. My main beef is that there needs to be a process or a plan in place, overseen by someone who will make the community happen, because if it’s simply down to voluntary action it may never take off.

The other thing that I think is incredibly helpful is willingness to create content (text, links, opinions, pictures); there can be real barriers to doing this in organisations where opinions tend to be guarded.

Anyway, very happy to talk about this and i’m interested in how you use wikis.

Thanks for your message, it might be interesting to talk at some point! I’m heavily involved with external online community-building at the moment, and have thought a lot about how to engage with people. I even have a theory…

I think the reason blogs have worked better as a starting point for teams using social networking tools to collaborate is that the journal format makes it more intuitive to understand how the information is organised. The advantage and disadvantage of blogs is that you can’t change – but you can add to – what’s already there. It makes it easy to see how a conversation has developed. But it can’t become the end product in the way a wiki can: if a conversation becomes really intricate, someone has to take it offline and edit all the threads into a combined answer.

So once a group is comfortable sharing information online, I’d get them to use a mix of blogs and wikis, depending on what they were trying to achieve. Meanwhile, I think the combination of free search, tagging and archiving of blog posts makes them very easy to organise with very little effort. If categories are well used and clearly displayed, they’re a great way of illustrating what the blog’s about. I’d limit the use of ‘pages’ on a heavily-used blog, as people may well forget to look at anything behind the home page.

As for shared documents, my experience is that blogs are pretty rubbish for them! Great for documents that arent’ going to change, but very fiddly for documents that are. I’m still experimenting, but at this point I find wikis and dealrooms better ways of dealing with them. Or SharePoint, which so many companies are using now.

s

I’m interested that you’ve found blogging a more useful tool than wikis for group communication. Any tips on organising the blog posts to make it easy to find what you need? And also, would you use some other document sharing tools alongside it or is there an easy way of incorporating access to shared documents on to the blog?

Alison