The Power of the Wiki

Wikipedia’s information has been debatable since I first started college primarily because it first became popular as I entered UNCW. Many professors would not let any students use or cite Wikipedia because they deemed the information to be incorrect or “loose” at best. However, there are many arguments that the information is not “loose” because people or users would go back into the article and re-edit the information to become correct. In my opinion, it comes down to whether or not you trust Internet users as a whole. Furthermore, I have encountered professors who would let students’ cite information from Wikipedia because they did trust the information and mainly because they themselves used Wikipedia as an informational resource.

In the article, “Wikis Are Now Serious Business,” by Marshall Kirkpatrick, the author re-affirms our doubts about wiki’s by including a link in his article to compare different wiki’s at wikimatrix. I think that is very resourceful link to include because it will compare and contrast the different wiki’s because I honestly do think that some are better and contain more resourceful information than others do.

The Uses of a wiki are endless to any end-user but the most popular uses include, very simple publishing, building text for common communication, structured information, notes after a performance, event organizing, disaster relief, news writing, exposing research publicly, and finally revive archived content.

I think all of these are great examples and ultimately could be used for these uses. Another example would be how it has worked for Dr. Atkins English 496 class and being as I am as student in this class I can honestly it has worked great for many reasons. The first the information is easily editable and updates immediately. The second being all of the users, or (students in his class), are connected to one another in some form or fashion through this wiki. The third being that Dr. Atkins wiki list all of students blog’s on his wiki inevitably creating an Internet Cloud of his own.

All in all I think that wiki’s are a glimpse into the future. They will continue to grow expand and change just as the Internet has and will always continue to do because of everchanging and evolving technology does.


Kirkpatrick, Marshall . " Wikis Are Now Serious Business ." ReadWriteWeb - Web Apps, Web Technology Trends, Social Networking and Social Media . N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.

write to my blog

Here is a screenshot of the program:





Write to my Blog, by Pete Cashmore, is an article about a syndication tool. It basically details how the service works, what it does and how it can be useful for getting your blog to a wider audience. Another way of thinking about it would be, it allows you to add links to your Twitter, Facebook and many other Web 2.0 Technologies to essentially get the most viewers as possible. the best part is that it does it for you.

How it Works:

Write to my blog is in essence a blog within itself, except for the fact it doesn’t host your blog. What a user would do is, write their entry into “write to my blog.” Next, the user would syndicate that blog into all of their other blogs, if a user had multiple blogs (like blogger and word press. For example, if a user wrote their blog entry into, “write to my blog,” the next thing they would do is syndicate to all their other blogs. Users do this by inserting their log in information into the tool because “write to my blog” is a tool known as a plug in that connects blogs to together.

Not only does “write to my blog” connect blogs together but it also connects via Facebook and twitter, which is another way of syndication. I think the best part about this tool is fact that it does all this for you. It essentially does all the legwork for you so that you don’t manually have to go to all these different sites and post hyperlinks everywhere.

Another cool feature is about “Write to my Blog” is “apart from the ability to post to multiple blogs at once, positioning images is much easier and inserting tables is a breeze.” It also has a word document editor; it functions very similar to Microsoft Word by using spell and grammar check.

My Opinion and Thoughts:

First and foremost, I think this tool is great and I’m going to start using it but the whole point of all this is get more attention to your blog. But, if everyone starts doing this, I think the whole thing is going to defeat its on purpose, because if everyone is doing it then it’s going to create so much more data on the Internet that it is inevitably going to make your blog just as hard to find as it was in the first place.

However, there’s another way of looking at it. How many people will actually do it? If not everyone in the world then it will work great because I assume not everyone knows about this technology and even if they do, can they figure out how to utilize it? I guess it’s like anything in life, “if you’re going to do something, go at full-hearted and try you’re hardest and hopefully you will prevail due to the fact that you’re just better at it.”

Linked to facebook:

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Link to "Write To My Blog"






Cashmore, Pete. "http://mashable.com/2006/10/06/writetomyblog-easy-posting-to-wordpress-blogger-typepad-and-movabletype/." Mashable, "The Social Guide". N.p., 6 Oct. 2006. Web. 5 Nov. 2009. .