Blogs vs. Wikis vs. Mailing Lists

Carl Cravens has been wondering on the Gamers mailing list about whether blogs take traffic away from mailing lists and reduce community.

It’s true that the vast majority of blogs don’t seem to have enough of a critical mass of regular readers and commenters to get much comment discussion. I occasionally wonder whether blogging is a bit of a solipsistic activity compared with participating in other online communities such as mailing lists or web forums. On the other hand, there are some weblogs that have a very active community of commenters, such as Making Light or BlogCritics. There’s also Moveable Type’s Trackback feature, which lets discussions wander from blog to blog, something used in the Game WISH meme. I’m sure there’s scope for an aggregator to format them like a threaded discussion

I’ve heard the blogosphere described as Usenet turned inside out; it’s sorted by people rather than by group. In my Usenet days you could read my thoughts on different subjects in uk.railway, alt.music.blueoystercult or rec.games.frp.gurps; nowadays a lot of them are gathered together here. It’s an interesting question as to whether or not this increases or reduces the overall signal-to-noise ratio. I tend to read the blogs of people who write about subjects I’m interested in; for worthwhile posts on gaming or model railways I also get the progress of people’s diets and strongly expressed political opinions I don’t necessarily agree with. But I don’t have to put up with a lot of the dross of Usenet; the spam, idiots, trolls and flamewars, which are restricted to the comments sections of one or two blogs.

I suspect the functionality of blogs, web forums and mailing lists will converge over time, and the same content and discussion might be available in multiple formats; email, html, rss, nntp, and so on.

Blogs vs. Wikis is another subject. There are pros and cons of using both to support online gaming. For instance, I use a Wiki (hosted by The Phoenyx) to maintain a lot of gameworld background information (and there’s a lot of it), because the Wiki lets me construct a hierarchical structure of sorts; and the WikiWord format makes for rich internal linking. But I have also set up an MT Blog for the actual game archives, because I find that easier to manage for something that’s essentially sequential.