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SEA-EAT Blog Mobilizes Fast For Tsunami Relief: Page 5 of 6

On the other hand, blogs give credit to individual contributors, whereas wikis are entirely anonymous, Gupta said.

"In the wiki, individual contributors are invisible most of the time," Gupta said. "Showing that you're contributing is a huge motivation factor in a blog. A natural step for us is to move onto a wiki, but I don't think that we could have come as far as we did on a wiki."

Mehta wrote on the WorldChanging blog on Tuesday: "On hindsight I wish we had set up the SEA-EAT (South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami) blog on a wiki instead. It was such a quick and spontaneous decision that we just wanted to get on with building the resources rather than fuss about the platform."

She notes that the blogging format can make it hard to find information, As new entries come in, older entries scroll off the bottom of the page. Blogger doesn't even allow posts to be organized into categories.

She added, "As a result of tremendous traffic, requests for all sorts of things are pouring in. We've had requests to allow translations into different languages, requests to mirror the blog onto other pages, requests to set up pages for people who are looking for their loved ones gone missing.... This only reinforces my belief that a wiki might have been a much better medium - not only would these pages be separate yet part of a faceted collection and linked to each other, it might have been much easier for someone to navigate and jump in and post as well. Or to open a new page that they felt was relevant without checking back with admin. Moreover, the layers we might have wanted would be so easy to build. And few entry barriers about asking whether they could post or not. Owned by all - a true community."