open publishing on the web

"Blogs and wikis are a reinvention of the open publishing philosophy of the web." is a point made in this presentation on "Building online communities of practice through web-based learning".

This is a nice point and of course refers to the commonality of blogs and wikis - the fact that content of both are not overseen by administrators. The blog and wiki providers restrict themselves to service management, whilst the users of the tools are responsible for the content. Subsequently a blogger or wiki user can enter whatever content they please. Wikis can be edited by everyone (the default) - or the wiki owner can elect to restrict editing rights to only himself, or to a select group. Likewise a blog can be edited by whomever the owner of the blog elects (however users have to be added, and there is no 'world writeable' option as default). The owners of both facilities control the editing rights.