"The goal will be to show how Radio can be interwoven across a given organization or project team through specific use(s) to support a hierarchy of shared spaces that mediate identity and knowledge. Profound mouthful."

This will be the theme of my book.

Weblogs are often knocked as just another hyped excuse for naval-gazing by wannabe diarists. Or, put another way, they are trashed as just old-time Net websites with some syntactic sugar added. Well, excuuuuse me.

First of all, if folks want to write about their Aunt Sally and post pictures of their cat, good for them. Electrons are cheap. Who asked you?

As for syntactic sugar, weblogs (no, check that, Frontier/Manila/Radio as a platform) do package together a set of features that were once-upon-a-time factored out in hard-to-use geeky tools. That's called progress. If that progress puts Aunt Sally's stories on the Net, awesome.

Now, here is another ill-kept secret:

Weblogs are also making it possible for Intranets to fulfill their long-ago promise as environments for managing and channeling knowledge - and for just the same reasons. Dilbert's neighbors never could figure out why the benefit of using yesterday's Intranets outweighed the presumed gain (it didn't by and large) but they now realize they can track the progress of their work and projects using weblogs.

In some cases, it's even better than that. They are running their own Intranet and Knowledge-nets without even realizing that they are doing so.

Bingo.

Once more:

"The goal will be to show how Radio can be interwoven across a given organization or project team through specific use(s) to support a hierarchy of shared spaces that mediate identity and knowledge. Profound mouthful."

'Shared spaces' just means that weblogs can be strung together conveniently in hierarchical or networked chains with push (publish) and pull (subscribe) notifications between coworkers engaged in common tasks.

Just think how cool it could (will) be when organizations start leveraging weblog platforms intelligently. Not weblogs - weblog platforms. So far, I only know of one such platform: Frontier/Manila/Radio. 

As better minds than mine have pointed out, this nicely (elegantly) blends planned and serendipitous knowledge creation and mining. So-called knowledge management has generally foundered for lack of tools that foster this blend without making the tool so onerous that our marvelous human brains rebel at the pain inflicted on us en route to some nebulous corporate goal.

Too wordy? Just sign up for this: "weblogging is fun".

Oversimplifying, Radio occupies a spectrum point between email/static websites on the low-end of shared interactions and a platform like Groove on the high-end:

Email
Static Websites
IM
Weblogs
(Instant Outlining)
Groove

(I parenthesize 'instant outlining' since it is still beta at Userland. Note that instant outlining would be nearly impossible without the broad platform support of Frontier).

Radio occupies a very sweet spot for public and semi-public sharing that requires minimal to moderate security. When only paranoia will do, Groove is your choice.

Of course, I leave very much here to the imagination - rather, to a book. And (I continue to repeat) to a book(s) that will explain how to actually use Radio to these ends.

At least I am tuning in to an audience (small to medium-size organizations of professionals) and a theme (showing them how to create and manage shared knowledge spaces).

It's a start. Next - a first cut at an outline and perhaps a small surprise about the approach I will take.

(Once again, thanks for the continuing comments. I am weighing each one of them. In time, I hope to enlist reviewers to savage my stuff so I can actually make it decent. Meanwhile, keep commenting please).

feedback:   2:36:55 PM