Tweney Understanding Weblogs. Dylan Tweney has summarized some of the recent thinking on weblogs (overlapping with many of the recent links posted here) in an article in which he also discusses realizing the personal knowledge-management benefits of keeping a weblog:

In other words, I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. Because it's so easy to create and update a weblog — the characteristic that has made blogging boom in the past year — it's an ideal information capture device. Whenever you come across something interesting online, you can easily drop a link, a quote, and/or a comment into your weblog, and move on. You may never return to it, but it's there if you ever want to look it up again. Same with passing thoughts: Just jot them in the weblog.

I agree that we need to see better forms of archival, retrieval, and organization. Either searching needs to get really smart, or some aiding for of taxonomy building has to help organize weblog entries by relationship. Just capturing knowledge or references is only half the battle. [Radio Free Blogistan]
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John Robb Responds to Shirky on Scaling. Robb makes the case that weblogs will (and do) scale more effectively than discussion groups:

Too much input is exactly the reason that discussion groups can't scale. A serial thread on a topic with a million contributors swamps a discussion. As a reader, I can't find the good posts in massive discussion group or mailing list. The signal-to-noise ratio is much too low.

However, weblogs change the equation. Each contributor gets a space where they can express their ideas. Their contributions aren't buried under the weight of the community's contributions in their personal space. The central hub of a weblog community provides a way to find these personal spaces, with each personal space acting as a filter or proxy for thousandsÔFCAof other sources. As the community scales the number of potential connections balloons. It isn't a broadcast system with one source of content, it is decentralized system with millions of sources. It is a marketplace for ideas and insight. By subscribing to a particular weblog, I am opting to transact with their idea flow without the noise of other voices.

(That's not the half of it.) Follow the link for the rest of the argument. [Radio Free Blogistan]
10:01:16 PM  #  comment []