Wednesday, March 20, 2002

K-Log Networks and Communities

Note: This is another post to the K-Logs (knowledge management weblogs) community on Yahoo Groups. If you like this topic, you are welcome to join).

A large part of the magic behind K-Logging is the ability to connect participants to improve the rate, quantity, and quality of knowledge shared in an organization or community. Simply publishing a personal K-Log gets you part of the way there. However, to go to the next level you need to provide tools and information that help K-Loggers to connect to each other. How do you connect K-Logs? Through K-Log community software.

K-Log community software runs in a central location on the Intranet or the Web (or on a community leaders desktop) and acts like a hub for the K-Log network. Participants in the community connect to it by pointing their K-Log software to that hub. The steps involved are easy. When participants publish, they send information to the community software that is then aggregated with information from other participants, processed, and displayed as Web pages that the community can use to can use to connect to each other. This community information allows you to find the high quality sources within the community quickly. Once found, you can cement your connection to a high quality K-Log via a subscription (see my earlier post for more information on this).

Here are the features that community software provides:

1) Recently updated K-Logs. This webpage lists K-Logs that have updated their sites recently. It tells you when they last updated (via a time-stamp) and organizes the updated K-Logs chronologically, with the most recent updates at the top of the page (http://www.weblogs.com is an example of this). Additional functionality that is provided by Radio (http://radio.userland.com), allows users to build a personal list or subset of recently updated K-Logs they want to track.

2) Referrer pages (referers for techies). A referrer page tracks the location of webpages that link to your site and provides into on the number of people that used that link to arrive at your site (here is an example of my referrer list). An important part of K-Logging is knowing who is linking to you. This gives you information on who's reading your K-Log and how much influence they have (as measured by the number of people that use their link to travel to your site). By clicking on the referrer link you can quickly find out what other people are saying about your site or a particular post you made.

3) Search.

4) Traffic on community K-Logs ranked by number of page views. Here is an example of this. This information tells you who is getting the most traffic or readers in the community. The higher the traffic, the more influential that K-Log is.

5) A list of the most active and popular subscriptions. As mentioned earlier, subscriptions are a way to get news on recent updates to K-Logs you want to follow and from general news sources. Information on which subscriptions are the most popular and active is aggregated on this page. Here is an example of this type of page. This page combines subscriptions to general news sources as well as other K-Logs. This is a great place to find sources of news that may interest you.

Note: Another aspect of community software is that it provides a way for a company or organization to manage a network of K-Logs. For example: it can allow a community manager to set limits on file types and the amount of disk space consumed by each K-Log in the network on the hosting server.

UserLand is shipping a Radio Community Server that makes setting up a network like this easy. It's free software that runs as an application on UserLand's Frontier or Radio. Here is more about the Radio Community Server. So, if you want to build a K-Log network within the firewall at your corporation or organization, this is the software to use. Or, if you want to build a community of K-Loggers that transcend corporate or organizational boundaries, this is the software to use. If you are interested in learning more or need help thinking this through, contact me. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
5:12:45 AM

Radio is personal publishing software. What makes it different than:

1) Desktop publishing software like Word.

2) Website publishing software like Front Page and Geocities.

The difference is that Radio shares, simplifies, and connects. Here are the specific differences:

1) Radio allows people to publish to to the Web rather than to printer.

2) Radio simplifies the task of constructing a website. It automates it so you don't have to spend time learning HTML or graphic design. It allows you to focus on writing.

3) Radio aggregates information for you from other weblogs and general news sources through subscriptions.

4) Radio connects you to other people people in your community by providing you information on which sites last updated, who is linking to you, and which sites are the most popular. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Good description. I get tongue tied when trying to explain Radio and blogging to people who haven't used it.

5:10:19 AM

O'Reilly Network: Microsoft's Research Director Taps Top Tech Trends. Q&A with Rick Rashid. If you look at the kinds of things that are happening right now in the hardware space and the software space, there are several areas I think are pretty important. One thing, of course, is that the amount of storage that's available has just been mushrooming. [Tomalak's Realm]

Very interesting! I saw Rick speak at CMU while in grad school while he was working on Mach. Great guy. Several of these things are ideas we've been tossing around from a start-up perspective.

5:06:52 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Google, K-Logs and Radio. Last month, Google announced a Google appliance for corporations. Nice. However, there is something missing. Google's attractiveness as a search engine is based on its ability to rank content based on a quality rating. Google's quality rating is a combination of the number of sites linking to a specific webpage and the quality of the sites linking to it. The results of this calculation provides the high hit rate on results Google is known for.

Unfortunately, unlike the Internet, a corporate Intranet is a static monoculture. Most Intranets are designed and built by a small group of individuals. It doesn't change much. It's usually a semi-passive resource for employees. It doesn't have a diversity of published views that link to resources that are located on it. As a result, Google's quality ranking doesn't have the material it needs to do its magic in corporate environments.

There is a solution. K-Logs. K-Logs create a body of Intranet webpages that a Google appliance can use to rank resources. This provides users with better results.

Google + Radio = better search results for corporate Intranets.

There's definitely something to this argument....

[rosewater]
4:23:37 AM