De la part de C. Kimble, un message envoyé à deux listes que je prend la liberté de reproduire ici car il alimente de belle façon le débat sur la nature des réseaux de carnets / From C. Kimble, a message sent to two lists adding to the debate on the nature of the weblogs' network communications

In a previous message to com-prac@yahoogroups.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/com-prac/message/2713

I made some observations about the speed at which an article that Paul Hildreth and I had written
http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html
had been picked up by blogs and asked the question:

> Has anybody else noticed this happening before or have I just been
> missing the obvious (or am I simply missing the point of blogs?)
>
> I am really quite surprised at how quickly an idea can spread. Does
> anybody have any thoughts on the role of blogs in communities of
> practice and/or KM?

This prompted a few replies both here and elsewhere, some of which I thought might be of interest. For me, they also raised a new question (see the end of this message).

The first item of interest came from a blog by Gilles Beauchamp:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101569/categories/gillesEnglishCorner/
This contained a reference to a presentation from Joe Katzman, Queen's
University, Kingston, Canada. http://business.queensu.ca/kbe/docs/blogs.pdf
The presentation deals with the issue of blogs, KM and CoPs directly. It contains an overview of blogs, a review of some of the problems of achieving a successful Knowledge Management implementations, some observations on the requirements for supporting CoPs and blogs and concludes with some interesting comments on "boundary spanners"

The second comes from Lilia Efimova at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/ who suggests an article by John Hiler
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/tippingblog.htm called "How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic". The article describes a similar experience to my own and again makes some observations about how blogs can act as "connectors" between groups of people.

On a personal note, I thought that the observations about the role that blogs play in crossing boundaries were quite interesting and had a number of resonances with the role of boundary objects that Paul and I have observed in some of our previous papers, e.g. Communities of Practice: Going Virtual

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble/research/13kimble.pdf 

Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?

Chris Kimble
Department of Computer Science, University of York,
Home: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble
MIS group: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/

12:30:21 AM