One of the big ideas about the combination of weblogs with aggregators is that you only get information about blogs that YOU decide are interesting, not the writer. I check out new blogs all the time, and I easily delete those that hold no interest.
Now, in a corporate environment, say you run a weblog about a particular project. Everyone on the project can subscribe and post their info on their own logs. It allows everyone to stay current when THEY have the time to read it. Another example is from research, which is where most KM technology is needed. The company is not concerned about what the admins know (although perhaps they should) or if the janitor has a weblog. [...]
One of the big problems many people have is staying current with the literature. Everyone needs to find hours per week to stay current. But, if people subscribe to newsfeeds for the journals, a single reader can filter out the relevant articles and post them to their weblog. I subscribed to over 50 newsfeeds for biology journals. I could browse over 300 articles in less than 1 hour, posting the important ones to my blog to be read later. That is right. Browse and make posts. I could then link to the article when I had the time. It was incredibly efficient, especially compared to reading each journal TOC individually. Others could then get to the important new literature quickly. People with particular expertise would be the first to find useful articles. This moves information around much faster than any other approach. Because, simply finding an important article is not enough. You need to get it into the hands of others to whom it might also be important. Hard to do in a company of 10,000 without using weblogs and news aggregators.
You can capture the tacit knowledge in the heads of people. People are not going to put completely inappropriate info up BECAUSE of the transparency. They know others can easily read it. If someone posts something that may be misleading, others can quickly reply and provide context. [...]
It is a lot easier to lie and mislead if no one knows anything. But then it is very hard to move forward. I firmly believe that there would be no Internet if the lawyers had been involved.
[Seb's Open Research]
