Another stream of recent posts has focused on weblogs as a tool for knowledge management both to capture and share knowledge. They include a mix of posts focusing on individual knowledge workers and on knowledge workers within organizations.

Lou Rosenfeld, author of the excellent Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has a good post on blogging k-logging.

Dave Pollard has generated a great set of posts on weblogs as knowledge management tools. His weblog in general has become a must read for me.:

Blogs in Business: The Weblog as Filing Cabinet

Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system.

A Weblog-Based Content Architecture for Business (this post also has some excellent diagrams of how weblogs fit within the entreprise)

The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog's publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever.

Blogs in Business: Finding the Right Niche

Weblogs can be effectively pitched to senior management of major organizations by explaining how they help solve the six problems:

They make contributing knowledge simpler, easier, and more automatic

They make it easier to update knowledge on a timely basis

They make knowledge more context rich

They allow the authors of key business knowledge to build and retain 'pride of ownership'

They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'

They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'

Each individual's 'collection' of shared knowledge is easy to define and assess at performance evaluation time

They make knowledge easier to route, to 'subscribe' to, to canvass and to 'mine'

Dave Sifry, creator of Technorati, and Doc Searls did a piece for Linux Journal on Building with Blogs. One key excerpt:

As weblogs account for more and more of the traffic in knowledge about a given subject, they become powerful instruments for hacking common wisdom. In many categories, they are moving ahead of mainstream journals and portals and building useful community services where over-funded dot-com efforts failed spectacularly.

Sébastien Paquet adds a piece on "towards structured blogging" where he starts to think about how to begin adding a next layer of metadata to collections of weblogs.

Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on.

Donald Luskin makes the following observation in his weblog (pointers courtesy of Scripting News and Roland Tanglao)

At the dinner table I explained what a blog is. There was the usual polite, partially feigned fascination with anything having to do with the Internet. But when I said that blogs have completely transformed my utilization of media and the way I acquire information about the world -- that I basically get everything from blogs now -- everyone stopped being polite. One fellow at the table was utterly shocked that I would trust any information I acquired online. I asked him if he trusted information he got from politically biased mainstream newspapers like the New York Times, or for that matter, from any commercial media biased toward at least some degree of sensationalism, if not some particular political view. I asked him if he had ever, once, read a newspaper account of some event of which he personally had expert or eye-witness knowledge, and found it to be accurate. I asked him he had ever once been interviewed by a reporter who quoted him accurately or in context, or who didn't already have the story written before the conversation even began? Well, no, he had to admit... but still... "...not the Internet! You can't be serious!"

Roland is always a source of good observations and links about blogging in knowledge sharing and knowledge management contexts. Some recent commentary via his blog include

Blogging is too difficult but it will get better. Like I always say we are at the VisiCalc stage of blogging. Compare and contrast Excel and VisiCalc; lightyears better and people in 2003 understand spreadsheets. Same thing will happen with blogging; we need years of experience and iteration to get from the VisiCalc of blogging to the Excel of blogging.

and this pointer to Value Creation by Communities of Practice

Blogs encourage cross-functional disruptive thinking.
I read a great quote that, like a magnet of meanings, pulled together layers of my thinking into a surprising pattern of possibility. Here it is: "Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony! ... While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects."

That should cover it for tonight, although there are still a bunch of good posts on this topic filling up my aggregator.

[McGee's Musings]

"I can't say that I agree with Don Park on this one.  In every organization in which I've been a manager, hierarchy becomes unavoidable because of course it's essential to utilize organizational network forms to cope with complexity.  But hierarchy by its very nature causes filtering and interpretation, and in order to truly keep a continuous "feel" for what's going on in the organization and in the market, I strive for more sophisticated network forms that inject more than a bit of the "edge" into my thinking.

Don says that "the CEO is not likely to know about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog."  Perhaps.  But I seek out and truly relish interaction with people at the edge of my organization.  When I find a hairy bug (e.g. a deadlock, or a comms or memory issue in the product), I love having the developer come in and debug it face-to-face.  It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product's internals, but also you have NO idea what I learn while chit-chatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc.  Design & implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc.  And of course they also milk me for what's going on in my travels, in my official role as Overhead at the organization.

I love listening to an individual sales rep or SE when we're on a sales call, because I get a better feel for what's actually going on with customers or prospects.  I try to pattern-match across reps so that I can see what might be improved in the sales process, rather than just listening to my VP of Sales.  I love interacting with designers and developers when doing my Thursday detailed feature design reviews.  I suppose this is just classic "walking the halls", etc., but I feel as though without this kind of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would lose respect for me.

With regard to blogs, I do agree that we need to figure out some kind of structure, but I don't think it should be strictly hierarchical.  I've got nearly 150 feeds that I monitor in one way or another - some employee, some not - and of course it's way too much to consume everything.  I've asked myself "if you could only read 10, which would you read?"  But I've found that this is the wrong question.  Reading those 10 would be like only having meetings with my direct reports.  I look to blogs for serendipity, and I won't truly understand what's going on "out there" unless I mix it up a bit.

So rather than hierarchical blogs, maybe the answer is a mix of some close (recurring) and some far (random)?  Maybe I should constantly read my 10 favorite feeds, and have the reader spit a bunch of randomness at me from the remaining 140?  All I know is that I need to mix some "practice" with the "process", to force some chaos into the system rather than just treating it as merely complex and manageable - which it most certainly is not. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]"