One unexpected fringe benefit of falling way behind in
responding to all the fascinating posts accumulating in your news aggregator is that you get a chance
to pull multiple items together into an integrated post. I did one recently on weblogs and knowledge management
that a number of people found helpful. The backlog of posts shows no signs of abating, so it's time for a follow up.

Rick Klau sets a nice context by reminding us of Gartner's hype cycle and its application to blogs:

We are almost certainly in the trough of disillusionment when it comes to blogs.
Lots of critical comments, much confusion over their "true" benefits, etc.
Yet hundreds of thousands of people continue to use their weblog as a way of cataloging their thought.
And companies are starting to explore how they might use weblogs for other purposes.

My prediction: we will emerge from this trough into the "slope of enlightenment" during which it will become
obvious that personal weblogs can be tremendous tools for capturing ad hoc knowledge and
archiving it for future use. Furthermore, businesses will figure out that blogs can serve as
both a content management system as well as an internal knowledge sharing platform - a much different
use from the personal application, but a critical one for the business world to adopt weblogs
with enthusiasm.[tins:::Rick Klau's weblog]

Dina Mehta is relatively new to the blogging world. She offers some helpful fresh perspective on the challenges of
introducing weblogs into corporate environments. Thinking about the problems of knowledge management and how weblogs may fit, she says:

I'm not really sure that KM is being adopted in a really useful or effective manner in many organisations here.
More importantly, while its great to have a system in place as a talking point, i'm not really sure what real
value is being created and disseminated. They tend to be led by the HR department and are usually
one-way monologues that not many participate in - (but this is really a topic for another post).

There is a constant generation of content in an organisation - via email, via IM, through documents,
presentations, training workshops and seminars, and sometimes through discussion boards.
KM systems tend to be slow and heavy in capturing and disseminating this content - in the process,
the value may be lost[Conversations with Dina]

Like many of us, she sees that blogs may be the answer, but isn't sure how best to make the case to those in a position to make a decision.

Part of that case will hang on the availability of some concrete examples of weblogs in use in organizations.
Two areas that are generating some early examples of weblogs in organizational settings are project management
and marketing. Both are naturals for the technology, being high-paced and communications intensive.

On the project management side, Jon Udell at Infoworld is a regular source of good insights into weblogs in organizational
settings. Here's a post he ran on the use of weblogs to improve project communications plus the corresponding article at
Infoworld (Publishing a Project Weblog).

The value of a project Weblog has a lot to do with getting everybody onto the same page -- literally.
You want to deliver a manageable flow on the home page, drawing attention to the key events in the daily life
of the project. To do this well, think like a journalist. ...

The newspaper editor's mantra is "heads, decks, and leads" -- in other words, headlines, summaries, and
introductory paragraphs. These devices are, in fact, tools for managing a scarce and precious resource:
the reader's attention. A well-written title (or subject header if you happen to be composing an e-mail message)
is your first, best, and often only chance to get your message across.

There's a particularly useful diagram Jon reproduces in another Infoworld post on blogs, scopes, and human routers
and drawn from his his equally useful book, Practical Internet Groupware. It captures a notion of the multiple
overlapping groups that we belong to in the pursuite of knowledge work.

Jon has also talked about the notion of what he calls the conversational enterprise and how weblogs will serve
as a key source of the raw materials for knowledge management in organizations (Technical trends bode well for KM);

What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time.
The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader.
But in the real-world enterprise, most people don't tend to write these narratives naturally, and
the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it.

There is, however, a certain kind of person who has a special incentive to tell the story of a project:
the project managers, who are among the best power users of Traction Software's enterprise Weblogging software,
according to Traction co-founders Greg Lloyd and Chris Nuzum (see “Getting Traction”).

Traction certainly is powerful software, although the power does come at the expense of a somewhat steeper learning curve
than systems like Radio or Moveable Type whose origins were in personal weblogs rather than enterprise.
Actually, it might be better to think in terms of a steeper implementation curve, rather than learning curve.
Setting up Traction in terms of project structures and tags takes some thought to get full advantage of the tools.
Using them on a day-to-day basis is pretty straightforward.

The use of weblogs in marketing settings is also drawing attention. Some of that is in the form of early, and
rightfully ridiculed, examples such as the faux-blog Raging Cow, which tried to force its traditional marketing
strategy through a blog format.

Others have made more sensible progress (I suppose that makes me terminally boring). Inc. Magazine ran a
recent piece on Blogging for Dollars (link found via Blogging News), for example, that highlights some examples
of the real use of blogs as a marketing tool.

Gary Murphy at TeledyN offers up a couple of interesting examples of KM in organizational settings in a recent
post on Walmart's KM rocks.

Both searches were initially pointless because, for very good reasons, both the sought after data
items did not exist in the superficially logical locations. This is probably the number one flaw with
most dead-robot KM systems: They fail to accommodate how Reality is inherently messy!

The only possible method to locate either the ribs or the cards was to do what humans have done
since the dawn of archives, ask someone who knows. In both instances, we needed someone who knew
where the target was, and who could refer us to someone who knew how to extract it.

Murphy provides the critical link here between weblogs and organizational need. It is the realization that
KM in organizational settings is primarily a social phenomenon and not a technology one.
Most prior efforts to apply technology to KM problems in organizations have been solutions in search of a problem.
They have been driven by a technology vendor's need to sell product, not an organization's need to solve problems.

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex,
which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work
backwards from the answer - weblogs - to the problem - what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management.
We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:"oliverw")-Blogs are the real thing because they have a real voice!
Ain't nothing like the real thing baby! Everybody who wants a blog will have a blog 10 years from now just like everybody who wants
email has email. We may not call it a blog. Whatever we call it, it will be a website with cool, sophisticated technology behind it that allows
you to easily organize, annoyate and record anything using any media (voice, photos, movies, text, etc.) anywhere, anytime to
whoever you choose (friends, family, colleagues, the entire web,etc.). And the rewards are greater to those who jump in sooner rather than later!
<quote>
Every January, trade publications put out lists of predictions for the coming year. They discuss products, services, and
trends that they think will change the way business is done, labeling some of these "disruptive technologies."
The idea of disruptive technologies comes from Clayton Christensen's 1997 book, "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies
Cause Great Firms to Fail." A disruptive technology is a method, procedure, skill, device, or material that redefines competitive standards,
and it often forces us to re-examine the way we work. Also note that the technology doesn't have to be a physical item.
InfoWorld’s list of disruptive technologies for 2003 included open source, self-service CRM, digital identity, and my personal favorite, weblogs.
How can a simple web-based journal be “disruptive?” For starters, it’s worth describing what a weblog is.
Basically, a weblog, or “blog,” is an online, time-stamped web page that includes the thoughts, ideas, and comments of the “blogger.”
The musings are usually brief, but they are published frequently and consistently.
People can subscribe to receive the blog updates via e-mail. Often, the blogger is an expert on the subject he or she is discussing.
At first glance, it doesn’t appear that blogs would be at all disruptive. So why all the hype? If we look closely at the structure and
intent of blogs as a communications tool, we can see some powerful ideas at work. Blogs are a direct, one-to-many means of communicating ideas.
They expand an individual’s ability to communicate. They are fresh and timely. The blogger, to maintain interest, must communicate often.
Blogs enable a single person to share ideas, insights, and useful knowledge with an audience.
Thanks to the web, the audience can be a global one. Whenever a new tool or process—such as e-mail—expands communications,
the effects are far-reaching and dramatic. Even though blogs have been around for 3-4 years, they could be “the next big thing.”
Blogs Are the “Real Voice” Two important characteristics of blogs are that they are written by a person who is knowledgeable and
passionate about the topic, and they are written in a “real voice.” This is a cosmic shift from the marketing and public relations
materials that are the staple of business communications.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:"corante_social")-Nice explanation! Need to try out a Wiki Weblog some day!
<quote>
I just found my WebLog wiki page from Sept'99. It says... "WebLog-s are basically running chronologies of annotated links that the logger finds interesting, and perhaps other random thought-blips. Usually structured as a multi-day document, most recent stuff at top. I could see a Wiki node representing some chunk of time (a week?), and using it as a springboard to other nodes of commentary. The problem is that this doesn't create a web of links among the individual little chunks. Another approach would be to make a separate Wiki node for each nugget, and the WebLog would really be the Recent Changes page..." How funny is that? It only took 26 months to get around to doing it... What kind of person might like to run a Wiki Weblog instead of a straight WebLog? An individual who wants to write about ideas, relate them to each other, and refine them. Someone who's been intrigued by the idea of Hyper Text might be interested. I could see Vladimir Nabokov using a wiki instead of hundreds of index cards to develop a story. :) Someone who's thought, "This weblogging stuff looks interesting, but you're always just throwing away your notes as they slide out of view" might be interested.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Yet another intro article to blogs. The more the better!
<quote>
Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname "blogs", weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Wikis are now on the radar screens of many of us grappling with using technology effectively in knowledge work. Ward Cunningham's book,The Wiki Way:Quick Collaboration on the Web, has been on my bookshelf for some time now and I've visited a handful of public wikis. Lately there's been a spate of posts in the blog world about wikis. I've gathered up and made a first pass at organizing the ones I've encountered into what might be a reasonable order (based on my current level of ignorance).

One thing that did help me get a better grasp on wikis was listening to David Weinberger's talk at Seabury Western two weeks ago. David was drawing attention to the collaborative effort to produce the Wikipedia, which is essentially an open source model effort at creating an online encyclopedia. I had always been puzzled by the free-for-all editing capability inherent in the wiki technology. The analogy that finally made it clear for me was to a whiteboard in a conference room. Those frequently become shared design spaces as markers change hands. Wikis are the same idea moved to the web, which suggests to me that they are likely to be more useful inside organizations than elsewhere.

• Why Wiki Works - [link courtesy of Corante: Social Software, which has been following the Wiki discussion in depth]
• Why Wike Works/Not
• Why I Don't Like Wikis Email - [Also from Corante: Social Software] - Some interesting observations about visual presentation in wikis and email vs. better laid out web pages and how this interferes with the usefulness of wikis (at least on the public web).
• Email Doesn't Self-Organize - [from Ross Mayfield] - quoting Ward Cunningham

  Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes.

• The Cunningham quote comes from What's a Wiki? an overview article by Sebastian Rupley at Extreme Tech.
• Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool [via Sebastian Fiedler] - which appears to be a good overview with lots of links.
• From the other Seb in my aggregator (Sebastien Paquet at Seb's Open Research) comes Why Meatball Matters.

  Meatball Wiki is a little-known gem in the jungle of online community-related material on the Web. What is it about? A whole lot of fascinating stuff - in founder Sunir Shah's words:

  It philosophizes about the nature of hypertext, government, and identity. It talks about user interfaces, community building, and conflict resolution. But it also contains technical analyses of indexing schemes, wiki architecture, and inter-wiki protocol design.

  Sunir has recently been busy writing up a nice summary of what's significant about Meatball, as part of a work portfolio he's preparing to get into the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.

  I believe Sunir understands Wiki philosophy better than anyone else I know. His contributions to framing the concept and patterns of soft security that underlie the social architecture of Wikis are what made me an early convert to Meatball. If only Sunir had kept a blog instead of a home-brewed diary page, he'd surely be well-known in social software circles today.

  Hopefully, as the Wiki way slowly seeps into the mainstream Internet mentality, its perceived weirdness will subside and collaborative hypermedia communities like this one will get the recognition (and linkage) they deserve.

[McGee's Musings]

(SOURCE:"blts")-Yup the paradox of blogging. CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and all officers of public companies walk the fine line between private and public all the time. This is nothing new for them but this is new to the "Leaf Nodes" I think it's going to become increasingly normal for leaf nodes to have to do this finely balanced dance because transparent (both internally and externally) corporations will eventually rule the earth.
<quote>
As long as your company views your blogging as "you chatting with your neighbors on your personal time", you pose little risk. But the more that co-workers, CEOs, and so on are on-record as being cool with blogs, the more that blogs take on the timbre of being "official". The more "official" that blogs are, the more perceived risk the company takes on by allowing you to blog. And neither you nor your CEO is really keen to make things more complicated than they need to be. And this is why, IMO, you see most companies and employees today still dancing around the issue of employee blogs and seemingly settling on a "don't ask, don't tell, and please for the love of God don't do anything stupid" policy.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]