I think I'm homing in on one very important community.  The kloggers.  I hear a lot of talk of tech blogging and war blogging.  I don't think I'm either of those.

But blogging as an aspect of KM?  That I can relate to.  I'm not alone in thinking that KM and notions of community are deeply intertwined.  The success or failure of KM projects are, I guess, rarely failures of technology.  The fail on the soft issues, they fail because they don't engage the communities, on whose efforts their success depends.

So for now, I'll consider myself a proto-klogger and see where I go from here.

European Digital Rights launches. Civil rights campaign for the Net [The Register]

Worth knowing about.

I've a feeling we're all going to have to learn how to protect our freedoms before this decade is out.

There are a lot of great ideas going around and I look forward to the tools and discussion this will generate. However, I think of this issue in a slightly different way, while linking neighborhoods, syndications, etc. all highlight the mechanical connections between related weblogs what interests me most are the conceptual threads of conversation that cross through many weblogs. This means extracting the relevant portions of many conversations, organizing the responses, editorializing the content, etc.

Everyone talks about wanting to create communities, but it seems most of the proposals really address how to create collections. To me, a community is about discourse and participation, not just relationships. I don't only want to know who's like me, I want to interact with them to create great ideas and products drawing from our shared experience. What's more, I want to filter or focus on real analysis, not just the link parroting that Blogdex and Daypop tend to highlight.

[rjsjr :: Robert J. Seymour, Jr.]

Robert is a new voice to me but I'm glad to have met him as he has a great perspective.

So far I've been concentrating on the tools to collect together the members of a disparate community in a dynamic fashion (it's the problem that drove me to think about this in the first place) but Robert highlights that the business of community is really about discourse and exchange.

Part of the BlogPlex manifesto (in progress) is that a BlogPlexa should actually be able to offer you useful services.  The first service being of course, that it introduces you to other people in a wider community.  Hopefully we can

I think we need a discussion about the services/facilities that we can provide to people.

If chat, threaded discussion and file sharing were not important to people I think that newer mediums such as Groove and organic mediums such as SlashDot wouldn't have them at their heart.

However I think we also need new tools that fit the medium of blogging.  In this message on k-log Phil Wainewright discusses the possibility of shared aggregators:

"The key point I'm making is one that I feel would be of immense value in
networks of k-logs: being able to read an RSS feed of someone else's RSS
aggregation:"

I agree and I think it would be interesting to consider how a BlogPlex might offer a shared (& digested) aggregation of the RSS feeds of each the current membership (remember it's dynamic).

I am familiar with the Livelink knowledge management system from OpenText having implemented it a few years back.  They already generate feeds of both news (in the conventional sense of bulletins) and also "what's changed" reports.  Both of these could be easily exported from the system in RSS format making it easy for project users with an aggregator to keep up with current events in their project.

As someone on the K-Logs mailing list pointed out it would be quite easy to make blogging part of your "project journal" posting items aggregated from project applications and sources and appending your own ideas, notes and comments (to be aggregated and read by others).

Additionally if a tool such as Livelink was capable of reading and indexing an RSS feed it could then close the loop and bring these "project journals" back into the system for archiving and searching by the wider audience.

Just a bit of speculation....

Lots of good info on the K-Log group. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» I've just subscribed to this.  Looks like a very interesting group.  They bring a different perspective to the idea of community that is probably more in line with the "Communities of Practice" philosophy.  Looking at weblogging as a tool for enabling projects and other focused groups.