It's simply about power. I keep reading comments on the upcoming war. It's about oil. It's about freedom. It's about terror. It's about a nasty dictator. It's about business. It's going to be easy to win. Unfortunately I'm now convinced that it's somehow much simpler than that. It's about power. And about lack of power. The U.S. feel that they can establish a new kind of imperialism to the world and that all existing international organizations, leftovers from the last century, are not needed anymore (if not to clean things up once they're done). Only Europe, as a friend od the US, could have opposed this imperialism. But we failed. Right after September 11 the US were leading the largest coalition of countries ever seen. Now, whatever the US administration is saying, they are going to a war alone. Even in the countries officially supporting this war (Italy is one of them), very large majorities of the population are strongly against it. There's something terribly wrong about all this. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

What do weblogs do?.

from Curiouser and curiouser!:

I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

I agree, but with a twist... what weblogs have done is help the group of enthusiastic early adopters become self aware, to recognize themselves as a group, and to help make strong social connections between people of like minds.  This is very valuable and I hope we can find other ways to partition the blogsphere so that, as other social networks come online (lawyers, doctors, teachers) they too can find themselves and be stronger for having done so.

[Micah's Weblog]

I guess I was a bit too quick there...  I agree with Micah that weblogs have offered an improved medium for people who want to communicate with each other to do so.  So yes, I was wrong, they do do something.

But what I'm trying to say is that enabling early adopters to communicate better isn't really doing what I'm interested in.  My take on the history of KM and it's technologies is that the early adopters are not a good predictor for how the rest of the wave will use a technology and I'm not sure that the early or late majorities, within organisations, will take to this medium as the early adopters do.

What weblogs have done is provide an easy lowering of the technological barrier.  But this is just allowing what I consider the real, social, problems to rise to the surface.  Of course this still does something good.  Exposing these problems is the first step towards solving them.  In my own journey I think I started with a view that the problems were mostly technological -- get the technology right and the problem is solved.  I don't think like that at all any more.