Somebody's listening. The Ivey Business Journal is launching a free and open online version of the 70 year old print publication. "The online publication will not charge readers and will not accept advertising. 'That's not part of our current business plan,' said the publisher, Edmund T. Pearce. 'It doesn't fit with what we are trying to do. We're not interested in making money, although by switching to online-only, we'll save about $300,000 a year in print-production costs.'" [OLDaily]
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.
Rings well with my earlier post on information overload in research. A domain expert can provide incredible additional value to his community or organization with little effort, simply by pointing to what blips on his radar and appending a comment or two.
Jonathon is a kid that used his access to information networks to play the market by Wall Street's rules. He analyzed stocks, took a position in those stocks, and published his analysis with enthusiasm on message boards and on his personal website. He made nearly a million $ doing this.
[...]Think of all the professions that make money via the mystique of access to privileged information. What happens when the walls and barriers to that information fall? What happens when individuals can publish what they find, with analysis, to a global audience? What if people find this low cost advice and information actually is good or at least 90% of what they need? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
The question is worth asking. Knowledge is power, isn't it?. And guess what, the kids are going to beat us to it when the walls fall. Then they'll be in charge.
The other side of greener grass. [...] You may think reading about lawn care is about as interesting as watching grass grow, but come with me on a short (barefoot) stroll through the geeky side of organic turf maintenance... [kuro5hin.org]
A very informative article written from a pragmatic standpoint.
Shirky on Community.Clay Shirky's written another sterling essay, this time on the nature of communities vs/ broadcasting and why only fools think they're going to build a really cool community and everyone will come and like hang out and then they'll be like all popular and everything. [JOHO the Blog]
Clay's got it right. A few quotes (emphasis mine):
The order of things in broadcast is "filter, then publish." The order in communities is "publish, then filter." [...]
Media people often criticize the content on the internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality -- bad writing, ugly images, poor design. What they fail to understand is that the internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance. Google edits web pages by aggregating user judgment about them, Slashdot edits posts by letting readers rate them, and of course users edit all the time, by choosing what (and who) to read.
Note that this new kind of post-publication filtering wasn't at all possible back when broadcasting was expensive. It's a very significant change that we've only begun assimilating.
[...] To create an environment conducive to real community, you will have to operate more like a gardener than an architect.
But, truth be told, architects need to operate more like gardeners, too, as Christopher Alexander so eloquently argues in his books.
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