Jim McGee offers a summary of posts that focus on uses of blogs for knowledge management, both to capture and share knowledge. I found them through Will Richardson’s Webblogg-ed. They are a year old but they are still quite interesting.
I liked Dave Pollard’s - The Weblog as Filing Cabinet. This is one of the major uses for my blog. In many large organizations there is an official enterprise KM system. But the good stuff is on the individual hard drives of the thousands of employees. These thousands of individual KM systems are not accessible to others, except through person to person request. They are also in various states of organization or disorganization. Frequently, you cannot find stuff in your own hard drive, unless you are more organized than me.
In that context I used my Notes archive as a place to store documents from others, (attached to the original e-mail) that I did not plan to edit so I could have the e-mail as the annotation. Those documents that I edited, I moved to local file storage. This was not very efficient.
Now, I am using my blog for many notes and associated documents (mostly annotated) and links. I frequently go back to it for my own research. Even if no one read my blog, it would still be worth the effort for this personal KM reason. I also can send a link to others to share information and they have the context.
There remains a use for local file storage for certain documents, especially since many blogs do not provide storage for files such as PDFs. For that reason, the nice people at KM Review where kind enough to set up a separate url to link to copies of the stuff I write for them. Now, I can go there for copies of my KM Review writings and share them with others through this means. I am adding more to it this summer and can put annotations of these documents with links as they appear.
I think this limitation (of the url requirement) will be overcome in some manner and we are in a transition state As Dave Pollard writes, “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.”
I especially like his close:
“And I'm old enough to remember managers saying that getting executives to make their own phone calls (instead of using secretaries) was inefficient, that e-mail was a time-waster that executives would never use, and that voice-mail was simply an invitation to endless telephone tag. So although it's not going to be easy, I think blogs might just be ready for business prime time.”
There were also those who resisted cars as impractical and said the horse would never be replaced. My grandfather was one with these doubts. He was a country doctor in Oklahoma Territory and bought the first car in the immediate area. The sales guy came and lived on the farm for two weeks to teach him the new technology. When he went on rounds, he would often be gone for 30 hours or more. When he drove the horse buggy, he could throw the reins over the side after the last round and sleep, as the horses knew the way home. Once he started using the car he kept falling asleep at the wheel. Fortunately, the roads were aligned to the old technology and were wagon ruts. The car would slip off the ruts and stall, leaving him unhurt. He was about to give up on the car, when he taught his young daughter to drive for him so he could sleep.
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