Blog Thoughts from Braintrust 2005

Every time I get to speak on a topic, I hope to learn a few new things, both in the preparation, but more so from interacting with the audience. Here is the some of the new stuff I gained from my talk last week at the Braintrust Conference in San Francisco. IN th ediscussion I summarized the research from the interviews for the our business blog book. There seems to be increasing recognition of blogs. This time everyone had heard of them, but then why would they come to the session of blogs. Especially, since the session next door was covering rocket scientists, or how NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used KM. I was pleased that there was still a good crowd with this competition on the last session of the last day of the conference. More interestingly about half of the audience read blogs and about twenty percent write blogs. These numbers are up from my last talks in Boston and New York.

First, I realized that it might be good to offer a definition of what is unique about blogs. So here are the bullet points. Let me know if you agree. Blogs:

• Provide simple web pages designed for frequent updates

• Require little or no coding, require little or no cost – eliminating entry barriers

• Each entry, or post, has its own unique internet address

• Posts can contain links to other posts or sites

• Blogs can accommodate comments

• Posts are arranged in reverse chronological order

• Posts are placed in searchable archive that can have categories for browsing

• You can subscribe to updates through RSS

• Usually written from personal or individual perspective

• Accessible nature promotes transparency

• It is only the beginning – new features constantly emerging (e.g. audio, video)

Secondly, I think that one of the killer apps for blogs is personal knowledge management. I have talked about this before on several occasions but being at a KM conference really brought it home. Blogs can supply the missing context the makes KM meaningful. To supplement the above list, I showed a sample blog entry: in this case a summary and link to an article by Valdis Krebs with arrows and tag lines to the different parts. I realized it would make a great entry in an enterprise KM system as all the context to make the content meaningful was in the post and much of it created automatically by the blog software (e.g., date, links, comments, etc.). Also, you always get two for one. You get external communication with knowledge management or knowledge management with external communication. There is a continuum that is included in every blog post.

From an individual perspective blogs offer:

Creation – publishing content within a personal voice
Collection – managing personal content in a searchable archive
Context – applying commentary to content you manage

From a networking perspective blogs provide:

Connection – discovering others with your interests
Conversation – engaging in dialogs on an organizational or global basis
Community – building networks around shared themes
Collaboration – finding new business partners

Comments

[John T. Maloney]

Hi --

Blogs @ college.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7153572/

Cordially,

John

http://kmblogs.com/public

[John T. Maloney]

B -

Allow me to contribute to your carefully construed cannonical constructs by adding 'Comments' to the conversation:

Creation – publishing content within a personal voice
Collection – managing personal content in a searchable archive
Context – applying commentary to content you manage
Connection – discovering others with your interests
Conversation – engaging in dialogs on an organizational or global basis
Community – building networks around shared themes
Collaboration – finding new business partners

Comments - Allow annotation from all readers

Cordially,

-jtm