j’s scratchpad

Blogs and Knowledge Management
Jessica Baumgart
ACRL ITIG
Friday, December 9, 2005

Raise your hand if you

[About twenty people were in the audience]

• Blog [about 7 hands]

• Manage knowledge [about 10 different hands]
• Use a blog or blogs to manage knowledge [about 2 different hands and one hand of a blogger]
• Use XML (RSS, Atom, podcasts, etc.) feeds [about 3 hands]
• Use feeds as a way to manage knowledge [no hands]

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is

• The storing and organizing of data so it is available for later use

• The sharing of information with others
• Managing knowledge in people’s heads
• It can be personal, as well as something done for others.

Why use a blog to manage knowledge?

Blogs Features Good for KM

• Easy to use

• Instant archive
• Many have nice navigation features
  • Browse by date

  • Categories
  • Search

More Blog Features
Good for KM

• Facilitate sharing

• Can link similar items together
• Easy to keep found things found
• Tagging

Drawbacks

• Limited export options

• Content locked in to proprietary software
• Software may not be completely ideal for the data
• Blogs may be a hard sell to others

Tour of KM Features on Blogs

• Shimonolog for the category tree: http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/index?…

• j’s scratchpad for departments, calendar, search: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/
• ASIST K-Blog Panel for links to previous posts and archives: http://asistkblogpanel.blogspot.com/

Blogs Used for KM

• EMU Reference Desk: Notes & Queries: http://emuref.blogspot.com/

• Park Library News: http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/news.htm…
• ACRLog: http://www.acrlblog.org/
• Sun Microsystem’s Blogs: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/main.do

Articles

• Martin Roell’s Distributed KM - Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing: http://www.roell.net/publikationen/distr…

• Lilia Effimova’s Legitimised Theft: Distributed Apprenticeship in Weblog Networks: https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/Fil…
• Torill Mortenson and Jill Walker’s Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool: http://www.intermedia.uio.no/konferanser…

Feeds and KM

• Route feeds to different places

• Some aggregators ease organization of feeds

Drawbacks to using Feeds for KM

• Feeds are fluid

• May be tricky to set up a group aggregator
• Aggregators may not keep data

Web-based Aggregators

• Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/

• Manila: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/ag…

Desktop Aggregators

• NetNewsWire: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

• Pluck: http://www.pluck.com/
• BlogBridge: http://www.blogbridge.com/

K-Logs

• Portals and KM by Bill Ives: http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_…

• Knowledge Jolt with Jack: http://blog.jackvinson.com/
• Mathemagenic by Lilia Effimova: http://excitedutterances.blogspot.com/

• Babson Knowledge: http://www.babsonknowledge.org/

KM is about People

As Christina Pikas concluded in her presentation at the 2004 ASIST Annual Meeting, KM is about the practitioner, not the tool.

My notes from Megan Fox’ presentation

My initial post of the program

A report of the program