An ecosystem of knowledge

Jon Husband dragged up an older post about blogging, that concludes:

Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this “body of knowledge” and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

Advocates of blogging know how valuable our blog knowledge base is for our work and learning. I have over a thousand posts, several thousand comments and connections with hundreds of other blogs on a wide variety of subjects of professional interest ranging from schooling to the semantic web. The value of having a blog, reading other blogs, using a feed aggregator and making my bookmarks social and searchable has very tangible benefits. I’m actually more productive.

In spite of the obvious benefits, it’s still a challenge to get adoption of these tools and techniques with non-blogging professionals. Unfortunately, it takes more than a few blog posts to see how these can become a knowledge base or how they enable you to connect with others. The benefits take a while before they’re “obvious”.

After my first workshops on Personal Knowledge Management (using social bookmarks, aggregators, blogs etc., to make sense of digital information flows) I saw about 1% of participants actually try to adopt some of these tools. Perhaps three or four tools are too much at once, and any move to co-creating knowledge should start with the basics and only proceed to the next tool once there is a level of comfort. Here’s an idea/suggestion:

Move your Bookmarks online using Social Bookmarks and some common tags for your group/team (1 – 3 months).
Set up an aggregator for each worker, with a few pre-selected sites and have people Tag any posts of interest, using the Social Bookmarks that they now use (3 – 6 months).
Create company or team multi-user blog focused on one area of interest or practice. Something like external training activities may be a safe place to start, with comments on how pertinent these were for those who attended (give it a year).

3 thoughts on “An ecosystem of knowledge”

One of the challenges I have getting non-bloggers to understand the value of blogging is that all they ever hear about blogging in the mainstream media is either about “professional” bloggers, who use blogs as a substitute for old-style columns, or about the attention-seeking sensationalist who uses blogs to get their radical message out for next to free.

Very rarely, if at all, are the values of blogs for the selfish (used in a non-pejorative way here) benefits that you describe here mentioned in the same sentence as “blogger.”