Sebastien Paquet in “A K-log is…” and lessons learned from a large-scale K-logging implementation:
Funny how so many people (myself included) have been talking about K-logs in the absence of an explicit definition. Yesterday, in my referers, I found a google search on the phrase “A K-log is”. Follow the link and see how pitiful the results are. But the last result, on the second page, is actually the best one, and helped me find a very interesting (but sadly, abandoned) weblog.
“A K-log is a knowledge-management weblog, where you use weblogging tools (like Blogger, Manila, or Radio) to write about your work, what happens, and what you know about. Presumably everybody else does too — or some reasonable portion of “everybody else”. Then you might use RSS to aggregate all this content, and you have the core of a knowledge management system.” writes Pete Harbeson.
Now that’s the kind of definition I like: to the point and understandable. I’m putting that in my knowledge repository.
OK. Here comes the part where you should pay attention, because this is the first time I’ve seen something like this since I’ve been following the K-log world, and it seem pretty relevant. Pete has experience with implementing k-logging in a large company. He says:
“It turns out that I’ve been building a system to do this for the past year or so. It’s not yet very distributed throughout my client’s company (yet), but we’ve reached about 1.7 million hits on a site that’s available only behind a corporate firewall. It’s a big company, but not that big. We’ve also found that other groups in the same company are doing similar things; this is clearly something an organization needs when it reaches a certain level of complexity.
I’ve learned a few lessons along the way, with (I’m sure) many more to come. They are:
- Posting the information is a small problem. Organizing and retrieving it is a big problem. We’re working on a shared ontology and RDF metadata.
- Most people don’t like to write. We’ve had a difficult time designing interfaces that encourage adding information instead of just reading.
- There’s no substitute for good, accessible writing. We have several people who write consistently for the system. The logs show that postings from one writer get far more attention and prompt far more linking than those from the other writers. “
All three points confirm the intuitions I had. The rest of his blog (“On explaining and explanations”) is also very interesting and well-written (Lilia, you should definitely have a look at it). I really hope Pete comes back to blogging soon. Looks like he’d have a lot to contribute.
Tags: blog research, blogs in businessArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/08/23.html#a161; comments are here.
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