Mathemagenic

[after last two posts] What do you need to connect KM research and practice? Get more KM researchers blogging about their work. Get them writing on-line in small pieces and easy-to-read language.

I'm close to consider this as my personal challenge :)

Italian research project: enabling distributed and autonomous management of knowledge

The aim of this project is to develop research in information technology and software tools that support the Distributed and Autonomous Management of Knowledge. The goal will be achieved by:

• structuring knowledge in different "contexts", that allow each different organization component to create, use and update autonomously its view on data encoding knowledge;
• providing a set of techniques allowing for the interoperability and the interaction among different contexts;
• implementing the techniques on an experimental platform supporting distributed and autonomous knowledge management;
• experimentally evaluating with significant business cases the techniques for creating, codifying and exchanging knowledge.

While it may sound too traditional or technical, the ideas behind are really in-line blogging as an emerging network of independent knowledge nodes. Check this site for project publications, related works and PhD positions (e.g. social models for distributed networks  :)

I'm reading a couple of papers from there, so more will follow.

Recent editorial of Information Research journal (bold is mine):

A couple of issues ago I asked readers whether or not they knew of any work on the 'half-life' of electronic journal papers versus that of print journal papers. I received a helpful e-mail message pointing me to Steve Lawrence's paper in Nature in 2001. Lawrence looked at papers in computer science and related fields and found:

...a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online, in computer science. The mean number of citations to offline articles is 2.74, and the mean number of citations to online articles is 7.03, an increase of 157%.

The crafty author, then, can pretty well ensure some take up by cultivating a friendly blogger and letting him/her know when a paper has been published - off round the network the news goes and, before you know it, you are on the best-seller list.

And finally:

Perhaps we'll see the day when a Blog Impact Factor (BIF) is required of all candidates for tenure or promotion.

For an interesting history of blogs, read Rebecca Blood, and if anyone has a paper on the subject in preparation, let me know.

See also for a list of most popular articles.

Meet the B-Blog [via Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

B-blogs are highly strategic, here-to-stay desktop tools that can strengthen relationships, share knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding. Think of the potential for your e-newsletter strategies:

• Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog, extending life and creating a massive conversation.
  
• You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get true, personal opinions on your products and services.
  
• Company experts can start a blog and become industry experts, helping your company edge out competition and, through this interactive forum, draw customers into another exchange of information and thoughts.
  
• The beauty of this interplay is you can layer your blog with editorial controls!

A follow up for Manila for school districts and Russian dreams

Actually I am not sure if Frontier / Manila can handle foreign language characters. Does anybody know?[Seblogging News]

Something I checked with try-out version of Manila: it can't handle Cyrillic. I expect that this in encoding problem, so those languages that use non-default encoding are most likely not supported.

Another addition: News aggregator in Radio doesn't support RSS feeds in Cyrillic (they get encoded into something not readable, the same as posts in Radio/Manila).

So, does UserLand want markets in countries writing differently?