Mathemagenic

This another slide of my presentation, but this one is probably the most important for me as this is the frame I use to think about weblogs in my PhD research trying to summarise (possible) uses/benefits of blogging for knowledge workers.

What's in it for me?

• Publishing
• Personal information management
  • Watching trends, staying updated (~'search' strategy)
  • Documenting experiences and ideas
  • Organising links, ideas and references
• Dialogue and networking
  • Getting feedback and evaluation of ideas, engaging in conversations
  • Establish contacts based on common interests
  • Emergent community
• Learning
  • As a result of:
    • staying updated 
    • articulation 
    • organising ideas
    • conversations 
    • being part of a community
  • As a side effect: writing, communication, search and technology skills

I just posted edited slides for my internal presentation on weblogs in business. I don't think that there is much new in it, may be just my way to explain weblogs :)

The presentation has two parts: explaining weblogs and discussion on weblogs from a business perspective. Below is a summary of some "business" slides.

What's in it for business? Releasing and "channelling" personal passion

• Personal nature of a weblog
  • Provides context to understand and interpret ideas
  • Supports trust, reputation and relation building
• Personal motivations to write in a public space make employee knowledge and aspirations visible, supporting articulation of ideas that are difficult to get other way
  • Experts and their expertise become more visible
  • Documented ideas can be collected, stored, processed and reused company-wide
• We tend to trust people more than we trust machines or organisations
  • Personal touch in customer-relation building
  • Authentic internal communication

Choices 

• Tools vs. voices
  • Weblog tools can be used to support organisational processes as any other tools, but then we risk loosing advantages of weblogs as personal voices
  • Weblogs can be passionate uncensored voices of employees, but then we risk information leaking and creating "wrong" image
• Business vs. individual
  • If we impose organisational goals and rules weblogs are not likely to work
  • How can we benefit from weblogs if we don't?
• How do we balance organic and personal nature of weblogs and business goals and needs?

Specific questions

• Intranet weblogs
  • If there is enough weblog readers to motivate weblog writers?
  • How weblogs integrate with everyday practices and existing tools?
• Public weblogs
  • Corporate weblogs=no personal voice: Will they be trusted?
  • Personal "work-related" weblogs
    • Are they censored? What do we loose then?
    • How do we insure that no competitive knowledge is leaking?
    • Should they be affiliated with a company? Hosted on a company's web-site?
    • Who has copyrights?
• Business model? Legal issues? Technology choices?