Today I’ll be talking to social software evangelists at IBM about some of the insights about blogging from my PhD research. While there are many things that I would love to fit in there, most of the presentation is focused on “what’s in it for me?” questions, explaining how blogging helps to develop ideas and how it supports personal networking, with bits at the end about facilitating blogging.

Slides are below, but for those of you who prefer reading instead there are also pointers for blogposts and publications at the end of this post.  Some of them are also linked from the presentation notes.

[Slides will be here as soon as Slideshare starts cooperating :) At the mean time you can download them here or here.]

• What’s in it for me?
  • Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas
  • Blogging for knowledge workers: personal networking
    • In-depth on blog networking study: interview summaries and findings in detail
• Blogging in business settings
  • Key PhD findings – PhD conclusions: blogging practices of knowledge workers (also: dissertation, pp.207-216)
  • What pragmatists might want to know about blogging (dissertation, pp.228-231)
  • Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments (dissertation, pp.231-233)
  • More specific examples about integrating blogging and work from the Microsoft study – Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2006). Microsoft and the art of blogging. Inside Knowledge, 10(4), 24-27.
• Things relevant to that came up in the discussion (will edit later!)
  • Re: information overload – Dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it brings
  • Blogging for myself or for others?
  • Author-centred vs. topic-centred blogging
  • Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging
  • Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: affiliation and attribution
  • Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers

• PhD blogging and paper writing
• From creative mess to products (blogs and wikis for thinking)
• How to become part of a blogging ecosystem?

I gave a presentation today at work to give an overview of my PhD research and discuss how the results might be useful in practice. It’s on Slideshare: Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers

Most of what I was talking about is in the weblog:

• Slides 2-3: An overview of the PhD approach
• Slides 4-8: What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Slides 9-12: Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments with PhD cover art story as an metaphor for slide 9 (the photo on it is A Topography of Woman by Arlee Barr).

Slides 4-12 are prescriptive. If you want something a bit more academic you can find an overview of the dissertation findings at PhD conclusions: blogging practices of knowledge workers.

• Stretching academic conventions, me-as-an-author and rare rushes
• PhD is done
• In Full Flow: my PhD and more stories about passion at work

Promised to blog this piece from the dissertation in February (together with What pragmatists might want to know about blogging), but wasn’t happy with it. Still not happy, but here it is (in a slightly updated form).

***

From an organisational perspective, weblogs provide a people-driven way to share knowledge and to develop ideas. For example, weblogs are useful for:

• Tapping into the undocumented. Blogging provides a low-threshold opportunity to write down ideas not related to current deadlines, but important to prepare for the future. Bloggers might use their weblogs to document their experiences and lessons learnt – those that escape official reports, but are usually very useful for others to learn from.
• Making expertise visible. Weblogs provide traces of personal expertise and practices. Making it visible helps to get an idea of who knows what, which is a starting point for collaboration. Reading a weblog written by experts allows others to gain insight about their ways of thinking and working, and to learn from them.
• Unexpected connections. Weblogs support serendipity – finding ideas that fuel innovation and interesting people to talk to or to combine efforts for a shared goal.

What is essential for facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments?

Putting an individual in control

Blogging works best when it is driven by personal interests and passions. Start by helping potential bloggers to find uses of a weblog personally meaningful for them in the long term – these are essential to sustain blogging while social effects of it emerge. Impose as few rules as possible: freedom and a sense of personal ownership of a weblog are important to be able to find those personally meaningful uses. Personal investment in blogging might create tensions with organisational norms and practices; however, this is the price that must be paid: be prepared to relax rules and embrace ambiguity. Avoid the temptation to measure the business effects of blogging: most of the added value of it is in enabling work rather than doing it, which is difficult to measure explicitly.

Supporting an ecosystem

Blogging is about microcontent – publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level – ecosystems between blog posts and connections between their authors are more interesting and more important. When thinking about introducing weblogs in particular settings, it is essential to create conditions for weblog ecosystems, rather than only supporting individual weblogs. The essential ingredients for this are:

• Readership. Introduce newsfeeds and newsreaders as part of the practices of working with information. Make sure that intranet weblogs are accessible via those.
• Scale. Facilitate the broadest possible reach. Communicate clearly that blogging is supported in your organisation. If there are things that should not be blogged in public, make those exceptions known.
• Visibility. The infrastructure that supports visibility of public weblogs (weblog indexes, aggregators, search engines) has to be recreated if weblogs are used within an organisation.
• Feedback. Bloggers need tools to monitor the interest and reactions of others to their writing, which are often missing when weblog infrastructure is provided by an organisation. Statistics about references and traffic should be made available to the weblog authors.

Making the best out of it

Although blogging looks simple, in practice it requires navigating a number of challenges. To help potential bloggers with those it is necessary to address several points:

• Some uses of weblogs are not obvious. Make sure that unexpected practices of blogging that are useful in relation to work are shared between bloggers.
• Think of blogging as a new tool for old tasks. For example, why not start a weblog for trip reports that are currently lost in separate documents? Lab notebooks, course notes, progress reports, customer communication and many other activities could be shared more easily via weblogs.
• Learn about the risks and benefits of blogging. Discuss those with the people in your organisation and then trust them in knowing what not to talk about in public.
• Provide blogging tools if you can, give basic how-to training or, better, ask a few experienced bloggers to coach newcomers by giving them time and recognition.
• Make it part of “work as usual” – make sure that spending some time on blogging is perceived as normal, account for it in performance appraisals, integrate it with other technologies in your organisation.

If people in your organisation are already blogging, is there still something to do? Definitely: help others to navigate the sea of blog entries, support cross-fertilisation, find ways to reuse quality entries and recognise good authors. This could include, for example, making sure that employee weblogs (and also external ones) are indexed by an intranet search engine or creating a “best of blogs” column in your monthly newsletter. Blogging is best driven by personal passions, but once there, weblogs need to be embedded into organisational practices to bring business value.

• Walking on ice
• Having two PhD supervisors
• Trip report (1): blogs and wikis implemented

After being in a solitary confinement for so long (this is how working on a PhD feels) I’m happy to see that what others find useful what I wrote, especially given my fears that for many of my peers the findings would look like yesterday’s news. I feel like sharing several other pieces from the final chapter of my dissertation, especially those where I talk about implications for practice, but can’t get rid of a nagging feeling that I’m killing publication opportunities with that.

I know that sharing openly brings all kinds of good things back, but next to it there is a feeling that a successful professional career requires more than coming up with good ideas and sharing them. I also believe that performance is counter-productive, that doing things in the way that reflects personal values brings people and projects that reflect those values. So, I will probably end up blogging all those things I’m not sure about, but I would also love to hear what do you think about it.

(Btw, any suggestions of what might be interesting to publish and where are very welcome :)

• Uses/benefits of blogging for knowledge workers
• Weblogs are not about informing, they are about engaging
• K-collector links and questions

Since it’s something people ask from me once in a while – a list of research papers on business/corporate/employee blogging (primarily those where actual uses of weblogs are studied), abstracts included.

• When known the company studied is in [] in front of the reference.
• For an overview of more practitioner-oriented publications check Lockwood & Dennis (2008) below.
• Most of the papers are free online, google the title if you don’t have an access to the scientific databases.

Suggestions of what is missing are welcome, I will try to update this list, but no promises.

***

[HP] Brzozowski, M. J. & Yardi, S. (2008). Revealing the long tail in office conversations. In CSCW 2008 Workshop on Enterprise 3.0.

Blogs, wikis, and forums can break down geographic distances, workgroup boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in an organization. While these tools significantly lower the barriers to producing content, employees may perceive there to be little incentive to invest their own time in providing this content for public consumption. We found that increasing visibility often motivated employees to participate and contribute content. Employees were motivated by the opportunity for attention, and the ways in which social media tools enabled or hindered this opportunity influenced the way it was used. In this paper, we describe the design and use of the internal social media platforms at Hewlett-Packard and examine the ways that employees used these tools. Specifically, we explore ways in which designing for increased visibility and providing opportunities for recognition improve the ways that social media platforms can be used in organizations.

Dwyer, P. (2007). Building Trust with Corporate Blogs. In Proceedings of International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’07).

The personal relationships that companies once had with customers degenerated into the cold automaticity of datagathering with the widespread adoption of management information systems. By restoring a human face to a company’s self-presentation, blogging has been heralded as a paradigm shift in the way companies interact with customers. This study tests a model relating the content of an author’s blog posts to readers’ responses. It suggests that companies can use blogging to complement customer relationship management processes to the extent their customers exhibit an organic desire to commune by combining provocative informational content with expressions of benevolent intent. Such consumers respond well to these overtures, showing evidence of increased subject-matter involvement, liking and trust. The study also proposes a way to measure diversity of thought in reader comments to guard against being unduly swayed by a vocal minority.

[Microsoft] Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (p. 86). IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.159

Editors, email, and instant messaging were first widely used by students who later brought knowledge of their uses and effective practices into workplaces. Weblogs may make such a transition more quickly. We present a study of emergent blogging practices in a corporate setting. We attended meetings, read email, documents, and weblogs, and interviewed 38 people- bloggers, infrastructure administrators, attorneys, public relations specialists, and executives. We found an experimental, rapidly-evolving terrain marked by growing sophistication about balancing personal, team, and corporate incentives and issues.

[IBM] Huh, J., Jones, L., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W. A., Bellamy, R. K. E., & Thomas, J. C. (2007). BlogCentral: the role of internal blogs at work. In CHI ’07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2447-2452). San Jose, CA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1240866.1241022

This paper describes a preliminary investigation into an internal corporate blogging community called BlogCentral. We conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen active bloggers to investigate the role of blogging and its effects on work processes. Our findings suggest that BlogCentral facilitates access to tacit knowledge and resources vetted by experts, and, most importantly, contributes to the emergence of collaboration across a broad range of communities within the enterprise.

[IBM] Jackson, A., Jates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (2007). Corporate Blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk. In Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (p. 80). IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.155

Blogging has grown exponentially on the Internet; however, the role of blogs within the enterprise remains ambiguous. Why and how do individuals use internal corporate blogs? What results do both individuals and the corporation realize from internal blogs? Our exploratory study of a large global IT corporation’s internal blogging system analyzed usage statistics, interviews, and the results of an anonymous, Web-based survey. We found that benefits to users were social as well as informational, and that connecting with their community was an important value sought by all types of users. Heavy users of the system realized the greatest benefits, but they also constituted the core of an online community that provided important benefits to medium users as well.

[Microsoft] Kaiser, S., Müller-Seitz, G., Lopes, M. P., & Pina e Cunha, M. (2007). Weblog-technology as a trigger to elicit passion for knowledge. Organization, 14(3), 391-412. doi:10.1177/1350508407076151

The practice of Weblogging as a new social and technological phenomenon in society and business is gaining a growing number of supporters. In short, a Weblog is a website where individual thoughts are publicly displayed in the form of a diary. In this paper, we seek to illustrate the impact of Weblog technology on people’s passion for knowledge. We start from the assumption that successful knowledge management requires the engagement of people in knowledge-related practices. We introduce a famous agglomeration of Weblogs that deal with the development of a commercial software. Based on an exploratory study, we suggest that the specific features and character of this novel technology have an impact upon the passion for voluntary knowledge work, which is triggered by experiences of flow states, as well as extrinsic stimuli.

[Microsoft] Kelleher, T. & Miller, B. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2).

This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organization’s “conversational human voice” to be greater than participants who were assigned to read traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversational human voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantly with relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).

[IBM] Kolari, P., Finin, T., Lyons, K., Yesha, Y., Yesha, Y., Perelgut, S. et al. (2007). On the structure, properties and utility of internal corporate blogs. In Proceedings of International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’07).

Weblogs, or blogs are radically changing the face of communication within enterprises. While at the minimum blogs empower employees to publicly voice opinion and share expertise, collectively they improve collaboration and enable internal business intelligence. Though the power of blogs within organizations is well accepted, their properties, structure and utility has not yet been formally analyzed. In this paper, we study the use of blogs within a large corporation to reveal some of the interesting characteristics. We propose new techniques to model the reach and impact of posts using the corporate hierarchy. We discuss how such a technique can feed into tools that identify the reach of blog posts, and the emergence of trends and experts within an organization.

Lockwood, N. S. & Dennis, A. R. (2008). Exploring the corporate blogosphere: A taxonomy for research and practice. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (p. 149). IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2008.163

Corporate blogs have received a great deal of attention recently in the practitioner literature and are gaining interest in the research community, although little is known about the uses and impacts of these blogs. We develop a taxonomy to describe and compare corporate blogs, and then apply it to companies listed on the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600 indices. Our findings revealed several main clusters of blogs that are currently being hosted by corporations as well as a few uncommon types of blogs that may represent emerging trends in corporate blogging practices. These findings also suggest that our taxonomy is indeed able to differentiate among different types of corporate blogs and will be a useful tool for future research.

Stocker, A. & Tochtermann, K. (2008). Investigating Weblogs in Small and Medium Enterprises: An Exploratory Case Study. In D. Flejter, S. Grzonkowski, T. Kaczmarek, M. Kowalkiewicz, T. Nagle, & J. Parkes (Eds.), BIS 2008 Workshops Proceedings (pp. 95-107).

Contrary to a Wiki where the opinion of the individual user disappears in favor of a more impartial ‘collective intelligence’, a weblog is author-centered, expressing the author’s subjective point of view. This particular property of weblogs played a fundamental role for the popularity weblogs gained for making implicit knowledge explicit in an unsolicited, self-organized way. However, empirical studies from academia exploring internal corporate weblogs remain scarce, especially when they focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which make up the majority of all enterprises worldwide. To counteract this lack of research, we investigate an internal corporate weblog in an ICT SME from a knowledge management perspective. We derive both research questions and hypotheses to test within future studies. Furthermore, we consider already gained findings from corporate weblog research and investigate their immediate applicability in the context of SMEs.

[HP] Yardi, S., Golder, S., & Brzozowski, M. J. (2008). The pulse of the corporate blogosphere. In Conference Supplement of CSCW 2008.

Blogging at work has gained considerable interest in the knowledge management community. It is not clear, however, how much of work blogging is related to work versus social, or when work blogging takes place. In this poster, we present results from our examination of the temporal aspects of blogging within a large internal corporate blogging community. We compared our findings to similar analyses of employee email use and to college student Facebook use. We found that blog posting is temporally similar to email, while blog reading is more similar to Facebook messaging. Our results suggest that participation is both work-related and social, indicating a desire to connect to coworkers at multiple levels.

• On book writing
• Walking on ice
• BlogWalk 4.0

It’s an interesting intersection of themes and conversations. I was writing a piece on how blogging might not work in an environment where the risks of sharing half-baked ideas in public outweigh the benefits of doing so, when I realised that at the end it’s not the environment, but the way one chooses to deal with it.

An academic environment is a good example: it is makes a lot of sense not to blog work in progress, since it is exposes raw ideas to potential competition and creates all kinds of issues with publishing finished work. Just as I blogged a piece from PhD chapter on attribution and ownership, Carol reminded me of possible implications of doing so (via Facebook wall, so I’m not sure how to permalink):

saw your status update about you wondering whether to blog your PhD chapters… I personally would recommend publishing in a journal first, you could then blog about your journal paper after. But if you publish your chapters on the blog first, you may automatically restrict yourself from publishing in journals where often you are required to not have published the work anywhere in the public domain first…. it’s a copyright issue…

Well, while being well aware of the risks of doing so I still want to do it. Partly because given my longer-term plans I can afford ignoring potential problems with a journal publication, but mainly because I find more important that the results of my work reach people than that they do it in a particular format.

An environment might provide favourable (or not) conditions for blogging, but I guess the real issue is how far blogging resonates with personal values and ability/readiness to act on those values given the circumstances.

• Can’t find ‘John Patrick on Weblogs’ article
• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 3
• What to publish to start collaboration

I’m sitting on the fence in respect to deciding how to share things I write for my dissertation: while I plan to share draft chapters online anyway, I feel that it makes even more sense to share parts of it as blogposts (it’s easier to digest in smaller bites and there is no need to wait till I get chapter drafts readable as a whole). I guess I’ll just share and let you decide if you want it in pieces now or as a big chunks of text later :)

This piece is on attribution and ownership issues around ideas articulated in a weblog. I probably should add something on the blog comment ownership (see also comment with more links by Stephanie Booth – in fact she should be credited as someone who brought this stream of discussion to my attention).

***

“Aren’t you afraid to write about work in progress? What if someone takes your ideas and publishes them before you do?” There countless times I had to answer those questions when talking about blogging about my research. In those situations I usually talk about the benefits of the fast feedback, opportunities for others to learn about my work without waiting for months (or years) and having access to costly academic databases, and the fact that “my ideas are there with the time stamp on them”, so there is an evidence of my authorship.

However, the issue is more complex than that. Although, according to the unwritten rules of blogging, attributing those who influenced a weblog post is essential, it is not always easy. In the following comment to one of my blog posts Alex Halavais discusses the challenges of attribution:

This is, arguably, easy enough with words, but much harder when it comes to ideas. I came up with some thoughts that, I will assert, are my own. Someone noted that these followed closely some things you had written about in your blog. I am a regular reader of your blog, and I think it is likely that these entries–at the very least–prompted my thinking in a particular direction. This tendency to remember the ideas but forget their source–the “sleeper effect”–has been shown in communication research several times over the last 50 years.

You actually know about this, because someone else made the connection and hyperlinked it. But otherwise, I would have been abscounding with your ideas without due credit. As interersted as I am in encouraging hyperlinking as attribution, there has to be a limit.

I wonder whether a standing set of citations (your “Regular reads/dialogues”) constitutes a kind of “thought group”–an indication that your ideas are at least in some part attibutable to the people you communicate with every day?

While “a standing set of citations”, usually visible as a blogroll, is helpful to give credits to others when adding a link to a specific weblog post is not feasible (also since finding relevant post in someone else’s archive is complicated, especially when there is no phrase to search with, but only an idea that “there was something relevant”), this approach does not translate well to non-blogging contexts. For example, there is a challenge of attributing ideas from weblogs in an academic publication:

Academic publications on business blogs are scarce, while there are quite a lot of white papers, case-studies from commercial companies, business publications or general media stories on the topic. And, of course, there are lots of ideas worth citing across the blogosphere.

The last one is a difficult decision. For an academic getting into research on business blogging it wouldn’t be an issue: just run search through databases of scientific publications, work with the results and pretend that the rest doesn’t exist. For me, learning about interesting issues in the field from weblogs years before something along the same lines gets “properly” published, it is a challenge. I can not pretend that the body of knowledge in weblogs doesn’t exist, but, bounded by academic conventions, I can’t figure a good way to fit it into my publications.

Even more, even if I try to give an overview of what is there on the topic across weblogs, I can’t do it according to academic standards that aim for completeness and objectivity. I know that I shouldn’t even try to provide a complete and objective picture when giving an overview on whatever issue across weblogs.

It is not easy to find to whom and how to credit when one’s ideas are inspired by reading weblogs of others and conversations in a weblog network. When those ideas leave the blogosphere and take shape of something that is part of paid work (publications, presentations, instruments, methods), lack of attribution could result in a bitter feelings as sharing one’s ideas for a “collective good” is not the same as giving them to someone who might be competing for a publication space or consulting assignments in the “real world”.

In addition, while attributing words to their authors is easy with clear authorship of a weblog, this is not necessarily the case with the ownership of those words:

The question that came into my mind: what happens with your ideas that you posted to a weblog inside certain boundaries (e.g. corporate blog or course blog) after you leave these boundaries. Both Martin and Sebastian suggest that it should be your property and you have to be able to take it with you as your own learning resource. Ideally, I would say the same, but I don’t think that it’s going to happen easily in practice.

Companies and educational institutions are recognising that they could benefit from aggregating ideas produced by people (e.g. course assignments from previous courses could be reused in a new course). An individual knowledge worker, from other hand, wants to have access to his own thought, may be throughout his whole life. This is not interesting for a company (it’s competitive advantage!) and it should be ideal educational institution to take care of it (at the end no any educational institution is responsible to your own life-long learning).

In one paper knowledge workers were addressed as investors bringing their knowledge for corporate use. This is good metaphor, but unlike real investors knowledge workers can not take their investment back. Even worse, if you leave treads of your knowledge work in corporate context they are likely to belong to a company (often copyrighted), so they in fact risk loosing some of their investments.

In a long-term this could be a problem to weblogs adoption in a corporate context: I’m more motivated to write something down if I know that it stays with me and I can come back to it than if it’s locked in a corporate knowledge management system or e-learning system [...].

This situation appears when blogging, which is not a paid activity for a blogger results in something directly relevant to an employment:

From notes of the Voxpolitics event on blogs and politics [...] about Stephen Pollard, “first major journalist in the country to be running a weblog”:

And he’s not writing for free – people respond to his comments and inspire him to write pieces for which he gets paid.

This simple phrase gets the value of blogging for free – it inspires you to come up with other pieces (with more insight/analysis/depth/structure) to get paid for.
For me it would also draw a border for copyrights: I’d like to “own” my blog (to give it away under Creative Commons) even if it is related to my work, while my company owns more elaborate products (e.g. papers) that can be inspired by it (of course when a company pays me to work on these products :).

In fact I don’t like to get paid to blog, because I want the freedom of doing it and I want to own the content. I’m also addicted to blogging enough to think that I would not be happy if I couldn’t do it. And I have scary phrases in my contract to worry about these issues :(

In the research environment, using weblog in a process of creating an article makes the issue even more clouded, since transferring of copyrights to the academic publishers often requires that no part of the work has been published before.

• Loïc le Meur in Moscow…
• Am I killing publication opportunities with blogging PhD results?
• CFP: Organisational Blogs: Opportunities and Challenges

The slides from my talk at Online Information today – Getting value from employee weblogs: A knowledge management approach

Related:

• Microsoft study
  • Lilia Efimova & Jonathan Grudin (2007). Crossing Boundaries: A Case Study of Employee Blogging. Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’07)
  • Links to papers, presentations and blogposts, related to the study
• Blogposts on things I talked about:
  • Knowledge work framework
  • Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?
  • Blogging as creating space for important
  • Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks
  • Public weblogs as a tool for (internal) knowledge management
  • Employee blogging: Making most from what is already there
  • ‘Beyond blogging’ lessons learnt

Technorati: OnlineInfo2007

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/05.html#a1962; comments are here.

• Talking From the Inside Out: The Rise of Employee Bloggers
• Telling your boss about your blog
• Research papers on business blogging

A bit of a follow-up on the microactions aggregate point from my post on ‘Beyond blogging’ lessons learnt, where I wrote:

Blogging is about microcontent – publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level – ecosystems between blog posts are more interesting and more important. Think of the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone from reading a weblog over time, implicit understanding of a new issue that emerges while following a conversation between bloggers or sense of belonging to a network of others – in all cases posts and links are only a tip of the iceberg.

Developing “fuzzy feeling”, “implicit understanding” and “sense of belonging” takes time and effort. For those writing and reading weblogs in a real time that’s an integral part of the process, but what about others – newcomers, who need to navigate implicitly constructed knowledge and relations, or those of a periphery of the particular topical community, who don’t have lots of time to invest, but still want to know, or those searching for an answer to a specific question?

In this respect I would distinguish between the first degree and second degree of blogging effects:

• First degree effects – those that “happen” as part of the natural processes in a blogging ecosystem – conversations, networking, reputation building.
• Second degree effects – those possible since weblogs provide rich traces to learn from for non-participants.

For a non-participant the microcontent nature of blogging creates two problems (actually, those are also problems for the participants, but to a much lesser degree):

• There are a lot of weblog posts, that are difficult to navigate if you are not part of the ecosystem
• Posts are fragmented, so often to gain real insight on the issue or to judge the expertise of a blogger one have to follow multiple posts

Now think of a company where many employees blog about their work internally or externally. Next to creating conditions for blogging (and the first degree effects of it), ideally it would be also also interested in maximising the second degree effects – making most from what is already there.

So, what are the ways to make most from the weblog traces that are already there?

One thing to do is improving discoverability of interesting blog posts, blogs and bloggers with smart search, aggregation and providing pointers to good content (exteded discussion and specific “to do” ideas). However, those things do not help much with improving access to expertise fragmented in a number of posts that not only take time to read, but also require some “integration” effort. Similar problem exists, for example, with forum-based Q&A discussions, where one often have to read through the whole thread to get an idea of proposed solution(s).

Weblogs are a bit better than forums in respect to summaries (since bloggers could not rely on having previous messages visible in a thread they tend to summarise some of it, see paper on weblog conversations for more), but they are still far from providing densely packed information in a way a good article would do.

Weblogs are good for drafting and discussing ideas in progress, but it also makes a lot of sense to find ways to do more with those drafts. Some ideas:

• Making a list of “best of my posts” is a good practice anyway, but as a company you can provide an additional incentive by asking bloggers who work for you to make those lists. For example, to be promoted in a newsletter on a topic of their blog or as an input for their evaluation if they want to bring their work-related blogging as an extra point.
• Checking if weblog content could be reused as an input for web-pages, white papers, help files, training courses, books, etc. and asking bloggers to work on those. I guess many would be happy with an opportunity to rework bits and pieces of ideas into something more coherent and potentially more visible (and I think that asking “more professional” writers to rework someone else’s weblog content only makes sense if bloggers themselves don’t feel like doing it).
• Automatic summaries and visualisations. Those do not replace human summarisation, but could be useful to get an idea of interesting trends and to locate specific weblog posts and conversations.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/30.html#a1960; comments are here.

• Trip report (1): blogs and wikis implemented
• KM in small R&D company

Thanks to Euan Semple, a pointer to Bringing Social Media To Work by Jeremy Burton, with the quote:

For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment “being productive”. No matter what, people will find ways to socialize and share during work hours. It might be best to treat this like sex education: If your employees are going to “do it” anyway, why not encourage them to channel their social-media impulses in smart, safe ways that can potentially help your business?

Puting it next to David Gurteen’s blogging as loving sexual relationship :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/26.html#a1957; comments are here.

• Aggregation can kill personal voices
• Lessons learned from a large-scale K-logging implementation
• Blogging for Dollars