Library clips

The Wiki and the Blog is an award winning essay on how information sharing, and collaborative tools allow us to dynamically adapt to a changing environment (from an intelligence agency point of view).

The idea is based on a workflow:

- repository
- blog
- wiki
- search (self explanatory)
- feedback

I also think RSS could of had a mention in respect to alerts and notification.

As the repository fills with information (structured or unstructured), we can be alerted by RSS for items within a category, user, keyword, most recent, etc…

Then we post blog entries, adding value (ideas and context) to this information (kind of a KM transference), people read the blog posts and are informed, create discussion (they too are notified of blog content by RSS).

The cream of the blogosphere is then added to a Wiki as the important and relevant information (filtered, and applied to the corporate context)…new entries can also have RSS feeds.

From the essay:

“The Blog will be vibrant, and make sea changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as a the Blog. The Wiki will be authortative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-uopn and corporate […] The Blog and the Wiki serve as successive refining processes for the unrefined ore in the intelligence repository.”

…this really reminds me of the Stock and Flow concept from a while back.

The repository is like the web, a flow of information, we monitor this and blog about it, inducing conversation, and establish a relevant context for this information….then we can publish our findings in a wiki (somewhere to distill all the context work done via blogging…the act of blogging is turning the information into usable knowledge).

By taking part in the blogosphere I think we are all knowledge workers without explicitly realising
…we monitor, distill (publish ideas in reaction to content, discuss, manifest new ideas, create personal relevance and context), then the final step is to refine all this by publishing the best practices in a wiki.

Feedback makes this full-circle, we can derive what is important to people from what they read and discuss, so this is measuring not the content, but the behaviours of people that deal with the information, this leads to foresight and direction.

From the essay:

“…in the repository were most cited by the Blog over the last 24 hours. This feedback lets visitors quickly know what the community thinks is important…understand its impact…let visitors know what areas of the Wiki are changing most rapidly as an indicator of newly vetted knowledge […] top words…top blog postings…top sources cited.”

” As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information. This allows intelligence officers to accurately understand where they are in the intellectual space of the intelligence community. It also allows intelligence officers to see what gaps exist and where changes need to be made.”

I was thinking of how sharing information, or connecting information adds value, it’s up to you to see it and derive some possible value (different ways of connecting information may induce different types of value).

Usually corporate blogs can be hosted in a multi-blog platform, this way you can see recent posts and comments from all blogs (the co-operations mini blogosphere), if the blogs are hosted separately a similar thing can be done by newsmastering techniques in re-syndicating the blog content via RSS and presenting it in Public RSS Aggregator.

What about if you went a step further and connected all these blogs in a folksonomy, there are more connections available, thus a chance to add more value.
That is you could view new entries by cumulative category (kind of like the latest by tag)…or maybe the blogs could use tags instead of categories, so you could view content of the mini blogosphere by a tag cloud, whereas before it was just viewing the latest aggregate entries, now you could do this at an extra filtered level…also this extra filter denotes feedback on not just content but how it is defined, so if a certain tag has lots of new stuff, or appears “big” in the tag cloud we can realise it’s importance.

Actually you don’t need a folksonomy to do this, there are other ways to transport blog tags/categories…see Community Engine Re-mix Experiment.
…at the same token folksonomies are a great way to navigate the content of all blogs, as if it were one big blog
eg. other blogs that also use this category.

Machine generated tag clouds (such as TagCloud) are also beneficial, although repetitve keyword count can probably be identified by back-end technologies, but when viewed visually in a tag cloud it gives a great perspective.

Coming back to the essay, is there a step between the blog and the wiki, what is the workbench where you collect all the blog posts in order to publish in the wiki…can social bookmark folksonomies be the go-between.
This way instead of the authority deriving what they think are valuable blog posts from the blogosphere, they could also derive valuable blog posts from what others think.
Derive value from a community; how many times a post is bookmarked (popular), related posts, common tags for a post, related tags for a given tag, users who also bookmarked a post (this gives further context to information, and also more feedback on what people collectively think about information by their bookmarking behaviours).

[via Portal and KM]