Library clips

Anecdote are under way with their Zahmoo project about Most Significant Change, they are kicking off by asking Bloggers to share their Most Significant Change due to blogging.

Since I don’t have a micro based story to share, I chose to blog about this instead of reply to the comments in the Anecdote post or Zahmoo post…this post is about my blogging in general, and how it has made impact and change on my life, and collectively how blogs do the same for the world at large.

Personally my experience is that blogging allows me to not only report news, and opinion, but I tend to share feedback and experiences.
Only when I sat back to think about it did I realise that this sharing of experiences (blogging) is part of what a knowledge worker is about.

At the moment I’m experimenting with ways of reading feed content on my phone, trying a few services…when I’m done I’ll share, I don’t know why, I just do. The great thing about this is that readers can respond and augment my experience, adding more insight…others can take this information and run (they don’t need to re-invent the wheel).
This is a great change in my life, I have an outlet to share my tinkering, and people respond…it’s a virtual community, the web 2.0 environment has initiated and sustains my growth.
I don’t know anyone f2f (friends, family, staff) that know about RSS, tags, folksonomy, wiki, OPML, etc…some know about blogs, but I doubt they read them, if they do, they probably wouldn’t know it. Reason I’m saying this is the blogging platform is allowing me to share and receive experiences from remote people.

Vice versa, I read other blogs experiences, which I can learn from…we are all sharing, this creates new knowledge, leads to advancement, innovation, etc…
I am consuming all this tacit information (or better put personal experiences) via reading people’s blogs, how would I have ever known all this stuff without blogs…and I don’t even know these people.

You could say that I can find out about this stuff already, news media, journals, etc…but can I?…can I get such a enormous choice in fact gigantic choice of sources, and personalised content and opinion that doesn’t pertain to a greater agenda (profits), than just plain old sharing?

Reading blogs has increased the amount of information at my finger tips, I’m being informed about news and experiences, it’s great.
My personal blogging is acting like an archive of news I come across and experiences I’ve had, I can look back on my blog and now remember or trace what I’ve been doing.
The other thing is readership, I would never have imagined that hundreds of people would listen to what I’ve got to say, it just happened along the way. From this I have made lots of aquaintances, lots of companies approach me, I get to try out some cool tools…who knows where this may lead.

I guess this is a macro view of blogging, and how it has changed my life:
- by reading and blogging I am part of a loose community
- by sharing experiences and reading about others we are creating the opportunity for knowledge

I don’t blog behind the firewall, but I can imagine that sharing experiences via enterprise blogging will lead to great knowledge…staff will be learning off each other by sharing ideas and experiences.
What other format gives you a soapbox?

I believe things shared in this blog soapbox, will bring people together to form new ideas and innovation, especially when threading multi-disciplinary ideas.

Blogs are naturally teasing out stuff that people would not normally share, maybe they would f2f, but that only falls on a few ears (and it is not documented)…and sometimes people like blogging or commenting on their own turf rather than a forum as they are in charge, they are not intimidated, they can talk about any topic, they can have distributed conversations via comments/trackbacks.

In saying this, an enterprise blog post may mention something about the latest industry news, or sharing an experience…it is there for all staff to read. Reading this post before going into your meeting might make a difference to decision making, as you are informed about internal intelligence.

Without a space to share this “internal intelligence” we are missing out on utilising the human resource to its full capacity…without a blog post, this person (going to the meeting), may have heard about this information f2f (only if they are around), or via email (only if they are cc’d).
The other great thing about blogs is the the information is in an archive, you can go through old posts and gain lots of internal intelligence.
Emails are not shared and archived for all to see, it is also more of a correspondence format, whereas the blog format is ideal to share experiences, reflect…but it’s more than a public diary, as you can break announcements about news, reviews, opinions, that are inteneded for ears other than just yours.

In a nutshell enterprise blogging can keep us informed of competitive intelligence, and it can also keep us informed of internal intelligence…and with this information we can say we are actively partipating in a knowledge workplace.

Blogging is just the beginning, knowledge sharing in the enterprise can expand to wikis, social bookmarks, podcasts, Q&A, etc…

Most of the comments shared on the Zahmoo post are about relationships, making contacts with like people…go over to their post and share your experiences, this seems a great idea…we are learning about the impact of sharing by sharing (there’s probably a word for that).

Related:
km 2.0 and organic km
Internal communication blogs and km2.0

Yedda, my favourite Q&A service, has added some more widgets and enhanced the earlier ones.

1. FAQ - choose a Yedda topic to display some FAQ on the topic

What about if this was more personalised…Yedda could scan your blog content and choose the latest Yedda questions that match your blog content.

2. Got a question - people can ask a question to the Yedda community directly from your blog

They way it works is that Yeddites (these are people registered with Yedda…I just made this up) will come across these questions and may choose to answer them, also certain Yeddites are invited by the system to answer the question as the content may meet their profile…and now the blog owner is also invited to answer the question by default.

3. My profile - self explanatory

I kind of wish the My profile widget included the Got a Question widget.

Another thing I hear in the works is enabling people to ask questions without having to be registered with Yedda.

Widgets are becoming the new web connectors, whether in your blog sidebar, a start page, you could fill your own your own website with widgets from services you are registered with, or just widgets in general.

I think widgets and start pages go hand in hand as your personal dashboard, some similar services like SuprGlu or Ziki re-syndicate content rather than use widgets…also see ID services.

For all things widgets check out Widgetbox.