I'm introducing a course on Knowledge Management at the Kellogg School in April. You can see the syllabus here, which is part of a Manila site I am using to manage most of the course development. One item that I thought would be of more general interest is my top 10 books to read to get up to speed on KM.

I've updated the reading list at Jenny's suggestion by suggesting an order to read them in and adding a few comments

9:46:10 PM •  • comment  

What is a k-log?. Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps? [WriteTheWeb]

Good interview with John Robb providing a quick summary of the k-log concept.  Why will k-logs push other KM solutions into the background? John gets it in one:

how much do current knowledge management solutions positively impact the worklives of employees at most corporations? For the vast majority of employees that answer is not much. K-Logs personalize knowledge development and use in a way that provides an immediate positive impact on how people do their work.

Finally, a KM tool that offers something useful for the poor knowledge worker in the trenches.

10:45:53 AM •  • comment  

Business Week: Copyrights -- or Mothballs? But in the rush to protect the established publishing industries, two avenues that were crafted specifically to allow innovation to thrive within the legal structure of copyrights are being closed down. For innovation to bloom in digital publishing, something has to give. [Tomalak's Realm]

nice summary of the issues around current copyright law and fair use.

8:45:32 AM •  • comment  

Dave W. "I have a confession to make. Radio is also an outliner." Hey, I use Radio's outliner every day (I keep a copy of 7 around so I can save as html, a command I hear's broken in 8). It's not perfect, but very little software actually is. I'm looking forward to UserLand's focus to swing back to around the outliner to see what they'll cook up next. [Steven's Weblog]

Ditto - I've been using the outliner in Radio since its first incarnation as Pike. Pretty much every word I've written in the last few years has flowed through Radio/Pike.

I can understand why Dave hasn't yet emphasized the outliner, but it's the essential reason I'm sticking with Radio as a blogging tool.  I'm looking forward to new mind bombs from Dave in this realm. [McGee's Musings]

Okay, I don't get this. The big piece of the puzzle is missing for me, as I haven't used outlines since college. What am I missing here? Why will outlines in Radio (or anywhere else) revolutionize my life? Somebody please mind bomb me!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Steven's observations are one good summary of why. For me the issue is one of being able to have a way to manage both structure and content in parallel. I never used outlines in college either because they're so badly taught (although I think more of Sister Helen and gradeschool when outlines come up). I still remember when Dave Winer's ThinkTank first came out for the IBM PC in the 80s. For the way my mind worked it was a major boost in quality of thought.  I could focus on and I could see the structure of my arguments.

One of the unfortunate side effects of WYSIWYG editors and word processors is that you get caught up in the surface appearance of the work. It's easy to lose sight of the underlying structure.

Two sources if you're interested in outliners as a tool. One is another of Dave's contributions to the community, outliners.com.  Another is Bernie De Koven's CoWorking Institute and the idea of technography, which is a really slick use of outlining tools in group settings.

Another good source of potential insight courtesy of this morning's scripting news. Inside Outliners from gRadio

8:42:54 AM •  • comment