Michalski jumps in.

The redoubtable Jerry Michalski (the writer/thinker/networker, not the battleship) has started blogging and has put up a wiki. (Wiki, not Wifi. A wiki is a page that can be gang-edited, a digital act of trust.) [JOHO the Blog]

Glad to see another strong thinker in the mix. But I wish he would provide an RSS feed instead of complaining that Radio doesn't provide an email distribution option.  As I make more use of Radio's aggregator I'm finding email newsletters and surfing the web much less productive uses of my time. I suspect I'll end up using RSSDistiller or Mark Paschal's stapler to scrape a feed for my own use.

10:12:26 PM •  • comment  

Blog This at Con Jose.

Towards the end of the panel, Bill Humphries said "The web log for me is a research tool," and pointed (verbally any way!) to Cory Doctorow's reference to Dorie Smith's explanation of her web log as her "Backup Brain." Teresa Nielsen Hayden said "One of the reasons I have a web log is to keep track of all the things I find incidentally." The Live Journal folk said the same thing, and so I'm going to point (yes, again) to the commonplace book as a close relative if not a distant ancestor of the web log.

[Instructional Technology]

This nicely captures some of my key goals with keeping this weblog. It's the primary reason that I tend to take advantage of Radio's news aggregator to post mostly complete copies of the items that I want to remember. I also use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to search my weblog archives. I can usually manage to remember some fragment or key phrase about something I've posted. I can then usually find the original item in my archives.

The notion of personal knowledge management hasn't been explored enough. Maybe I'm sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can't see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible.

10:08:28 PM •  • comment  

Chicago Get-together?.

Klogging in Chicago. I'll be in Chicago for a conference in early October and I'm very interested in meeting knowledge-focused webloggers in the area. [Blunt Force Trauma]

Terry - there's a bunch of us. Jenny, Jim, Eric, Mike, me and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. We keep promising each other a get-together - maybe this is our excuse?

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Maybe we should also look to include AKMA in our group. Not specifically focused on knowledge management but much deep thought about the web in general.

9:49:30 PM •  • comment  

Bloggers uncover the implicit and make it explicit. (SOURCE:Mathemagenic)-Great idea! Bloggers build stories to make the implicit explicit.

I've been trying to articulate out what these professions have in common that could explain why weblogging has become an especially popular practice in those areas. I'm not finished thinking about it yet, but I think the commonality has to do with uncovering the implicit. Software developers patiently explain to a machine things for which humans wouldn't need an explanation. Journalists take threads from different places and build a coherent story out of them. Teachers patiently explain to students things for which trained specialists wouldn't need an explanation. Librarians gather and organize explicitly material that is only implicitly connected. Lawyers, whenever they seek to correctly interpret the intent of a law, need to uncover its spirit which is almost always implicit. All of them are not just pattern recognizers, they are also pattern explainers.
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Wendell Berry has a phrase I've always liked: solving for pattern. It catches the notion that interesting answers are rarely obvious.

The other thing that these professions share is that they are all people who think for a living. As such, they've developed a healthy respect for the time and effort it takes to develop a decent thought. This may be less evident to bloggers than it might otherwise seem. If you write or even read blogs regularly, you're accustomed to thinking and may not recognize how rare a skill it is (it is a skill and, therefore, something that can be developed).

9:30:58 PM •  • comment