Weblogs: March 2004 Archives

I am always exited when I find a new voice writing and thinking about KM. Jack Vinson, from Knowledge Jolt with Jack, pointed out that Ton Zijlstra writes about information overload in a long post in his blog. He talks about the volume of information and how to distinguish between a signal and noise. Blogs provide a good filter and allow sense making individuals to make sense of the noise and tell us when it is a signal. I, have a very tight seive, but I read lots of RSS feeds. I find I only comment when the signal resonates with me.

I had a demo of the SocialText application today. I was impressed by the functionality and the difference between this and many other collaborative applications.

The presentation layer is an elegantly simple text based presentation of functions that combine the best of weblogs and wikis. More like a wiki, the application encourages collaboration and iterative thinking by allowing users to edit and build on pages written by others. Posts are presented in reverse chronological order, like a blog, but participants in a collaborative project can augment and edit anything they want. An idea can easily be extended in an ad-hoc way by creating a new page with content that enriches the idea or discussion.

Implementation of the application would consist of some easy adaptation of the interface to personalize it a bit with logos and colors. User adoption would require some training, but not a lot, and a commitment among a distributed team that they would contribute to this collaborative environment rather than continue to send point to point or broadcast emails. The application is flexible enough, however, to fit the way busy people work, and users can select to post to the SocialText application by email, and can receive updates sent from the application in an RSS feed or via summary emails, like a listserv.

All in all, a very impressive app. I look forward to find a use for it with a client.