Weblogs: March 2006 Archives

Lunch over IP  recommends Comment is free, new blog started by the Guardian:

"The British newspaper The Guardian one week ago started a new collective blog, called Comment is free. For it they recruited more than 100 smart people across the political spectrum, who post when they want about the subjects of their choice writing as many words as they like. There is an editor in charge, to get some coordination and some "hierarchy" - and help out those of the 100 that didn't have previous blogging experience - but copyediting is limited to checking for libel. Comments by regular columnists from the Guardian and its Sunday sibling Observer are also posted on this "open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement", as the "about" page puts it. The quality of the contributions is impressive.

Georgina Henry is the editor, who made the switch to blogging after 16 years spent on the print side, and she posted today her lessons-learned-in-the-first-week dispatch".

I think that this is an excellent argument for business blogging. 

A Learning Circuits Blog post titled “Blogs as knowledge management” speculates that “Blogs are knowledge objects that can make bottom-up (i.e. useful) knowledge management a reality.” To explain the point the post inserts the following quote from David Weinberger’s blog:

I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it's only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.[Smart Mobs]