Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

Lilia Efimova provides a good summary of the benefits of blogging for knowledge workers (knowledge workers: if the physical artifacts of your day's labor are documents, or if you don't produce any physical documents at work, that's you). If you're trying to explain to your co-workers or your boss why blogging would be good for your organization, Efimova's explanation is a good place to start.

Efimova focuses on the individual perspective: What can blogs do for me? But what she says about blogs as personal knowledge management tools has some relevance for my discussion of blogs as social knowledge management tools.

Efimova sees the social benefits of blogs, but she notes that those benefits don't come right away:

While blogging is personal, most of its advantages are the result being part of an ecosystem, where weblogs are connected not only by links, but also by relations between bloggers. Those relations do not appear automatically: it takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to find a personally meaningful way to use a weblog [Lilia Efimova, "Blogging for Knowledge Workers: Incubating Ideas," Mathemagenic, 2010.01.11].

Notice that? Before you can really hook into an ecosystem -- an essential condition, I would suggest, for doing social knowledge management -- you need to find a personal reason to sustain your blog. I feel a zen paradox coming on: I wonder if I could say that you find your way into a blog ecosystem by writing as if you weren't concerned about finding your way into a blog ecosystem. You need to write for yourself. Create an online tenkeskriving space: if it is compelling enough to sustain your authorly interest, it will be compelling enough to attract and sustain others' readerly interest.

And when you reach that point (sorry if this sounds all too New-Age tipping-point fuzzy... but it is!), the readers you draw will represent the society for whom your personal knowledge management now becomes a component of the social knowledge management.

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