Weblog Collaboration Blog

Crayzer, Steve. "Semantic blogging and decentralized knowledge management." Communications of the ACM, 47 (12), December 2004, 47-52.

Steve Crayzer discusses the needs of the HP Laboratories' Semantic Web research group (Bristol, UK) to set up "a system capable of aggregating, annotating, indexing, and searching a community's snippets." Snippets being small pieces of information that might be relevant for retrieval later.

Crayzer points out that blogs alone do not meet the group's requirements. While blogs allow easy capture of information, decentralized data-gathering, and easy methods to add to the collected information (through comments and annotations), Crayzer wants his system to have a flexible data model, be extensible, and make it possible to infer new metadata from existing metadata.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Crayzer uses Semantic Web framework tools to add the necessary functionality to the weblog framework. Specifically, RSS1.0 and RDF.

What I find most interesting about this article is Crayzer addressing the other models for ontology creation, albeit briefly and as a contrast to the Semantic Web model. Decentralized ontologies, such as those created through Flickr, del.icio.us, and Topic Exchange enable a user community to set up its own ontology by creating a list of tags or bookmarks for content. "However, in all of these systems the ontology lacks semantics and are both centralized and universal. The Semantic Web may be better served by precise, local, domain-specific vocabularies that are loosely coupled, rather than by a one-size-fits-all central ontology, no matter how collaborative." (p 52)

This argument parallels the debate between controlled vocabulary searching and full-text searching, and human-created indexing versus automated indexing (relating specifically to exhaustivity). The Semantic Web approach allows for individual disciplines and groups to take more control over access to their information. While this may enable more precise search and retrieval for knowledgeable experts, the ability of John Q. Public (or the sales guy in the field) to obtain rapid access to the same information may be limited by a lack of familiarity with the thesaurus.

I think within an individual business enterprise, the Semantic Web approach recommended in this article could be the most effective approach. However, if you conceive that the information may be used by a wider audience (up to and including the average consumer or general public), being able to search full-text (or through a publicly available and generalized tag set) will better promote access.

Both approaches have merit. As I've said before, if you only learn one tool, and it's a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The more tools and approaches you are willing to examine, the more creative you can be in proposing solutions.

There are several links at the end of this article I will be looking into, including Planet RDF for communal blogs, Platypus for wikis, the semblog platform for aggregators, and Compendium as an authoring tool utilizing Semantic Web blogging ideas.

This is a good article, and thought provoking! I hope you have a chance to read it.

In the same Library Stuff post is a presentation from the Blog Business Summit entitled "Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More."

The presentation lays out how the authors (Nick Fink, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone) use these technologies in their work life. I thought the presentation was very well done, and had many interesting points.

In this post from Steven Cohen's Library Stuff he mentions that a friend, Andrea, had introduced him to a software called JotSpot. JotSpot provides a hosted service for creating wikis.

Looking at the JotSpot website, I think that JotSpot could do for wikis what hosted software like Blogger has done for weblogs. The ease-of-use functionality (and even the style of the user interface) bear more than a passing resemblance to the Blogger interface.

This would be an excellent service to use for trying out a wiki on a collaborative project. Just look at some of the possible uses for JotSpot listed on the website. More than enough ideas to get the creative juices flowing!

In the November/December 2004 issue of the b/ITe newsletter, Stephen Cohen writes an article about corporate library blogs. Brought to my attention by his Library Stuff weblog, excellent as usual.

This article nicely addresses the types of basic questions you need to answer prior to embarking on a project to create a corporate weblog. You need to have information that must be communicated, you need to understand who will use the blog (internal employees or the general public as well) and how the blog will be used. A mission statement helps to establish the goals of the blog and focus content meaningfully.

I like this article because it puts first things first: get straight what you want to convey, to who, and for what purpose. A corollary objective to be achieved in finding the answers to these questions is: get buy-in from users and your IT support staff. People issues dominate the decision to begin such a project, not technological issues.

The article also points out that one of the primary advantages of blogs over e-mail communication of this information is that the blog groups user comments with the original post for an easily-followed "stream of conversation". Trying to tie all follow-up e-mail replies to an original e-mail can drive you batty! This grouping of like-subject comments also facilitates collaborative efforts among staff members sharing similar interests or expertise.

There's a nice article in the January 10 edition of Computerworld about the work of Bernardo Huberman at Hewlett-Packard. He has developed software algorithms to analyze e-mail flows through an organization in terms of a concept called "business centrality," which measures the visibility of individuals within the organization. Through this analysis, Huberman identified communications patterns that he interpreted as belonging to communities of experts (either de facto or otherwise).

Huberman has also developed software that creates profiles of users based upon their access of documents and Web pages through the computer network. These profiles can then be used to help other users identify experts.

All of this activity is in the patent process, but it is interesting to think about the possibilities. This type of information could help an organization formalize some of its communities of practice and improve communication between the expert community and the larger organization.

One of my favorite blogs is Jenny's "the shifted librarian". Here is a post linking to a page discussing "10 Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects."

Jenny's point is that one can substitute "libraries" for "projects". A very valid point. I have read Tom Peters, who says that all professional work in the future will be project work. As librarians are information professionals (aren't we?), we should expect the nature of our work to evolve in a similar direction to the work of other professions.

I found an interesting entry on this weblog about a "Collaborative Communities of Practice 2004 Online Conference".

Following this link takes you to a page presenting the program for the conference. The abstracts of the presentations on this page provide a pretty good outline of the content covered by this conference. "Collaborative Communities" (or "Communities of Practice") is one of the central concepts of knowledge management, that informal, socially networked communities of experts form around specialized knowledge. KM believes that organizations should foster and tap into these networks in order to develop new solutions. Weblogs represent a simple collaboration tool that businesses can use as part of a knowledge management program. However, I believe it is important to avoid becoming too "techno-centric" in your approach to KM. The most important thing that anyone implementing a KM program can do is to first understand the community members and how they communicate. Technological (or Luddite) solutions will follow naturally by adapting the right tool to the right situation.

This blog, hosted by Rick E. Bruner, is focused on the use of blogs for marketing and customer communications. Mr. Bruner runs his own consulting practice, Excecutive Summary Consulting, that specializes in research and writing services about Internet marketing and media.

The category "Articles about Biz Blogging" in the Business Blog Consulting blog seems to keep regular posts on short articles appearing in the business and popular press regarding the use of blogs as business tools.