[Sigia-l] Knowledge Unmanagement [was blogging]

[Jon Hanna]

> The blogging systems currently available today do a good job of
> providing a
> knowledge medium for passing information, in close to real time, to people
> who are interested in receiving it.   Where these systems break down
> however, is in their long term prospects of providing a lasting
> information
> source for individuals to learn and gain knowledge from.

Examining blogging from this perspective is valid mainly because some
involved with blogging (primarily tool vendors) have begun to promote them
as content management or even knowledge management tools.

They do indeed fall down in such a role for exactly the reasons you state.
The association between blogging and CM or KM is partly "vocabulary
inflation" as those terms become increasingly vague to the point where CMS
can now mean almost anything, and largely marketing. The popularity of
blogging unfortunately means that many will adopt ideological positions
supporting any positive claim made about it, and the notion of blogging as
KM will no doubt continue to gain currency.

However I do think that blogging has an interesting role with regard to CM
and KM. One could playfully label this role "Knowledge Unmanagement"
(coining unmanagement to differentiate from mismanagement which, while
better English, entails negligence or incompetence).

There is a power to the lack of order that blogging has, especially combined
with the rich linking that often goes on, that makes its very lack of
management useful. Ironically the more those interested in blogging hold it
up as a method for CM or KM, the less attention will be paid to this real
power.

Of course the content can later be managed. As an exemplum I'd offer
<http://diveintoaccessibility.org/> which began as a series of blogs and is
now an excellent resource on issues of web accessibility (one of the best
I've seen, and the best guide for newbies by a large margin).

An interesting area of study would be the degree to which blogging creates
self-sustaining pools of opinion, as blogs largely in agreement with each
other have more frequent links. This is of course true of the web as a
whole, but the nature of blogging makes these pools "grow" faster. Both the
primary advantage and disadvantage is that dissenting voices are quickly
marginalised. This is an advantage because it removes much that could be
considered Spam, or information that is clearly wrong. It is a disadvantage
because some of those dissenting voices should perhaps be listened to.
A side-effect of how these pools form without the participants actively
deciding to do so is that a false sense of consensus can quickly form, the
dissenting voices being so effectively marginalised, even if outside of the
pool the members might find themselves in the minority ("It often seemed to
him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that
everyone in England was Labour, except the government." - Martin Amis, _The
Information_). Indeed someone who is particularly heavily linked-to would
have the ability to consciously manipulate this sense of consensus.
As such blogs are generally preaching to the choir (or to those who are
reading precisely because they strongly disagree) and can only subtly affect
opinion.

I'd be very much interested to hear of any studies of this information flow.