On communities of practice – an example

A workplace initiative at a former workplace that I am really proud of was the introduction of communities of practice (CoP’s) - I named them ”Pubs”. The pubs connected people with a common interest and a common workplace need across three key business units (and some others), and across geographic space in Australia and New Zealand. I have elaborated on this before so [...]

On blog action day 2008 poverty

The 15th October was blog action day for poverty. I was away in Canberra yesterday on more mundane things like knowledge management and the act-km conference (more details in a later post). However, I still wish to highlight the awareness raising hopes of blog action day for poverty with this post.
The UN reports that “the [...]

On back into the swing of things

I am back to the blogosphere from the two week distraction of the Olympic Games and a week sick with the ‘flu. The paraolympics are coming up next and I shall be watching them keenly. But I can safely say that I will also find the time to give some attention to this blog.
Quite a few [...]

On the value of online communities and social networking

I was alerted today to this blog post from ReadWriteWeb on social networking. The blog post cites some media commentary on a study that says that social networking is a waste of money. The report is based on a survey of over 100 US businesses. Despite spending millions of dollars, the companies could see little tangible benefit from [...]

On possibly an announcement from WordPress

A couple of months ago WordPress started adding automatically generated links to the bottom of the comments section on WordPress blogs. WordPress calls them “possibly related posts”. The rationalisation was that these automatically generated links gave the commenter or comment viewer the option of seeing similar blogging posts from WordPress bloggers. The idea seems to make [...]

On my new job

I start my new full-time job at the Fred Hollows Foundation tomorrow. I will be in charge of the information, knowledge management and education unit of the organisation. I am really looking forward to working back in the NGO sector and in international development. It will also make my involvement in KM4dev and Society for [...]

On blogging until you drop

According to this newspaper report, blogging professionally is dangerous to your health. As a non-paid blogger who blogs out of interest (and not as frequently as I would like), I don’t seem to have that kind of health issue.

On blogs and CoP’s

Joitske Hulsebosch blogged about the potential of using blogs with communities of practices (Cop’s). Joitske gives four very useful ways in which blogs can support CoP’s but I just want to focus on one of them. Quoting Joitske:
“A weblog with summaries of discussions can be a repository for the community. An example is the weblog [...]

On tagging, the grey side

My last two posts have been about tagging based on my presentation last week at the conference in Sydney, ”Enhancing search and retrieval capabilities and performance”.
I want to look at some of the perceived disadvantages of tagging that I briefly mentioned in my presentation:

Lack of specificity – refers to the fact that an item can have [...]

On the positive side of tagging

In the light of what I discussed yesterday with respect to my conference presentation on Tuesday, I want to move on to tagging. Tagging is essentially unstructured metadata that is assigned by the content creator and the readers/users of the content, the latter called collaborative tagging. The user-generated classification that emerges is called a folksonomy.
Examples of digital content using [...]

Blog inside the enterprise

I have come across reluctance by senior management in the past to consider blogs as a suitable communication medium for engaging readers and encouraging dialogue. I have also heard that “it’s all too hard”.
Check out Naomi Wolf’s Amazon.com blog. This is as simple as it gets and all focused around a single theme. And that theme [...]

On Jeremiah’s weekly digest on social networking

Today I want to highlight Jeremiah’s weekly digest on social networking. I find it a valuable and quick read about the social networking space. Jeremiah Owyang is on my blog roll but his weekly digest is too good to hide behind that!

On knowledge management’s crisis of confidence

I read a lot of blogs on knowledge management. I also read articles and I try to read books (although I am doing so at a much slower rate these days). I attend knowledge management conferences and discuss issues with attendees. I talk knowledge management at forums and with friends and colleagues.
What I find is that [...]

On actKM Conference 2007

Yesterday I attended day two of the actKM conference in Canberra. The day was full of thoughtful speakers and enjoyable conversation. The venue was in an unpretentious room located in the lovely grounds of University House at the Australian National University.
David Gurteen opened the morning session with an overview of a range of social networking tools and technologies. David emphasised [...]

On information research

The latest issue of the e-journal, Information Research, is now available.
There are some really interesting papers, especially the paper by Marcia Bates on browsing behaviour and the paper by Judit Bar-Ilan on librarian blogs.
There are several book reviews too, including this one on David Weinberger’s book, Everything is miscellaneous (a book I am currently reading).
 All [...]