One of the trials of assembling a Whole Product Solution is remembering that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Like many others, I think that weblogs can form the foundation of a knowledge management solution. But I differ from most in thinking that the primary contribution of weblogs will come from making content easier to find rather than promoting its creation.
Most companies have plenty of content. They just don’t know exactly where it is located or what it is about. The conventional technological solution is to use centralized storage with metadata to describe the content. And the usual sociological response is to ignore both whenever possible.
If a practice of weblogging can be established, then weblogs and link analysis can locate and describe content. Manually entered metadata tends to be sparse and out of date. But accounts of how content is used in the context of work are descriptively rich and current. It works for the internet. Isn’t time to see if it works on the intranet?