A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.
--David Weinberger

Blogs have spread like wildfire on the Internet. Blog postings range from the trivial and vain to the witty, informative, and insightful. A blog, for those of you who have not taken a look at one yet, is a Web page of short entries arranged in reverse chronological order. Some blogs are the efforts of one individual while others are produced by a team of authors. The success of blogging as a new publishing form lies in the ease with which a new Web site can be produced "automatically." All of the hassle of setting up and designing a Web site is taken out of the process, so authors can focus on adding content. Typically, a remotely hosted blog can be set up in minutes by filling in an online form and clicking "create." Adding content is even easier. Simply type or paste a short entry into a Web form to post an entry. Blogs make it easy to author Web content and syndicate it. Producing content and syndicating it is useful not only on the Internet, but also on intranets.

Intranets, by their very nature, serve as repositories of codified knowledge. Files and documents such as procedure manuals, sales reports, and so forth are saved centrally and shared. Formally or informally, intranets support knowledge management (KM) by encoding, storing, and transmitting information. Intranet blogs certainly can support KM. Blogs allow individuals or groups to easily encode content, store it, and transmit it via Web pages, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, or daily or weekly e-mail digests. The versatile means of transmitting blog content is a significant advantage of blogging tools. Unlike a bulletin board system, which might offer only viewing or viewing plus e-mail notification, blog content can be syndicated, aggregated, and merged with other content, allowing for aggregate news feeds from multiple projects on your desktop or integration of internal and external news feeds in one convenient place.

Without a doubt, more and more intranet teams are being asked to support or lead knowledge management initiatives. KM has any number of definitions. For the purposes of this article, we'll stick with a pragmatic definition. Knowledge management is "an umbrella term for a collection of disciplines, methods and tools that support the creation and sharing of intellectual assets to achieve business/organizational goals."1

Two common types of KM projects focus on building knowledge repositories or assisting the formation and development of communities of practice (CoPs). KM projects focus on providing knowledge bases that assist staff in carrying out tasks such as telephone support, equipment repair, sales, and marketing. Other projects focus on CoPs, workplace communities that hold and perpetuate collective knowledge and best practices.

Blogs Support Repository Building and Communities of Practice
Reference departments have been quick to adopt blogging for staff use for sharing best practices, tips and announcements about new databases and tools. Some reference teams also produce blogs for their users highlighting new resources and services. System departments are areas where blogs are being tested and used for tracking software projects and installations. Code updates can be blogged and monitored as an RSS feed. The experience of configuring and installing a complex application can be traced and the lessons learned captured for the next group of installers inside your own organization or within a consortium.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge
Knowledge held by a company is often divided into two main categories—explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is definable and objective as well as easily documented and transferred. It's tangible and written down—procedures, process, data, models, algorithms, models, etc. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is skill based and is the private knowledge that people have in their heads and in their practices. It's the most difficult and elusive to capture and often cannot be articulated. This knowledge is often transmitted orally and tacitly according to a master to apprentice behavior.²

The idea of using blogs to more effectively transfer and capture knowledge has generated excitement in the blogging community. It's evident that blogs can readily help with sharing and encoding explicit knowledge. Some bloggers also see that tacit knowledge maybe transferred through these blogs. Blogs are often vehicles for anecdotal communication, mentoring, and storytelling. Blogs in this mode help coach new staff with a particular skill or practice and become a forum for sharing experiences, judgments, and insights. Stories share information, meaning, and knowledge. Good stories resonate; so do good blogs. Many organizations do not have the luxury of face-to-face, master-to-apprentice interactions but have to pass on knowledge to staff in disparate locations, so tools that support this type of transfer of skills are valuable.

Blogs to K-Logs
John Robb, president and CEO of UserLand Software, Inc., is the originator of the concept of k-logs or knowledge management Web logs. K-logs are communities of blogs, usually in one organization, and are located behind a firewall. K-logs offer more than an easy content publishing to a Web page. The toolkit should offer "subscriptions for knowledge streams, categorization of posts, and community tools for finding related content."³

Organizations and knowledge workers can benefit from k-logs. Robb points out that k-logs make it possible for domain experts who are constantly keeping up with new developments to share their experiences and points of view on a close-to-real-time basis. The information is encoded and searchable. A k-log also allows an individual to build a personal brand in a company by demonstrating his or her expertise.⁴

K-Logs and Knowledge Transfer
K-logs can help to encourage knowledge transfer in an organization and may be the right tool to help support your KM initiative. The promise of KM is certainly alluring:

• Instant sharing and flow of strategic information and knowledge
• Seamless access everywhere throughout the organization
• A well-informed workforce
• Ability to respond quickly to the vagaries of the new economy
• A means to "capture" what senior staff know

Despite the wonderful promises of KM, trying to get a KM initiative underway can be daunting. There can be many hurdles and challenges: organizational readiness, financial resources, and individual knowledge workers' perceptions and attitudes.

Blogs and Resistance to KM initiatives
Occasionally the organizational culture is ready for KM, but often it must be "primed." Taking time to document or share information is perceived by many workers as time away from their assigned duties. There need to be strong incentives in the organizational culture and structure to ensure that sharing knowledge is indeed seen as a core part of one's job. Obviously, any tool such as a blog that makes it very quick to share information will have an advantage over a complex system.

Often KM initiatives meet resistance when they require staff to learn new systems or carry out work with different tools in a different way. Many of us are comfortable in our rut. We may even know that there may be a better way to do something, but the fact is we have a system that works now that we know and trust. Overcoming this inertia is a major obstacle.

K-logs have a minimal learning curve. Within minutes a knowledge worker can be adding and posting entries. The simplicity of the blogging toolkits allows for easy rollout and low risk deployment. Blogging tools can either be deployed as the infrastructure for an initiative, or they can sometimes be used as an inexpensive way to test out a KM initiative that requires staff to post and share content.

K-logs may also help overcome resistance stemming from WIIFM (what's in it for me) attitude. Blogs can make life easier for some knowledge workers. It could become "the place" of choice to track emerging ideas, notes, interesting posts, and so on. A blog can help tame the creative chaos of piles of papers, electronic e-mail, notes, and files into a more coherent and manageable personal repository. Sure, you have to use it to reap the benefits, but there definitely are people who are already championing blogs as a personal organizational tool for ideas and information.

A number of bloggers have reported that the act of keeping a blog has helped them to discover their own interests and gain greater clarity by articulating their reactions and thoughts. Not only do blogs help to solve real world problems of information overload and dozens of alerts and newsletters in e-mail inboxes, but they are also self-rewarding.

For experts, blogs also offer the possibility of saving time by sharing knowledge with many people based on one post. Rather than answering the same question to several individuals, they can answer the question once, post it on their blog, and it can be found or pointed to when others ask the same question.

Individuals can resist sharing their knowledge, believing that their specialized knowledge is what gives them value in the organization. Overcoming this belief takes a multifaceted approach of education as well as tangible changes by the employer toward job responsibilities, evaluation, and financial rewards. Overcoming this attitude can also can happen at a more informal level of peer recognition. Bloggers are recognized for their expertise by sharing, not hoarding, it. They are openly appreciated and often thanked. Blogs offer a built-in indicator of value and success. Blogs and bloggers that have posts that share relevant information are linked to and read frequently, and quickly achieve "name" recognition.

Interestingly, some of the resistance to KM initiatives may be overcome by the social nature of blogging software. According to McClelland's theory of motivation, while many people are motivated by the need for achievement, others are motivated by affiliation needs. Blog software can foster and develop friendly and close interpersonal relationships through community type tools like comment feature, deep linking, or blog rolling. Blog rolling is used to manage buddy lists of interesting blogs or sites.  

Many blogging software packages allow you to comment on a single blog entry. This allows for the reader to add a response to a blog entry, to challenge ideas, add new information, and so on. It's common on technical blogs to see a string of possible solutions and work-arounds to a software bug conclude with a posting that encapsulates the best approach, building upon the information in the previous entries.

Some intranet users have experience with blogs on the Web, where deep linking, commentary, and communities of interest are the norm. They bring the experience of "blog practices" with them. Ironically the very things that blogs are criticized for on the Web—incestuous, cyclical linking, back and forth posting, off-the-cuff nature of posting musing, and emerging ideas, may actually be desirable features for fostering intranet communities of practice and informal learning networks.

Benefits of K-Logging for Organizations
An active k-logging community can certainly speed up the transfer of knowledge in a community. K-logs can facilitate a number of important knowledge related activities. Here are just a few:

• More information is codified, captured, and searchable. Depending on the intranet, corporate search engines can spider blog content.
• Rather than relying on machine filtering, domain experts offer human-powered filters that can contextualize and comment on new developments in a specific area sifting through hundreds of news and events to zero in on a select few.
• K-logs are a great tool for finding who knows what. A quick look at a k-log community will bring to light experts in an area. Individual staff can make their own assessment about the k-logger's credibility and knowledge in area by reading a few posts. Keep in mind that a k-log is a living entity, constantly updated, so as new interests emerge they are captured in the blog. Expertise databases might exist in a company, but keeping them current is a challenge.
• For newcomers and novices in a company, blogs provide an obvious way to identify communities of interest and discover knowledgeable co-workers that could serve as potential mentors.
• K-logs can break down silos and allow us to have "connected content" by using bi-directional linking systems like TrackBack.

Drawbacks to Blogging
First of all, many KM initiatives don't require any technology. Those that do may not find the simplicity of blog posting adequate to meet the requirements for the project. In some cases, blogging is the right tool for the job. It offers a lightweight content management system that allows authors to add brief content entries to the Web with ease.

While some people will see the potential for blogs to help transfer knowledge, many will point out the shortfalls of blogs. The fact is many blogs have a spurt of activity and then lie dormant. Bloggers find everything about their own lives fascinating and worth sharing, including what their cat ate for dinner. The ratio of signal to noise is a very real concern. No one wants to plough through more garbage in search of a few nuggets of gold or wisdom!

Another area of concern is sitewide search engines. In some cases, without tuning or development of Web site collections, including blog content in corporate search results may actually hinder search relevancy more than it helps.

Blogging Tools
There are dozens of blogging tools that can be used for KM initiatives. At a minimum, a toolkit should support multiple blogs, offer an archive search, and allow categorization of content. Depending on the purpose of your blog, you might want to consider content distribution features like RSS feeds and e-mail alerts. Consider whether a comment feature is essential or the ability for bloggers to subscribe to other news services within the blogging toolkit. For more help with selecting blogging software, take a look at my column, "Blogging Software for Intranet Applications."5 Two companies that have focused on enterprise blogging suites are Trellix [www.trellix.com] and Traction software [http:// www.tractionsoftware.com/index.htm].

Next Steps
Blogging software is the right tool for many small intranet projects. It's fast to set up and puts the publishing power in the hands of the author. If you think blogs might be a tool that will work for an intranet project, test drive one of the free remotely hosted blog services like Blogger.com. Setting up a community of bloggers, k-loggers, is definitely an option. To find out more about k-logs and how they've been put to use, check out the Yahoo Group k-logs [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/]. v

1 Patti Anklam, Social Network Analysis, KMWorld 2002 http://www. byeday.net/sna/assets/documents/KMWorld%20SNA%20Patti%20Anklam.ppt

2 Michel Grundstein, Chapter 12 From Capitalizing on Company Know- ledge to Knowledge Management, p. 264 in Morey, Maybury and Thuraisingham, Knowledge Management: Classic and Contemporary Works, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000.

3. tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog http://www.rklau.com/tins/stories/2002/ 07/02/weblogsAndFirmwideKnowledgeManagement.html.

4. John Robb's Radio Weblog Friday, January 25, 2002 http://jrobb. userland.com/2002/01/25.html.

5. D. Fichter, "Blogging Software for Intranet Applications," Online, Volume 27, Number 1, January/February 2003, p. 61.