Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing,by Martin Roell, is the a paper he presented to BlogTalk 2.0 in Vienna in July 2004. He starts with a point that can’t be made too often, knowledge is human, it is not an attribute of information systems or a fancy version of information. More importantly, knowledge is not a collection of objects, it is an aptitude or capability in humans to re-create on appropriate demand.
Roell then swerves off to talk about “knowledge workers”, a horrid phrase that should be banned. The paper redeems itself by turning at the end to blogs and how researchers can use them as open filing cabinets. I like the idea of “knowledge journals” – it suggests that knowledge has a narrative rather than being a system of fact-jects. Whether research blogs ever lead to collaborative projects or not, they capture fragments of the path, which in the humanities is all we have.