Dear all,
sorry about the subject line but this posting was prompted by a
posting by Prof Tom Wilson to <KNOW-ORG@...> and
<IR-DISCUSS@...>. It ran something like this:

> Colleagues may be interested not only in David Gurteen's
> comments on the paper in Information Research, but also in the
> rest of his newsletter.
...
> The Nonsense of Knowledge Management:
> http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/ID/X002AB736?
> open&r=3&p=5455

I think this point to an interesting phenomenon I have not noticed
before: the (self referential) role of blogs in the dissemination of
information. The Gurteen Knowledge Weblog, Knowledge-Log refers to
Sébastien Paquet's Weblog, Seb's Open Research.

The above link points to Tom's paper, however I noticed a similar
pattern with my own paper, the duality of knowledge:

http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html

which appeared in the same issue of Information Research.

This has been picked up by several Weblogs. Some seem to have made a
genuine effort to review the paper, e.g:

http://www.downes.ca/archive/02/10_21_news_OLDaily.htm
http://www.internettime.com/blog/archives/000437.html#000437
http://radio.weblogs.com/0114226/2002/10/29.html#a48
http://eyepopping.manilasites.com/

But most appear to have either reproduced the abstract, e.g.

http://onepine.blogspot.com/
http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000511.php#000511
http://www.schockwellenreiter.de/2002/10/25.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0113442/2002/10/25.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0104937/2002/10/23.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101569/2002/10/22.html
http://carbon-unit.blogspot.com/2002_09_29_carbon-unit_archive.html

Or to have to have reproduced a review in e-learningpost:
(http://www.elearningpost.com/archives/2002_10.asp) For example:

http://www.linqx.dk/sol/index.php?searchterm=&sp=7
http://vowe.net/archives/002598.html#002598
http://hitchcock.dlt.asu.edu/blogs/asuonline/archives/000039.html

Has anybody else noticed this happening before or have I just been
missing the obvious (or am I simply missing the point of blogs?)

I am really quite surprised at how quickly an idea can spread. Does
anybody have any thoughts on the role of blogs in communities of
practice and/or KM?

--------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Kimble
Department of Computer Science, University of York,
YO10 5DD, York, UK
tel: +44 1904 433380 fax: +44 1904 432767
Home: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble
MIS group: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/