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Lilia Efimova believes knowledge work is all about unique individuals:

knowledge worker is someone who creates value by being subjective

I think she's onto something. Blogs, unlike other "knowledge management" tools, center around a person. This is important because it gives individuals the freedom to post whatever they want. By eliminating the fear that something you care about doesn't belong in the system somewhere, the act of posting is always much closer at hand. You don't even have to ask yourself if something belongs—you get so used to writing things down on your blog that you instead have to wonder, when wouldn't I want to share this {idea, feeling, picture, tip, joke} with other people?

And so people simply care more about blogs than other KM tools. The boat of knowledge written down on the blog is lifted by the tide of person-centered writing and discussion.

You might think that if you wanted to help your people sell widgets, you could just give them a widget-sale-data-sharing system and forget about the family pictures, stupid jokes, and indulgent ramblings you see on blogs all the time. At the very least, they could still record and exchange the same knowledge about widget-selling, which is all you care about. Right?

Perhaps not. Will your widget salespeople feel as comfortable writing about their sales failures in this task-centered environment? In a blog, a reader sees many sides of the author, automatically triggering empathy. Some people think they can do well in a constrained communications channel, optimizing their life to become the top widget sales performer in the northeast region. But the more your company's success depends on people doing their best work cooperatively, truly caring about organizational goals, and maintaining a deep company culture, the less a constrained channel can offer.

Getting people to open up and build relationships between each other is risky and complicated. Mistakes are made and feelings can be hurt. But the accelerated spread of knowledge, loyalty, help, and love is well worth it.