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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.

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Here's a mop-up-the-drool review of BlinkX, a search sidebar product. This is an example of contextual, implicit search, not unlike dashboard. It certainly seems useful to have relevant information automatically made available to you. But there are two (non-technical) challenges with bringing this kind of software to market. First, data off the public internet is usually not useful—and most people know to use Google when it can be. Secondly, there is a trust barrier that prevents users from opening their own data to such a product.

In the first case, an automatic sidebar might save you some typing, but if you want to do a Google search it's often just a text-selection and right-click away. However, when you're looking to get something done—rather than just be distracted by random stuff to read—you don't need constant google results. If you sell Widgets, you probably already know that the company you work for makes Widgets and that effective selling requires courtesy. You need to know much more specific stuff, especially from your past successes and mistakes. The stuff you need isn't on the public internet.

On the other hand, an individual or company would be profoundly naieve to open confidential data to an internet startup offering to index it for your convenience. That smells like spyware. After years of web-based email, even Google found that privacy norms weren't universally understood. And I wouldn't trust even Google with the contents of my hard drive. Dashboard, which is an open source application, overcomes these problems because it doesn't depend on any central entity, but I don't think it's anywhere near production-ready yet.

So, what about selling to companies? I think there is some potential here, but even a great contextual search application isn't going to sell on its own. Enterprise buyers will, however, see it as a major benefit if integrated into a broader knowledge management framework. Crucially, the search must acquire context from specific business applications and data, and provide results in useful, structured formats. For example, it should notice if you're entering a sales prospect form for General Motors and show you all previous sales attempts with GM, organized into sucesses and failures. It should show you current data on GM's profit in the location you are targeting. It should show you the latest intelligence on which executives to pitch to, along with their personal tastes. Then you know that your best bet is to offer John Doe in Dearborn a ride to golf in your CTS-V, but best wait until Q2 financials are done.

If I were developing a product like BlinkX, I'd start by partnering with enterprise KM (knowledge management) and CMS (content management) vendors and consultants. These markets have some special advantages. First, you can sell to end users and not just advertisers. Second, the business context can trump individual privacy concerns, at least at the corporate purchasing level. Finally, the ubiquitous search sidebar is a great motivator to get people into the habit of using and contributing to knowledge repositories. It's a natural symbiosis.

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now to see if I can manage a second international trip in September…

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I guess I'm on a Dave Pollard kick.

• I started with his list of the top 10 most important ideas in blogs for 2003.
• He brings up some good points about Purple Cows in Knowledge Management.
• What's a Purple Cow, you ask?
• And, well, can they revive KM?

As some readers will know, the purple cow has special meaning to me as the mascot of my alma mater, Williams College. Maybe it's a sign.

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A book chapter about weblogs and knowledge management.

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A mailing list about blogs and knowledge management.