We know too much and are convinced of too little, T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays 1928.

One of the pressures I try to resist is the feeling that I ought to keep up with the streams of thought and knowledge concerning my areas of interest. Apart from the fact that it would be a futile attempt, I am convinced that in these days of knowledge economy the way of wisdom may be, on occasions, to close the door and find time to reflect. Knowing as much as possible is no guarantee to right action.

With so much material being generated on the web, how do we find those ideas that represent real quality? And how do we go about promoting content of our own that is worthy of the attention of others? I have experimented over the last year and a half with web-logging or "blogging". My motivation has been twofold.

Firstly, I have wanted to use a weblog as a tool for personal knowledge management. It has worked up to a point. I have noticed that I have not blogged as often as I have had ideas that needed to be jotted down. Instead I have waited until I had time to craft something I was happy to publish to the web. This has meant that I have not noted down some potentially useful ideas, meaning they don't get developed, and so some of the benefits of a weblog as a personal knowledge tool have been missed.

Summary of an article published by Harry Scarbrough of the Warwick Business School in KM Review called "Why employees don't share what they know"

A table showing 4 different modes of knowledge behaviour. The appropriate intervention should reflect the prevailing mode. If not we may be addressing the wrong problem.

The 3Cs of Knowledge Sharing:
Culture, Co-opetition and Commitment by David J. Skyrme

Looks at reasons people don't share knowledge, and finishes with incentives to overcome this.

David Wilcox on technology, engagement, governance

A site that explores the relationship between human relationships and structures and internet technology.

Jack : Knowledge Jolt

A consultant active in KM

A fascinating interview with Richard Thieme | Linux Journal who is described as a philosopher of information technology, describing the interactions between technology and human experience. A number of points stand out for me in this interiew by Mick Bauer. Here are three that I think are particularly worthy of consideration.

Thieme asserts that computer technology defines our reality in a similar way to language. Modern culture has been formed through its interaction with and interpretation of written texts:

I could see by contrast that interacting with text on computers created a different experience, shifted how we thought about our possibilities, our work, meaning, ourselves--everything.

Secondly, the long term impact of technology:

In the short term, we always overstate the effects of new technologies. But in the long run, we always understate them.

Finally, on the role of unconventional thinkers who cross the boundaries of disciplines and conventional ways of acting and thinking:

First, they sound crazy. Then, they sound funny. Then, people attack them. Then, everybody believes that they always agreed with them all along. That's when you know their way of seeing things has become the core of a new consensus reality, and already new truths that contradict that are arriving on the edges.

One of the major problems in managing a weblog, or any site where visitors can leave comments, is that there are some that abuse the open nature of the web in order to advertise either unsavoury goods or copied software. These are the spammers. Their ploy is to insert their url into as thousands of sites in order to achieve a high search engine rating.

Their are various solutions to this, none of them entirely effective, but I found an interesting discussion on the alternatives at Sitepoint.

The danger in all this, as in any community that includes those that abuse freedom, is that the security measures we find necessary start to undermine the very freedoms we wish to preserve. This is where measures taken at the individual level are inadequate. We also need action at government level to put web abusers out of business.

Heres an article I want to think through some more: Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

I owe this link to George Siemens: HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation: Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors

Its an interesting article, and I won't comment further until I have read it more carefully.

Having installed SuSE 9.2 I have been trying out suspend (hibernate). The suspend to disk works fine, although I have to make sure no applications are open (or visible on the desktop) as the password box is obscured behind the application windows!

With suspend to RAM, the machine (an NX9005) goes to sleep, but wakes up with a blank screen (so I have no idea what it is doing).

I have found this comment "I had nothing but trouble with suspend-to-ram until I used some extra parameters in GRUB. With IBM's Thinkpads it's best to use the option "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" upon GRUB's start-up." SuSE Linux Forums -> Hibernate on Linux?

Something to try out.

Knowledge Management is seen by some as just one more trendy business idea that has not quite lived up to its promise. What KM is actually about seems not entirely clear, and of those I have spoken to there are some rather diverse perspectives.

According to a recent article by Martin White in EContentMag.com, who borrows his title from elsewhere, Knowledge Management involves neither knowledge nor management. Any administrator of an academic organisation could tell about the difficulty of managing those that create, share, and convey knowledge. At best, management can administrate the context in which knowledge is created, and therefore act as a facilitator. But knowledge is personal and complex. It is not a commodity that can be organised and controlled according to strict rules.

Should we then eschew the term KM in favour of Knowledge Exchange, or KE, as suggested by Martin White? "Exchange" of knowledge certainly points toward the voluntary, personal, and networking nature of knowledge. But we are also concerned with the creation of knowledge, and with maintaining a context in which knowledge can flourish. And further than this, in the business context, the focus is clearly on improved company performance.

Whatever we call it, the knowledge dimension of productive work is closely related to the culture, values, and mission of a particular organisation. The latter are not managed! They are fostered, cultivated, developed. They are as vital a component for success as aspects of a business that can be managed.

My suggestion is that we talk of attending to the knowledge dimension, and reserve management to information and resources that form part of the knowledge enabling infrastructure. Perhaps the technology should be referred to as KSM, Knowledge Support Management.

KSM on its own, as many have proven over the last few years, does not in and of itself bring any improvement to business success. Cultivating the knowledge dimension is not a quantifiable process. But, as with culture, values, and mission, the organisations that stand out are those that have got it right.