GWSAE is offering an telephone/web seminar this month on knowledge management. The program features Larry Prusak (who coined the term) and Seth Kahan. Seth was one of the folks who developed the World Bank’s KM program, which I have heard very good things about. I’ll be signing up for this one.

Here is another project looking at how to use the structure of a facet thesaurus for web site navigation: FacetMap. They even allow you to build your own navigation system (hosted on their site) by entering keywords into a hierarchical relationship.

Jon Udell is on target with his coment below about how weblogs can facilitate knowledge exchange around the use of technology:

For years people have argued that software must relentlessly improve its score on the “mom test” and that is certainly true. But there’s another angle here comes back to the KM aspects of blogging. When we narrate, we externalize what we know. We convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. This can help software become more usable for two reasons. First, when technologists narrate what they know, they’re more likely to realize how much tacit knowledge they have and expect in others. Second, when non-technologists narrate what they know, technologists can see more clearly that the expected tacit knowledge is missing.

I can immediately think of several software applications in my office that would be better understood and used by our staff if more features were explained by power users.  Of course those power users need to also be good communicators, which can sometimes be a tripping point.

I’ve been getting up to speed on what has been discussed and discovered in the past couple of years about using web logs for knowledge management.  I continually find articles and analysis that clarify the ideas that have been bouncing around in my head.

The latest is an article on elearningpost.com that provides an analysis of how weblogging fits into the traditional view of KM.  The core idea I take away from here is that weblogs (or knowledge logs or klogs) facilitate tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer. This is essentially the sharing of wisdom about a certain practice or profession by an individual for an audience. Tacit-to-tacit is the hardest to facilitate and the piece that has failed in so many other KM initiaitves. Perhaps blogs are the answer….

This article came out on May 14, 2001. Only a year to go to get caught up!

John Robb is leading a discussion group exploring how to use weblogging as a knowledge management tool on corporate intranets. Lots of good ideas floating around on this list. One interesting idea is to leverage the google-bombing effect of weblogs by indexing a weblogged intranet with a Google search appliance.