George Dafermos has posted a long paper, Blogging the Market:
For years it has been suggested that online communities will revolutionalise the way organisations operate; however, the only social process/technological infrastructure that has reached this potential and is dynamically evolving is the weblog. It takes no technical savvy to set up a weblog and start talking to your customers. That's why weblogs are huge: they take the power out of the IT department and the webmaster's hegemony and hand it over to where knowledge really resides - to the individual workers who are knowledgeable enough and know how to speak with a human voice. Now, organisational structure loses its historic role of managing power relations at a distance, and as a result the organisation becomes truly hyperlinked and power shifts to where knowledge actually resides.Originally recommended by John Robb on the Yahoo Group, Weblogs for Knowledge Management, with a link to the same from his blog, it has now been flagged up by David Weinberger: 'it covers a huge amount of ground. I'm sure I'll be returning to it frequently as I try to remember who said this or that insightful thing about weblogs'.
Update (13.1.2004): see Cruft for further discussion of Blogging the Market: 'Mr. Dafermos comes close to the real benefit of weblogs inside a company but misses it. The benefit is not found in Knowledge Management, the search and retrieval of information, the benefit is found in workflow. In any business, information and ideas FLOW though the organization up and down the hierarchy. The flow happens via email, paper, conversations, specialized software and a multitude of other means. This flow of ideas, approvals, and comments is key to a business's success. It is not simple search and retrieval, it is directed flow of information to the right places to allow people to do their part. It is in this area of workflow where weblogs can play a vital role. Weblogs alone are not the 'killer app', they are simply part of the new wave of information flow such as RSS, ATOM, media encapsulation, commenting, and other blogosphere friendly technologies.'
