Blogging, personal publishing, micro-publishing, whatever you want to call it (I’ll keep calling it blogging for now), has two simultaneous– and superficially contradictory– characteristics. Blogs are just tools which can only play one part in the much larger process of creating a knowledge space. Blogs are– in and of themselves– a revolutionary development in the social process of communication. So blogs are simultaneously insufficient and revolutionary.
The relative single-mindedness and ubiquity of blogging software and hosting combined with the low barrier to entry have sparked the revolution, in hindsight a logical next step given our natural desire to communicate and the growth of the web. But the simplicity of the tools and their widespread adoption make them unsuitable as a sole-tool for knowledge management.
This isn’t a failing, but a feature. If the tools become too complex, users won’t use them. Blogs aren’t meant to fulfill all the needs of knowledge workers or serve as knowledge repositories. Aloow them to flourish and succeed on their own terms. What blogs and bloggers are doing– what their relative success is doing– is pointing us away from the tarbabies that are monolithic applications. KM thinkers should harness the strengths of the blog as one part of a confederation of small tools loosely joined