In the beginning, blogs were celebrated as personal knowledge stores, a perception I've been sceptical of from early on - just because we have blogs, our personal storage capacity for what-to-find-where-data doesn't grow. This blog seems to have reached the point where I cannot find any given past entry just with a Google search for a specific word or two any more. One short entry on the benefits of having people with different backgrounds and perspectives on a team remains lost (but it is probably not worth spending more time with digging deeper for it).
Zooming out, bigger picture of "knowledge recalling": what knowledge applications, blogs and (even more so) wikis need is better search, better search than we have now, plus fast page and fast editor loading. Ross Mayfield calls this Rapid Recall. Speaking of wikis, where it will be of most use, he says:
It let's us simply contribute, knowing that we can recall later. Others can recall, edit it, link or tag it, and it will pop back to top of mind if it is important. We can forget when immediately processing what crosses our desk when we have confidence in rapid recall.
(The second field on which future generations of wiki tools will see vast improvements is user interfaces. Issue include: establishing as a new contributor whats already where in a wiki, establishing the context of a given wikipage, graphical mechanisms to find and connect related pages, moving towards shorter pages, and others. Have a look at Server Side Wiki, an Enterprise Wiki example page, the Socialtext products and at Wikipedia to see what wiki interfaces we have today, and how they already have progressed.)
Comments are closed at the moment. I will post a blog entry as soon as they are available again.
