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Wherein Matt Mower (aka rubymatt on FreeNode) rambles about technology, the love of a good MacTop, ruby coding, rails, topics, knowledge management and learning, and politics.

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Curiouser and Curiouser! on micro-content http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic micro-content Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Knowledge Centrifuge Sun, 26 Oct 2003 21:13:00 +0000 As we get closer to release I've found myself explaining what <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> and I are doing with <a href="http://w4.evectors.it/">K-Collector</a>, what the product is about. So far the best explanation I have come up with is: <div style="text-align: left; margin-left: 40px;">Realtime Knowledge Management </div> What I've been trying to do is make the case that knowledge management and document management aren't the same thing. Most knowledge in a company begins life as a granule of information, micro-knowledge. It exists for a time and, if not exploited, likely dies away to be discovered again later if needed. Quite often the inertia that has to be overcome in order to turn such a granule into the sort of document you would load into Livelink, Documentum or some equivalent product is overwhelming compared to the perceived value, at that moment, of the knowledge itself. It is only when the cost of repeated rediscovery begins to bite that someone finally does the decent thing. The corrollary to this is that the benefits of knowing that you know this information are not felt until quite late in it's lifecycle. I would guess that, by the time a lot of information is formally documented, it's probably well on the well to being out of date or irrelevant (is this your intranet?) By contrast the K-Collector approach collects information while it is still fresh and combines it with other related information before presenting to users for them to see if it meets their needs. That which is good can be promoted to a more appropriate place (for example a <a href="http://www.socialtext.com/">Wiki</a>) Things which don't make the cut fade into the background but, crucially, are not lost. I imagine K-Collector as being a kind of knowledge centrifuge, spinning together all kinds of different bits of information and separating out the good stuff for you. At the heart of K-Collector and determining what makes 'the good stuff' are topics. Topics act as markers for points of interest around which information can be clustered. The Who, What, Where, When metaphor we have adopted is - we think - a really simple way of considering what is important to us all (although, prompted by <a href="http://www.henshall.com/blog/">Stuart Henshall</a>, I have been wondering about Why as a 5th W). I think of K-Collector as a kind of multi-dimensional database where each topic slices through the available information. We're working on some pretty cool topic related trickery for future versions that will take this idea and make it a lot more powerful. I'm hoping to get back to writing soon and share more about what we are doing. I hope this is useful in the meantime. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001681.html I am not a vector. I am a free man! Mon, 24 Nov 2003 15:22:16 +0000 We've posted an <A href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/story$num=4&sec=1&data=kcollector">essay</A> which attempts to highlight where we think organisations can benefit from blogging. <%softShadow("http://paolo.evectors.it/stories/vectorWorkers/images/img6.gif")%> It continues our effective organsiations theme and uses what we think is a very strong visual metaphor for understanding how different organisations can apply similar amounts of effort but get wildy different results. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001773.html