A KM Experience Reaches My Sister

My sister has been very interested in what I am learning in this KM class from the first day in September. She is working at a small internet start-up company doing search-engine optimization, and has always made it a priority to learn the latest and greatest on the internet. The company she is working at is called Yodle, and is based on a school project designed at the Warton School of Business. At the ripe young age of 26, the founder uses many technologically advanced techniques in making his business run as efficiently as possible. Just this past week, she mentioned that all the stuff I have told her about in my class is coming to Yodle!

Apparently the company is starting their own wiki in order to make it easier for the employees to contact people for advice on how to better handle clients. They created the wiki to store things like powerpoint slides made for presentations and things that they generally don't know where to store. In addition to file storage and advice sections, they wiki is also going to act as a social networking site. The employees already have a contact directory that lists the accounts that everyone has, but the wiki is adding a section for every employee to list some things about themselves "to make employees feel more comfortable contacting people they don't know." 

The interesting thing about this wiki though, is that not all employees can have access to change things. The employees have to go through an administrator to update anything. My first question when hearing this was "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a wiki?" But after thinking about it some more, it seems the wiki isn't being used for the same purposes we have discussed in class, although it does take advantage of the enormous flexibility. Yodle is using a wiki as a kind of internal portal, but I wonder how this will evolve in the coming years as Yodle's clients and problems grow.  Any thoughts?

The KM Response to the Economic Crisis

In addition to discussing how KM is used with organizations, we talked about KM tools open to the general public. I have listed some of them in the links on the right. I found an extremely interesting article recently about how blogging is being used to combat the economic crisis and everyone being laid off from their jobs. The article mentions how free lance writers are going to be attempting a new style of creating a career. They call it "guerilla" like as in guerilla warfare. Their approach seems to be going back to the American entrepreneurial style. A lot liked linked in, new writer blogs can act as a yellow pages for people looking to hire writers or publish books. It's fascninating how Web 2.0 tools are changing and becoming flexible to our society. 

In my first blog post on my experiences with KM, I mentioned that the youth generation was becoming reliant on new KM tools and that eventually this will be able to be seen in the workplace. This article reinforces that and shows that now the workplace is becoming intertwined with our personal KM needs. In organizations blogs are also being used as kind of advertisements for skills and ideas. Which brings me to my thought of using a "Craigs List" within an organization to be able to progress ones job promotion quicker. Ultimately employees may have to use this "guerilla" career building technqies on an everyday basis. Scary thought! 

"For Laid-Off Journalists, Free Blog Accounts"

Web 3.0

In prepartion for the Knowledge Management forecasting paper coming up, I have decided to start looking into what is out there. I came across this article on a NY Times Blog and found it very interesting. The blog post speaks about how Silicon Valley is moving beyond Web 2.0 tools and moving to what they call the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 tools. The post also mentions that previously the Web 2.0 tools are only available to large corporations and sharing/creating knowledge within them. This Web 3.0 that is coming about is an attempt to bring Web 2.0 to the average user. I am fully aware that I am not an expert in this, but from what I have seen besides the few extremely large corporations Web 2.0 is not being fully utilized. How can companies think that coming up with new tools is going to help if they aren't even using current tools available? Also is this shift to Web 3.0 really a semantic web? Or is it just opening integrated Web 2.0 tools to the general public? I am excited to see what Silicon Valley has come up with, but I am concerned about its implementation. If smaller companies can't even implement Web 2.0 how are they going to be able to move to Web 3.0?

Semantic Web Blog Post YouTube Video on Web 3.0