Mopsos

I just came back from Blogwalk 1.0, an informal conference on weblogs for business organized by Ton, Lilia and Sebastien at the Telematica Instituut in Entschede, Netherlands.

It took me ages to get there and to come back, and I looked like an old rat in such a young assembly (see Andy's and Ton's and Martin's photos for documentary evidence of this), but it was really worth the journey. Thanks for the invitation, guys!

I came out of curiosity. I was obviously interested by the topic itself, but I really wanted to know if a gathering of people of such diverse origins, experiences and personalities only on the basis of what they wrote on their weblogs daily could produce anything of good quality. Well, I must say I was impressed. The organizers really did a great job of facilitation, the participants literally covered the walls of yellow post-its, and for the first time in my life, I actually thought that 80% of these little notes were relevant to the topic and actually useful for me.

In two words: It worked!

I came out with three new ideas:

1- As they are deep conversations with oneself and with the world, weblogs connect like-minded people, thus playing a key role in the grassroots formation of communities of practice.

2- A necessary enhancement of weblogging technology is the ability to choose your audience by ticking a box just before saving. Some entries would be made accessible to the entire world (Internet), others would be restricted to your company (Intranet), to one or the other of your communities of practice (Extranet), to your family and friends etc... This by the way is coherent with Microsoft's Weltanschauung.

3- The core issue underlying any knowledge management technology (weblogs being one of them) is really information architecture. One must really understand the morphology and syntax of web-based communication, understand the differences between data, content, information and document, dig into XML tagging etc. Weblogs are the simplest form of content publishing because they provide very little structure and are easy to use. They convey rich and contextual -but not actionable- information . The more structure is given to a publication, the more actionable it becomes. But at the same time the publication process becomes more constrained (workflows, taxonomies etc.)

Will Blogwalk morph into a community of practice for professional blogging? I sincerely hope so.

Bonjour Martin,

Thanks for coming to BlogWalk 1.0. I'm glad you had such a good experience.

A la prochaine,

Ton

Posted by: Ton Zijlstra at March 22, 2004 06:46 AM

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