There were a couple of good nuggets in the presentations but I guess I was disappointed in the track overall. Or maybe what I was really disappointed in was the apparent lack of progress corporations have made incorporating internal blogs into overall Knowledge Management initiatives.

It is unfair of me to generalize that because there were no case studies from real corporations Corporate America must not be doing enough to leverage technologies like blogs, wikis, and RSS as a meaningful component of their KM program. And, there were a couple of examples given of companies, like IBM, that are doing this. But this is the KM World conference, is it not? If companies had compelling stories to tell around internal blogging initiatives where would they be presented if not here?

My company is a small services firm so our experience may not be transferrable to companies the size of our typical client. But, for what it is worth, here is an old post I wrote on why I think our internal blog initiative failed. At some point, I hope to correct these mistakes and take another run at it. Maybe by then many others will have shared their stories.

Tom has had some recent success with TiddlyWikki, which is a “reusable non-linear personal web notebook” that runs locally and requires no server.

• I don’t have to fire up my laptop to post. I can do it from any networked device.
• I’ve got tons of space as opposed to the 40MB included with Radio.
• The technology foundation is more intuitive. It’s LAMP-based so there are a lot of resources available. Radio Userland is based on Frontier which is not nearly as ubiquitous as LAMP.
• Similar to the prior point, I love that it uses a relational back-end. I don’t have to re-publish pages when I change the look-and-feel. And the model is more like what I’m used to. Front-end web page talks to back-end database. Simple. I get it.
• My aggregator is for aggregating and my blog tool is for blogging. The built-in RSS aggregator in Radio is okay, but I didn’t want to have to fire up Radio to check my feeds. Sometimes I’d use Sage, but, again, I’d have to fire up Radio if I came across something post-worthy. Now, I use Sage all of the time–I hit the bookmarklet to post and I’m there.

In my early days of Radio I thought it might be a good tool to roll out internally. That was before I had been exposed to the server-based blog tools. And, quite honestly, I think I was forgetting the lesson we’ve all already learned about distributing and maintaining client apps versus running them on a centrally-managed server infrastructure with a thin client.

I’ll grant that it is extremely easy to set up a public blog with Radio. I tweaked my config to publish to both a public site and an internal site and that was straightforward for a technical user. When I think about folks in our sales organization making those same tweaks and maybe wanting to customize their templates, I think about what Walter said to Smokey in The Big Lebowski, “You are entering a world of pain.”

I imagine Userland’s answer to this would be, “You are right. For a big intranet project you should use Manila, our server-based product.” Maybe so. But you’d still have to bone up on Frontier.

Anyway, I’m not trying to dog Radio here. I’m just excited about my choice to switch.

Here’s a summary of what I did:

1. Moved images to gallery. This gave me an excuse to try out Gallery and gives me a decent way to manage the images I reference from stories and posts.

2. Moved stories by hand, cleaning up HTML and changing out IMG references to gallery. This would have been a decent job for a Perl script but I didn’t have that many to move. (While prowling around I found some old stories that Radio was no longer publishing for some reason. Thanks, Radio!).

3. Imported mySubscriptions.opml into blogroll.

4. Created categories to match old categories. As it turns out, this wasn’t necessary. The RSS importer creates categories for imported posts as it needs to.

5. Added rewrite rule to .htaccess to try to address any links in my posts:

RewriteRule ^/0117027/categories/xml/([0-9]{4})/(.*).html /newbloglocation/archives/$1/$2 [R=permanent]

6. Updated the UTC time offset in my WordPress options. (I just hadn’t had a chance to do it until now).

7. Edited /www/wp-admin/import-rss.php to tell it the name of the XML file to import.

8. Wrote an XSLT stylesheet to filter unwanted post categories. I was using Radio to post to my public blog as well as an internal server at Navigator. The XSL simply transformed the existing RSS into a “public” version without the internal categories. I used Perl to recursively cruise through the Radio backup posts directory structure and transform the XML.

9. Uploaded the transformed RSS files to the site and ran the import-rss.php script.

I’ve probably got more cleanup to do but at least it is all moved over.

Knowledge Management for an IT Department?. Slashdot Sep 30 2005 8:25PM GMT [Moreover Technologies - Knowledge management news]

The key issues, as I’ve mentioned before are:

• it has to be easy to contribute content
• it has to be easy to find content (via search and possibly taxonomy browsing)
• it has to be secure
• it has to have all of the “-abilities” (eg, scalability, extensibility, usability, etc.).

Something like a combination of blogs, wikis, possibly a document repository, and a search engine for the whole thing ought to do the trick.