Blogging: Why would I want to do that?!

A few weeks ago I was at an internal presentation on social computing when one of my colleagues, Lauren, asked the question:

“why would I want to do that?”

The presentation by Maria and Andrew included aspects on blogging and about how the web has evolved to support the social aspects of knowledge work. Lauren , who had only recently joined our Web and Information Management Service Offering, wondered why you’d spend hours at a computer at work and then go home and spend hours blogging. It’s a fair question and certainly one I pondered when I was struggling about whether to blog or not to blog.

The knowledge manager in me knows that there’s an incredible amount of value in storytelling and blogs provide the means to do this in spades! When I first heard about blogging it was about storytelling in reference to the war in Iraq - a diary and a news report about what was going on from a personal perspective. It was the very essence of a blog as we knew it then - a web log. But are all blogs web logs? Are blogs just an online diary? Are blogs just about telling your story. No. I don’t think so. I’d even go so far as to say that the nature of the blog has changed since then.

Stephen Collins, Andrew Boyd, and I, have been blogging about knowledge workers, web workers, and burst mode work. As Andrew jokingly reminds me, it’s probably partly my fault - I bagged Anne Zelekna’s blog post on burst vs. busy work. I suggested that Anne was erroneously talking about ‘web workers’ when she should have been talking about ‘knowledge workers’ and their need for appropriate tools and supporting management structures. My post seemed to set things in motion.

As the dust began to settle, and our furrious blogging began to see thoughts emerge on the nature of knowledge work, enterprise 2.0,and more recently government 2.0 (after Gary Nairn announced blogs as government forums for discussion of policy), I reflected on what had happened. We weren’t using blogs to write about our day, or something that had happened in our work. It wasn’t a news channel. We were using blogs to articulate thoughts in our head, we were using them in a way that mirrors the old science peer review system. That is, writing, publishing, generating comment and discussion on a topic. And then writing some more. Way back in 2004, Donna Maurer was asking the question whether we blog rather than discuss things. Today, Remo Williams’ comment on Greg Mankiw’s blog suggests that blogging as discussion is now happening in academia.

Brad Delong, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, supports this view. He writes:

“[blogging] is a promising way to … communicate with a mass audience rather than merely an ivory-tower audience.

Academics who blog think more profound thoughts, have a bigger influence on the world — both the academic and the broader worlds — and are happier for it.”

While I wouldn’t suggest that the world is happier for my thoughts, big or small, but I’d like to think they provoke talk within the KM and IA communities. Blogging helps me clarify my thoughts and as such is an amazing tool for knowledge management and personal information management.

If, like me, you’re a knowledge worker rather than a process worker, you use knowledge and information to get your work done. If you need to find information, clarify your thoughts and share them with others before you write that paper, maybe blogging is the way to help you get your proverbial ducks in a row. Maybe blogging will help you get comments from others, whether they’re peers, colleagues or people you don’t even know who are also doing the same sorta stuff as you.

Why would you want to blog? If you’re a knowledge worker, I’d say why not?!

M

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