Deb Coates, IT Specialist
Continuing Education and Communication Systems
Iowa State University
Working Paper #1b

July 29, 2002

Setting up and Using Weblogs for Knowledge Sharing

Part Two

As mentioned in Part One (Weblogs as Trusted Sources and Knowledge Filters), there are many reasons for web logging, or blogging as it’s more commonly called.  Pyra, developers of Blogger software estimates that 100,000 people are currently using their software; Userland says that over 10,000 people have purchased Radio Userland; Movable Type is considered one of the most popular current blogging tools.  According to Essential Blogging, a new book from O’Reilly, due out in August, 2002, there are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the Internet with thousands more starting up every day.

Cory Doctorow calls BoingBoing his outboard brain.  Community managers at Macromedia (Matt Brown's Dreamweaver weblog; JD on MX; An Architect's View) keep web logs so they can update users on new releases, bugs, and things they just happen to be excited about.  GuerrillaNews and Privacy Parts blog about computer security and privacy issues respectively.  Part one of this paper looked at using web logs to establish yourself as a trusted source and provide a filtering service for people interested in the particular kinds of knowledge that you are an expert in.

In keeping with the theme of part one, let’s assume your purpose in setting up a web log is to share information and develop your site as a trusted source for evaluating and discovering knowledge.  Even with a fairly specific purpose, there are different traditions and different styles of web logs.  Some are truly clipping services, primarily links with little additional content, some intersperse commented links with brief essays and graphics, some are essentially personal diaries, and some combine aspects of all three.  At this stage you will want to spend some time looking at web logs.  I’d suggest picking three or four to check regularly, observing how they change from day to day.

Where can you find useful weblogs?

One of the features that make blogging so popular is the ability to index and link to other weblogs.  Weblogs.com, blogdex and Daypop are three sites that use RSS, XML, and other technology to maintain information on popular and oft-cited links.  They can tell who’s linking to who, what topics they’re linking on, and track the popularity of specific links over time.  If you’re new to weblogging and want to get an overview of what’s out there, Weblogs, Daypop and blogdex are worth checking out.

Once you find one or two interesting web logs, you’ll find it’s easy to ‘grow’ your list.  Like Amazon pages which, along with the book you're interested in, list books that buyers also purchased, most bloggers have sets of links to blogs they read regularly and have found to be rich in useful information. 

As you tour the web and investigate different weblogs, take note of what you like, what you dislike, what’s most useful, easiest to read, what features you take advantage of and what doesn’t seem to matter so much.

Once you have some familiarity with the practical, day to day use of web logs, take a look at the characteristics and features of available blogging tools (http://www.urldir.com/bt/).  Among the factors you’ll want to consider: cost of the blogging tool, support and maintenance, ease of use, server and other technical requirements, features.

All of the primary blogging tools are used by many people.  Each has strengths and weaknesses.  Although I’ve tested several of these tools (Blogger, Conversant, Radio Userland), the one I use regularly is Movable Type.  For the remainder of this paper, specific examples will assume that you’re using a Movable Type setup.  For detailed basic information about setting up and using other blogging tools and more information on Movable Type as well, I’d recommend the O’Reilly book, Essential Blogging.

Movable Type is available for free download at http://www.movabletype.org.  While not strictly shareware (defined as if you like it and use it, buy it), it is possible to make a donation to Movable Type if you use the software regularly.   In exchange for a $20 donation, your web log can be listed in the ‘Recently Updated Weblogs’ listing on Movable Type’s main page.  For a donation of $45 dollars or more, you can also receive direct support.  There will likely be a ‘for-pay’ version of Movable Type in the future.

Requirements for running Movable Type (MT) are:

• An account on a webserver that allows you to run custom CGI scripts.
• Perl, version 5.004_04 or greater, installed on this webserver.
• An FTP program to upload the necessary files to your webserver.
• Javascript and cookies enabled in your browser.
• Support for the DB_File Perl module OR MySQL & DBD::mysql

If you’re not sure you can meet these requirements, check with your system administrator.

Setting up Movable Type

Movable Type (and most other weblogging tools) can be downloaded from the web.  Detailed setup instructions are available at the Movable Type web site and also contained in the O’Reilly book, Essential Blogging.  Some familiarity with setting up CGI scripts is required.

Movable Type provides a management system that looks like:

This system provides for:

• new entries
• editing existing entries
• uploading files
• editing templates
• establishing categories
• setting up a notification system
• configuring your weblog (blog)
• rebuilding your site.
  

A new entry looks like:

An entry can be saved in ‘Draft’ or ‘Publish’ mode.  Once it has been published it will appear in your weblog:

At this point, you have a functioning web log and because you have established a purpose for the web log that links to your own interests and expertise, you have some idea what to 'blog.' 

How do you establish your own voice in a large organization?

If you conduct face-to-face meetings and individual consulting, you already have experience expressing information in your own voice.  When you're delivering a specific educational program, you do so with a professional manner, but you also tell stories, interpret information through your own experience, make contact with the people in your audience in certain ways, and all these things are a unique and essential part of you, the individual, rather than the organization that you're working for.  Your style and voice assure things that the organization alone cannot, that you make individual specific contact with people, that you can adjust the organization's educational material (or your material developed through the organization's resources) to individual questions and concerns, that your own tacit knowledge integrates seamlessly and adds value that the program material alone cannot.  These are also the kinds of things that weblogs, by allowing the possibility of individual voice and personal, professional knowledge and interpretation, can bring to the web that published organizational documents cannot.

So, what can you do to establish your own voice in a weblog?  First, if you and your expertise are also representing a large organization you want to be sure to present your material in a way that indicates your own professionalism.  This means, in part, checking spelling and grammer, choosing specific subjects carefully, allowing opinion and interpretation, but also remaining focussed on the educational and knowledge filtering task that you've undertaken.  People want to 'know' the person they're interacting with.  They want to trust that you have knowledge worth sharing and that they can rely on you, not to tell them what to think, but to help them with the huge task of sifting through and interpreting massive quantities of information.  In addition, you can help them find information they didn't know existed and explain to them what's useful about it and how they might apply it to their own goals and objectives.

Here's an example of a weblog entry that both reports and interprets information:

July 02, 2002

External Storage for your Brain

Cory Doctorow, one of the folks who maintains the excellent and eclectic BoingBoing blog, has a recent column at O'Reilly.net about weblogs as memory tools. Blogging is not only a way to pass knowledge to others without having to constantly walk around the office saying, 'Look at this, look at this.' It's also a way to keep track of stuff for yourself.

Posted by dcoates at 09:14 AM

And another, somewhat different, example:

April 30, 2002

People-powered Software

Technology should be useful.

This simple tenet sometimes seems to have escaped the attention of software designers who release products that in the final analysis seem neither useful or usable.

In a recent article on knowledge management at CIO, Bonnie Nardi, an anthropologist working for Agilent, says that people often need to communicate with people in the organization who aren't connected to them by lines on an organizational chart. But too often, collaboration software creates barriers to the process rather than facilitating it.

Currently, collaboration, workflow and knowledge management applications are designed to manage knowledge, not support individual personal networks. But knowledge, like Soylent Green, is people and exchanging knowledge means making it easy to get in touch and stay in touch.

Posted by dcoates at 10:15 AM

Community and discussion

You've gotten your weblog installed.  You've done some research on the web and gotten a feel for the myriad ways weblogs are being used.  You've started making entries and you've begun telling people how to find your weblog for the information they need.  Because weblogs are about interconnectedness and sharing as well as finding and indexing knowledge, there are a number of options available for extending your weblog by opening it up for discussion and community building.  In Movable Type, you can choose to allow visitors to your weblog to leave comments on your posts.  You can respond to these comments with additional comments of your own.  In general, weblog discussions do not take on the 'anything goes', 'loudest voice wins' aspect that pervades some Usenet-style newsgroup discussions.  You can request that visitors leaving comments identify themselves, edit or remove comments, ban persistent offenders, or close off comments altogether.

Comment discussions in Movable Type (other weblogging software also allow for comments to be added) will generally look something like:

For a weblog that makes extensive use of comments, check out Making Light.

In addition, weblogs are about weblogs and two of the great strengths of weblogs are the ability to cite links and to index what other weblogs are doing.  One weblog cites another weblog and comments on an entry.  The original weblog responds.  Bloggers post lists of weblogs they visit regularly, make recommendations when particularly cogent entries are posted and in these ways create a 'trusted circle' of associates.  Visitors to your weblog can use this information to create their own circle of trusted sources.  In part one, I indicated that one of the ways that trust is established is on the recommendation of friends or other trusted sources.  The blogging tradition of commenting on entries and putting up links to favorite weblogs provides a variation of the 'friend of a friend' and 'trusted source of a source' for the electronic community.

For some examples of conversations held from blog to blog, you might want to visit JOHO the Blog, Scripting News, and Dan Gillmor's Silicon Valley Weblog.

Summary

Weblogs have many uses.  Among them are the ability to create journals and clipping services, interpret information and guide visitors to other sources of information.  By using weblogs, individuals within organizations can help people find information they need, interpret that information in useful ways, and locate additional resources for decision-making and learning. 

Setting up your own weblog is relatively simple.  While you may need some technical assistance to install the software and set the parameters, creating entries is straightforward and easy enough to do if you have a basic level of keyboarding, writing, and computer skills. 

Before you begin, get a feel for how weblogs are used and what they can do.  Spend some time considering your purpose, your audience and your general principles for providing professional, personal knowledge sharing and filtering.  You may want to think about your own expertise, your organization's mission and goals, the people who might visit your site, and what you want to accomplish through the links you make and the contacts you establish.

As with all new projects, you may find that your purpose and goals change as you learn and use these tools and as you receive feedback on what you're doing from people who visit your site.  Weblog software is flexible enough to allow you to add features, change how information is stored and change what it looks like on the page.  You can add links, move sections, and reorganize.  Most of these things can be done without specialized technical assistance.

If you're interested in what I'm doing with weblogs, visit:

Tech, Knowledge, and Community
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/mt/dcoates/
A weblog on technology, knowledge management, online community, creative and other things that strike my interest

Tech News from EIT
http://www.extension.iastate.edumt/mt/technews/
A group weblog on breaking support issues for ISU Extension

Links Cited       

References

Weblogs as Trusted Sources and Knowledge Filters; Deborah Coates; Iowa State University; April, 2002; http://www.extension.iastate.edu/mt/dcoates/extras/weblogs2002_part_one.html

Essential Blogging, Shelly Powers, Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena G. Trott, Benjamin Trott; O’Reilly and Associates, September, 2002

We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs; Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan; John Wiley and Sons; August, 2002

The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup; John Hilier; July, 2002; Microcontent News; http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogware.htm

Foley, John. Are You Blogging Yet? InformationWeek 22 July 2002. 29 July 2002 http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020719S0001/1 .

Other links

Blogging at Worldcom; George Partington; Third quarter 2002;
http://www1.worldcom.com/digital_source/2002_Q3/articles/blogging/

Blog the Organization
http://radio.weblogs.com/0105823/

Blogging Goes Corporate; Farhad Manjoo;
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52380,00.html

Organizational Blogs

Waterboro Public Library
http://www.waterboro.lib.me.us/blog.htm

Northfield, Minnesota
http://www.northfield.org/