James R. Regan linked to my Social Software on Meatball Wiki link. Thanks, James. He, in turn, had an interesting article on “Blogs, dialogue and identity building” from Lilia Efimova’s site, which in turn leads to the KM Wiki and to Ton Zijlstra’s Inter Thoughts. While I was at it, there were interesting side trips to WikiWebPIM, the IAWiki with this great picture of Post_Web Information System Design and Tim O’Reilly and Adam Turoff having a great conversation on developer communities for Open and Closed Source projects.
Obviously, a lot of time and effort has gone into the discussion of “What are blogs?” and “How do they help things?” and “What’s The Next Big Thing?”
While blogs may serve, in the day-to-day chronological sense, as a dialogue between peers, a discussion group, the ability to archive them turns them into a knowledge base, although one difficult to search and navigate. A reader can follow, days, weeks or months later, a conversation that may have gone back and forth, but they may step into the conversation in the middle, or lose the final conclusion. A mechanism to summarize and group these related conversations together is needed. Relevance scoring is always welcomed.