It just clicked for me. Many facets just snapped together into focus. One, explaining why I post in so many different blogs (channels, brands), that almost promiscuous thrill of starting a new blog at the drop of a hat. Another, some recent conversations with business people who understand blogging and are using its process-flow as a basis for actual, real knowledge management (a tired buzzphrase if there ever was one).
I’d rather call it knowledge husbandry to connote the idea of a daily rhythm of proven techniques for putting one’s house in order, and cultivating one’s gardens. The k-house is your computer (digital data storage and retrieval). The k-garden is your blogs. Your blogpatch, if you will.
I’m no gardener, but my partner is, so I’ve witnessed how it works. Every year the garden gets better. Some plants wilt and die, unwatered or getting the wrong amount of sun, wind, predators. But others thrive. Some plants volunteer, not all of them weeds. Other organisms and nutrients join the dance and the ecosystem gets richer through the tending, through the encouragement of good dynamics and deprecation of those that do not bear fruit.
Planning is great, but feeding back what the system is learning from experience is how nature and the universe evolve. Not to get cosmic, but any plan will do as long as you regularly revise the parts that don’t work. Any filing system is fine to start with. Just prune the dead files and occasionally subdivide the overloaded ones.
Back to blogs. What I just “got” this morning is that every project should have a blog. Every ongoing endeavor deserves a journal. Frail memory cannot support our multiphased planet-culture soaked consciousness without the aid the outboard (or backup) brain.
In a way we’re seeing a trojan horse to what many have touted as the next computer interface, an array of time-ordered events and documents (with the UI to be a spacial representation of the timeline, I suppose also browsable by categories), in the infectious adoption of blogs—not just by writers, techies, and artists who, like pornographers, always pioneer a new medium and exploring its expressive range, but as a knowledge format.
Another ingredient that is helping gel these thoughts for me is a conversation I had Friday with Jordan Frank from Traction Software. That disussion deserves its own entry, as it intrigued me a great deal with something that in tackling enterprise knowledge husbandry, goes far beyond my PEP (Personal Expression Platform) writer’s dream application.
One last note. Mike Masnik from Techdirt.com was kind enough to toss a “great blog” into one of his e-mail messages to me. Later, I asked him if I was keeping it up. (“How Am I Driving?”) His reply:
Still been great. Occasionally things are a bit random (but what blog doesn’t have the occasional random post?) and I skip over some of the more specific discussions about things like how do specific things in Radio, but
it’s been good for keeping up on what’s going on in general in the blogspace.
So let me take the opportunity to explain how to focus this blog. Read my recent post about categories and decide which one most closely fits your interests. I cross-post liberally, so you may find that one single category is all you need to follow.
For example, if you want to read about blogging and you’re interest in blog-related memes then the ‘metablog’ category will be sufficient (that is, you don’t need to read ‘memewatch’ also because any entry on blog-related memes will also be posted to ‘metablog’)
If a single category works for you, consider making bookmarking or blogrolling its home page, and/or subscribing to
So, as reader of ‘knowhow’ who isn’t interested in Salon Blogs, Dreamweaver, or Radio Userland could bookmark knowhow or subscribe to its RSS feed.
What else? The ‘metablog’ category probably carries 80–90% of the posts. All blog pages contain navigator links listing all the active categories, so nothing ever prevents you from peeking at streams you’re not as interested in, but I wanted to mention this to improve your reading experience and give you more control over your own media feed.
Oh, and as an experiment, if anyone links to this entry, please consider using the following linktext: I get it. Thanks! I’d like to track the meme.
Corrected the permalink linked above to this entry at the site’s current address (for the sake of historical accuracy I’m leaving the original entry as posted at the old address), and updated the linktext to match the entry title and to turn the meme around.
Who cares that “xian” gets it unless you already know me? It makes more sense (to me now) to encourage people to add the words “I get it” to their blogs and link it to my article on “getting it” about klogs, project logs, slogs (schedule logs), and so on.
Searching for “xian gets it” in Google does get the old post as the first result, but who would ever search for that? The answer is no one besides someone who’s already heard the phrase via word-of-mouth. (Frankly, xian is hard to say out loud. It’s more of a written nickname than a spoken one.)
Anyway, it’s much more likely to me that someone may have an epiphany (probably about something else, sure), search for “I get it” and eventually find this new entry. It will be more likely if the fad of linking to the entry takes off as it does in all of my precisely calibrated virtual simulations, MUAHAHAHA.