Information Sharing Processes

Right now (2002!) I write a WebLog, read lots of weblogs, send emails (like blogging, but targeted to small key group of people, or maybe something that's still wide-broadcast but of higher importance to me).

Peerkat, annotations, RSS

See John Robb's notes on making a community cloud/knowledge network

Some scenarios:

• loose community of affinity (e.g. cohort of webloggers), watching each others' work

• free agent sharing info with other free agents, also with institution-employees

• employee of institution. Intranet, Knowledge Management

Some issues/questions

• How important is timeliness? I tend to obsessively waste time visiting high-update blogs hourly. But realistically, I don't get any significant value from that distraction.

• How importance is the gestalt of a given WebLog? E.g. if it's extracted into smallish chunks of XML (e.g. RSS) and I read those filtered and reformatted by my proxy, am I missing something in the translation? Does the RSS even include all the text content, or is it just titles?

• What are the implications of different bits of info being more Actionable than others?

• When/how does any group processing of WebLog content add value (e.g. showing most popular links across my cluster of favorites, etc.)?

• With a relatively closed Virtual Community (Project Team), does it make sense to have a single shared space, or to keep things driven independently by individuals, with some sort of group-aggregation system, which might reduce some redundancy of posting? Or is there a mix (a subteam working on a particular task/phase might have a shared space, those individuals might have their respective individual spaces, etc. - does it stay clear what kind of postings go where?) The looser the affiliation, the more I like having clear ownership and control of nodes, for later separation (or at least taking of copies). In other words, if I'm consulting for a company, I want to document work on their intranet, but I don't want to lose my words, so I want a copy. That's not too hard on a single-channel weblog. But what about when it's an entire Wiki For CollaborationWare space? Maybe I need a replication mechanism (s2s, server2server). Of course, then I get a copy of the words of other people in that space. Messy. But really not too different from what happens informally anyway. And as long as I keep that info confidential, it's pretty kosher. But when you make arrangements like this explicit/contractual, people tend to go nuts...

• What's the role/process of Group Discussion? Annotation Systems? Ratings?

• Is it important to be able to search across some limited body of 3rd party content? Is searching the RSS chunks sufficient?

• How important are subset views of a person's flow, esp. if (a) there's a lot of it, and (b) you don't read it on a daily basis?

Hmm, what are the Business Models For Information? Do the notes above apply mainly to an environment where my written words are given away? What's My Personal Business Model (Business Model You) for the future?

Some places where this is discussed

• WikiWikiWeb:AllInOneWiki