One of the more interesting seminars I attended at KM World dealt with the opportunities to use blogging behind the firewall. Of course, blogs such as this one tend to ramble, but a well-focused, topical blog can provide two things that help employees deal with info glut: human filtering that gleans the really valuable nuggets from all of the information on a subject, and contextualizing that information with storytelling and personal perspective.
Blogs are easy to create, even easier to maintain, and can bridge the gap between adhoc communication such as email or instant messages, and structured knowledge stores.
This got me thinking. With all of the excellent tools on the market, many of which are free and/or open source, why not create an entire knowledge management system built using free components. Blogging software, forums, news and content management systems and RSS feeds could all become part of a KM package that even small companies or low-budget non-profit organizations could afford to implement.
What do you think? Am I out to lunch? In left field? Up a creek without a paddle? Let me know.