I gave a presentation on Weblogs and how Weblogs and KnowledgeBoard can connect to each other at the SIG Editors meeting in Lisbon on June 1st. This article summarises the points I talked about and that were discussed.

Why I came to the meeting
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by a group of KnowledgeBoard members to join their discussion on Weblogs. They had started to meet in chats regularly to talk about how Weblogs and KnowledgeBoard could connect to eachother better. If you search KnowledgeBoard for the word "Weblog" you will see why: There was more and more discussion boiling up around Weblogs and the group felt it was the time to come to concrete insights about what KnowledgeBoard should have to do in its relationship with Weblogs. I helped by contributing my knowledge and experience of Weblogs and we shaped our ideas into a proposal of what KnowledgeBoard could do. The timing was just right for the Lisbon meeting, so I was invited to give my talk here and help facilitate the discussion about connecting Weblogs and KnowledgeBoard. I have a personal interest in this, because I would love to connect to KnowledgeBoard better with my Weblog, but I will talk more about that later.

Blogs and Blogging
Some introductury ideas about Weblogs and Blogging can be found in the Mindmap that is attached to this article.

People use Weblogs for personal journalling. They collect thoughts and links and reflect. They publish to a personal audience and enter in discussions with their readers and other webloggers. Discussion with others works in different ways: Comments (very much like comments on KnowledgeBoard), E-Mail or Posts on other Weblogs.

What is important is to notice that Blogging is Writing and Reading. Bloggers use the "RSS"-Technology to be able to follow many different sources.

RSS
RSS is a machine readable (XML) Format for content of regularly changing websites. It can be used to "subscribe" to "feeds" of new entries from a source. These feeds are published automatically be every weblog. By aggregating different feeds in one interface, you save a lot of time by seeing automatically, what has changed and by being able to skim content very fast. (I gave a demo of this in Lisbon.) Using RSS is the natural way of following content for many people.

Why do people publish on Weblogs rather that posting to KnowledgeBoard?
Important: It's not a question of "either-or". Many bloggers are also active on KnowledgeBoard and many KnowledgeBoard members also blog. They are using different mediums, different channels for different goals.
This is a very complex issue and explaining it in detail would go too far here. If you, dear reader, were not present at the meeting in Lisbon and have some specific questions on this, please do ask questions in the comments.
The important point is: Bloggers have very good reasons for blogging. They are not "not-posting" on KnowledgeBoard because of a lack of features, but have specific, personal goals that they want to accomplish by publishing on a Weblog. The question for KnowledgeBoard should not be "What can we do to get bloggers 'back' to KnowledgeBoard?" but rather "How can KnowledgeBoard benefit from these (very active!) users?"!

So... what can be done? Now we get to the important part.

What SIG Editors could do:

• Start Reading Weblogs. You can start at the KnowledgeBoard Blogroll - a list of Weblogs of KnowledgeBoard members - to find interesting weblogs. Get yourself an RSS-Aggregator - you can install them on your PC or use a service on the web like bloglines.com. Here is an example of how that looks like:
  http://www.bloglines.com/public/KnowledgeBoard
• Feature interesting articles on your SIG. This happened with an article that was originally published by Martin Dugage on his Weblog and generated an exteremely valuable discussion.
  http://www.knowledgeboard.com/item/125824
  http://blog.mopsos.com/archives/000080.html

Implementations on KnowledgeBoard
1) Integrate Weblog-URLs into personal profiles of users. At the moment, the KB-Blogroll (the list of all KnowledgeBoard members with a Weblog) is produced manually. It would save a lot of work and improve quality if it was created automatically. This list of Weblogs of KB members would be an interesting starting point for SIG editors and other users who want to broaden their reading.

2) Implement RSS-Feeds. This connects to an important point Martin Dugage brought up in his talk about Communities of Practice: Many people seldomly surf to the homepage of a community to find out what is happening. Publishing RSS-Feeds would lower the barrier of following new content and discussions on KnowledgeBoard. I shared my own story of how following what is going on on KnowledgeBoard is quite difficult and requires me to "start an extra process". It is not part of my daily information work. If KnowledgeBoard produced RSS, I could more easily follow what is going on and be able to participate more.
Feeds could be produced for different items: New posts on SIGs and Zones, new comments, new members etc.

3) Implement TrackBack. Bloggers are already writing about KB-stories on their Weblogs - but KB-members cannot notice! TrackBack is a fairly simple technology that was developed in Weblogs that makes it possible to notify a website that you have written about it. If KnowledgeBoard was "trackback-enabled", it would be possible to see where discussions about KB-items are going on on Weblogs. Every article could have links to the weblog-discussions going on elsewhere, that today are just lost. (Again, I shared a couple of stories of how I blogged about KB-items on my Weblog and how it was a pity that the content of the discussion that ensued on my blog was not fed back to KnowledgeBoard - the two communities were not connecting to eachother.)

There were many questions and a very long discussion. I hope I was able to answer most questions.

What was clear is that the issue of connectiong weblogs to KnowledgeBoard is an important one and that it should be emphasized in the future development of the site. Anne Jubert suggested to start a working group that researches concrete ways of connecting Weblogs and KB further and Anne Bennett of Sift said she wanted to join the group. Other people present at the meeting also showed interest in participating and I am sure that there will be more KB-members who participated in discussion about Weblogs in the last months that will want to join.

It was an honour for me to be invited to this meeting and I would be glad if I could continue to work on this subject as an advisor to the working group.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the members of H-SIG and the other members of KnowledgeBoard who were involved in the preparations and the work, especially Ton Zijlstra, who wrote the proposal together with me and should be credited just as much as me, Lilia Efimova, who helped me shape the outline of my talk and who's blog-archive was full of great ideas that we built on, Jacques Souillot, who was always there when I needed feedback and Cindy Lemcke-Hoong whose energy kept us all going.

Technical Notes
A technical note on the documents attached: The first file contains my presentation slides in PDF format. They do not contain a lot of content by themselves and serve more as an aid to memory for participants. The second file is a mindmap which I used in the first part of the presentation. It is in Freemind-Format. Freemind is a free, java-based mindmapping software which I highly recommend. You can read my review of the software (in German). The third file is an HTML-Export of the mindmap and the fourth a JPG-(image)version of it so you don't have to get the software to look at the map.