The Art of Knowledge
Blogging Tools
I came across this interesting RSS feed which has lead me on a research filled day trying to track down products using blogging to solve business initiatives. This was the original post. It speaks about the problems with a product called K-Blogger.
- K-collector provides a topic-based overview of different weblog posts. Fine, but Waypath does it better, indexing all blogs and not only small fracture that uses k-collector. So, why should I narrow it down?
To use k-collector before it gets smarter I have to add topics to my posts. I can't use them to navigate my own weblog, so the only motivation is to make navigation between all weblogs easier. Nice and altruistic, may work for me, but my experience is that it doesn't work for most people (e.g. people tend not to add keywords to documents in a corporate document repository even if it makes their own documents more accessible).
- By adding topics to your weblog posts they can be automatically threaded into a Table of Contents and used to build shared knowledge feeds.
- k-collector is an enterprise news aggregator that leverages the power of shared topics to present new ways of finding and combining the real knowledge in your organization.
Weblogs are most commonly published by individuals and organized chronologically. This presents a challenge when considering weblogging in the context of business groups which might expect information to be organized in more meaningful categories. The k-collector architecture, and applications based upon it, deliver an interface targeted at business users.
It seems like a nice way to get rid of the, what is becoming a very evident problem in most blogs, chronological structure of blogging tools. The original post which lead me to these two products makes a valid point of user-interaction. How can you get the user to identify the metadata for a blog? Search Engines have never really captured this in a easy to understand fashion apart from using quotation marks and plus symbols to assist in weeding out unwanted information or sites. The author above again points to waypath which uses nav4 an "easy to use" navigation system helping users group topics by category rather than date. These seem to be a step in a really good direction.
*p.s...there are also a ton of different spelling and grammatical errors on these sites. Again, I play the pot and the kettle devil's advocate, but when a company seems to do that it doesn't really give me a wonderful sense of legitimacy.
Link posted by JVMM : 4:52 PM