Blogging and Knowledge

I just posted on the cost of knowledge on the OUBS Blog and some one part of the post made me include some blogging thoughts which I will repeat here.

This is really more about information than knowledge though and about a very small fraction of the thoughts about this. One thing to understand is that information is not like a normal resource in that it doesn’t get used up and once I have it, I don’t want it again. A lot of how we personally value information is in relation to the transaction costs attached to this information and this is where our current shift comes in.

For finding information I can more and more use RSS based services, including things like PubSub. For creating it I can use a blog host. The harder part is the internalization bit, which is also about information overload in our time.

This is where the blogging bit comes in. Previously, when I wanted to find information I would use the New York Times (for example), partly because I trusted the source. This trust is based on relevance, quality and validity, with the relevance bit being how people choose the paper they read for example. Another option was always to read several papers, which is what lots of people did to get the real full picture. The problem there become the transaction costs of the process, as the more I increase the things I do read, the more problematic become the relevance and validity.

With blogging I can now increase the amount of different ideas I get fed into my head a thousand times, but with it comes the problem of trust as blogs are not held to the same journalistic standards as the New York Times. With a blog you will have to read some posts over a period of time for the trust to build, or you will need some good information about the poster and see who else trusts that person to be able to trust yourself. But then there will be an even deeper bond.

You will likely start reading a blog because it has some relevance to you (you like that person, want to follow their life, or are interested in the subject), you trust the quality and the content stays fresh (validity). Your choice in the end depends on the total transaction costs and these have just been brought down tremendously by RSS or Syndication in general. This is why Blogs will succeed. They take a lot longer to take hold, but the reputation of some print mag doesn’t come up over night either.

One thing that might speed up the readership of a personal blog would be to get some people to comment that are known, or to get some interviews on your site, some talk with other people, that shows that they trust you. Otherwise you need to just have to build up trust over time.

Simon said that _in a world where attention is a major scarce resource, information may be an expensive luxury, […]_. This is where sensemaking comes in. You gather, analyse, synthesise, share and re-use information, which becomes your cost of knowledge. The bottleneck is being removed by Bloglines and RSS (gather) and PubSub (analyse), to just name two. Synthesizing and sharing is what happens with blogs and my look into some fields will be the filtered information of somebody else.

In the end, for a big readership this blog for example is too unfocussed. I might bring value for a lot of people, but they are mostly doing this through finding entries via Google or other Search Engines. The real readership will be people that have followed this over months and feel that what I post is highly relevant for what they do, even though it is so diverse. For others, it will just be information overload.

All this means though that blogs are here to stay, and they will only grow in use and become more niche driven over time. With more power in computer, more focus on social networking as a service layer below an application, even the synthesis could be doable by an application. The future remains interesting.