"Contagious Media"

Interesting interview here with John Patrick from CIO Insight magazine. His discussion of blogs and knowledge management is especially on-target:

You could call it knowledge management, but that's sort of a hackneyed term, and a lot of people, as soon as they hear KM, they immediately tune out. Actually, I think KM is going to come back again. It never left, it really is important. It's just never been able to work very effectively. Some people have said it was overhyped, but I say it was underdelivered. Nobody argued with the potential of it, it's just that it didn't really happen. Why? For the most part, it was based on the idea of imposed collaboration: Making it work required centralized control over the knowledge and the sharing of it. It's a good theory, but it simply hasn't worked...

So where does blogging fit in? It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully.