I’ve been building up a whole heap of thoughts and feelings on one particular aspect: personal knowledge/ information management. Specifically, I want to start a speculative list of thoughts on the ways that social media is impacting, and may impact further in future.

I am taking a definition of organisational knowledge management and rejigging the words to suggest that we have to manage our own knowledge in the same way that an organisation manages its knowledge:

‘Personal knowledge management could comprises a range of practices used by our consciousness to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of what it knows, and how it knows it’

1. We previously had common sources of information: books, journals, online articles, word-of-mouth coaching, best practice sharing, peer reviews, reading lists etc.
2. Social media has taken all of these elements and added rocket fuel: choose your area of interest and people are parsing, snipping, cutting, sharing, distributing and publishing information at an increasingly rapid rate
3. The addition of personal opinion or ‘weight’ seems to deliver the same authority in people’s minds as expert opinion
4. The speed of information gathering, comment addition or ‘grouping’ (adding with other disparate, but relevant information prior to onwards distribution) is increasing, but to what end? The visibility of those using the ‘added-value’ information, and their requirements (unless we argue that it is always the same people that create it) are missing
5. Online applications may be providing the individual with the tools to better manage social media for our own personal knowledge management

There are a bundle of thoughts under the title ‘Personal Knowledge Management’, again on Wikipedia with good links to the following blogs/ articles:

More to come, but I’m working towards exploring whether it is possible to define a perfect system of personal knowledge management? (by definition requiring personalisation for you….)

Money Symbols Abstract 4 - svilen001

earlier in the week on the Social and Information Web Drug):

12. Social media is the new provider of social currency

Defining social currency as ‘The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade—or give away—to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans’

Christopher Carfi has a great post on social currency that expands further

So, particularly the tools of social media that aggregate/ channel/ filter and weight information are providing multiple opportunities to socially interact by trading ever more pertinent, timely and (to the individual hoping to interact) valuable information.

Those face to face ’watercooler moments’ are being replaced by snipping content, feeding, streaming and adding to comments…..

7. Is there an element of voyeurism? Particularly when you consider things like the FriendFeed stream to the right, and when you consider the post I mentioned yesterday on the Future of Blogging on ReadWriteWeb showing the ability to run your FriendFeed through a blog.

8. Less ominously, and extending point 2. yesterday about ‘Connection’, social interaction is an obvious driver of the fascination

9. Within Belbin’s later additions to his preferred team role profiles (which came from data feedback on a cluster of interests he hadn’t originally seen) is the ‘Specialist’ role. Those who want to know all there is about a subject. Is there an alignment between the preferences of those who find the time to fully absorb themselves in social media, or the tracking of certain streams of information, and this ‘type’?

10. The original draw of ‘surfing the net’: the random exploration of links and connections. The revelling in the depth and breadth of human interest and endeavour (to wax lyrically about it)

11. The experimentation with a set of tools by a keen and passionate group of followers. These tools likely to have the ability to significantly shift some elements of our future histories

You can tell I’m still splurging……..

World Peoples by Ilker

Prompted by the contrast between Luciano’s Litemind post on his one year anniversary – congratulations – and his discussions about increasing the involvement with his readers and a post on the Future of Blogging on ReadWriteWeb. This latter article set a number of things racing in my head which, ironically, had been planted there by just forty eight hours of use of FriendFeed and an article in the FT (similarly as contrastive as my first example)

My apologies for this just being a string of observations with half-formed responses (in only some instances):

1. There is something incredibly compulsive about social media. Whether blogging, micro-blogging, social recommendation engines – all the way through to ‘attention management engines’ like Particls which weight information feeding according to implicit and explicit factors
2. This compulsion is often described as ‘internet famous’, but I disagree. There may be an element of that psychology in the initial drives, and to be important (if that enables you to give yourself that label) may work for you. However, I’d argue that there’s something at a more ‘Connected’ level at work (I explored this further in a couple of posts on the Power of Social Recommendation)
3. The amount of the ‘involvement’ required. The involvement in the technology, the set-up, the linking, the maintenance, the reading, (the thinking), the commenting, the exploring (and loop to the technology). Nicely (to me), it’s as though this becomes a proxy for the offline effort involved in meeting and engaging with people (both friends, acquaintances and strangers)
4. The time that this involvement translates into. The FriendFeed stream I caught (from Jason Goldberg’s socialmedian in an extra irony….) bemoaned that there wasn’t enough time to keep up/ get involved/ get anything else done if you did get involved. Interestingly, for me one of the underpinnings of the LifeStreaming debate above is that (if you can find the time to read and comment), it can take over most traditional blogging elements….
5. Is there something about control? The ‘attention management engine’ Particls beta I saw today endeavours to value your attention in order to weight what is fed for you for your future attention. RSS feeders in first principles enable you to control your inputs and information feeds. This takes control to a monumental level
6. Is there an element of shiny new gizmo/ social media tool snobbery. I will save comment for when more experienced.

To be continued…