Blogging and Knowledge Management

From Wiki4dev

Blogging

This article notes the development of Sphere, a new search engine for the blogosphere. The author notes that are now "nearly 50 million blogs online. Some estimate the blog universe is doubling every six months. Technorati, a rival of Sphere, estimates that 125,000 new blogs appear online daily." Leslie Walker, The Washington Post

Blogging as Journalism? "A national phone survey of bloggers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Perhaps more interestingly, one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Many say they check facts and cite original sources.

• 34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism, and 65% of bloggers do not.
• 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either “sometimes” or “often.”
• 56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either “sometimes” or “often.”

Knowledge Management and Sharing

KM for Development (KM4Dev) is a web site dedicated to development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches. It offers a mailing lists as well as some online collaborative services to share content inbetween members. The community traces its origins back to two face-to-face workshops held respectively in February and June 2000. Participants from the two workshops wanted to continue discussing among themselves and asked Bellanet to create an electronic forum where this could take place. The KM4Dev mailing list and website came to be in the summer of 2000; Bellanet continues to support the community by providing facilitation and technical backstopping. To find out how to subscribe to KM4Dev, click here. A volunteer Core Group was created in May 2004 to further support the community and help respond to its needs.

NearlyFreeSpeech.org "More recently, knowledge has also taken centre stage in the world economy. Though most products exchanged on the routes of international trade still are physical goods, the amount of money changing hands for the permission to use the ideas that someone else has had is rapidly growing as a part of the total. The spread of digital communication networks has brought another spin to the ways in which we handle knowledge."

Case Studies

Examining the potential to improve employment creation in housing projects in South Africa

Robbins, G.; Aiello, A.; Goodenough, C.; Hadingham, T.; Klug, N. / School of Development Studies (SDS), University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa , 2006

This report traces the evolution over the past decade of employment-related policies in slum upgrading in South Africa. This is supplemented by two case studies of housing and urban upgrades in different contexts. The findings of the policy overview and the case studies inform a series of recommendations on how employment could be improved through South Africa�s shelter-related endeavours. The report finds that whilst considerable potential exists to improve employment creation in housing projects in South Africa this potential has not been fully realised, due to the constraints in policies, regulations, administrative processes, management, governance, and human capacity. The authors argue that best results will be achieved if urban development minimises the fragmented and narrowly framed interventions which have characterised human settlement programmes in South Africa to date, and instead maximises sustainable and holistic urban development models that emphasises community empowerment.