Expert Voice: John Patrick on Weblogs
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Blogging gives new life to the concept of knowledge management. Read ex-IBM Internet strategist John Patrick's take on this Web-phenomenon in an interview with CIO Insight Executive Editor Marcia Stepanek. Web logs—or blogs as they are sometimes called—are Web pages filled with the thoughts and musings of people with opinions to share, no matter how useless or useful they may be. Some blogs have become mainstream and are highly valued by their readers, such as patrickweb.com, ex-IBM Internet strategist John Patrick's daily take on life and technology and its impact on business and society. Technorati, a California-based Internet research think tank, estimates that there are 750,000 blogs and counting—with many of them arising among employees inside corporations.

Among the more significant aspects of blogging, MIT researchers say, is it represents a new genre of communication that offers people alternate filters to mainstream news of events, written instantly by sources they respect on subjects they need to know more about. And sometimes, a blog is a tool for building community: As the Howard Dean presidential campaign is showing, a blog can be an effective way to organize behind a cause or event. Powerful search engines make blog postings accessible to a worldwide audience, and blogs—always on—are continuously updated by those who write them, via "blogware" that's recently become available.

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So it's inevitable, perhaps, that businesses are going to be affected by this new Internet medium. Indeed, at some corporations, blogs are already being created and shared, many under the radar of top corporate managers. Their promise, says Patrick: to tap into expertise among far-flung locations and enable information-sharing with partners, suppliers and customers about everything from business problems to new-product musings. "Knowledge management wasn't overhyped," says Patrick, in an interview with CIO Insight Executive Editor Marcia Stepanek. "It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could."

John Patrick's full interview begins on Page 2.

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