I've been working on a research project on the use of online information and knowledge sharing tools by genealogists. You may have guessed it, there's really not a lot of research out there on the information seeking behavior of this group, much less on the online tools they use. But there's still some.
Yet as I tried looking for a study that would differentiate between information and knowledge sharing, of course, I found nothing. It makes sense though.
Say email, for example. It could be both. An email may contain information or knowledge; the same with an online forum. Wikis are more difficult to place. They contain a combination of individual "knowledges" that form a greater one.
But I found blogs the most interesting. I find good information for competitive intelligence projects in blogs. They are not necessarily primary sources, but blogs are great stepping stones to finding the right information. They usually comment about something that has happened--they regurgitate existing information to some extent, and add bloggers' insights and thoughts about that information.
I've often thought that our society has gone through similar stages as the ancient Greeks did. But I always wondered how it'd be possible for us to be as close to policy and opinion shaping as they were. And blogs do seem to fill that gap. We can't all meet in Washington or Ottawa to discuss politics. But like in Athens, we're now listening to the most popular opinion-makers through blogs, though these are not politicians or anyone of national importance. I like that.
My question is, who's going to be our Alexander the Great?
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