Can blogs be knowledge management tools?

There's an interesting discussion going on in the trdev email list about blogs and knowledge management. First, the original poster wrote that she reads a number of training and business blogs (including this one, I'm happy to report) and she was thinking about the potential for blogging in her organization, especially as a training and development tool. She asked people to let her know about their experiences.

Another list member expressed some skepticism because most of the blogs he'd seen were of the daily journal variety. So I piped up and wrote the following:

"While many blogs are similar to journals, the tool has evolved to be much more than that in many cases. Here's an article that might change your thinking a little, from Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/blog.html.

George Siemens of elearnspace offers a great article on blogs and learning: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm . See especially the Uses for Blogging and Benefits sections.

Also, see this article on blogs as personal knowledge management tools by Amy Gahran: http://blog.contentious.com/archives/000120.html. (This is the link I published in this blog several weeks ago.)

More about blogs and learning can be found in my article, 'We Learning Part I,'http://www.learningcircuits.org/2003/dec2003/kaplan.htm. There are additional links in there."

I also wrote that I was the author of this blog and it's definitely a work-in-progress/experiment. The content and format change slightly as time goes by, as I try to learn what you, my dear readers, are interested in and what keeps you all checking in. I said that right now the format is a sort of "best of my inbox"--thoughts on articles, press releases, other tidbits and items of note that I don't run in my Intelligence column in T+D for whatever reason.)

Since I wrote that message, I found some more great resources on corporate blogging, posted by Amy Gahran in her Contentious Weblog.

The discussion on trdev has continued. The original skeptical poster is rethinking his view. Others have voiced their opinions as well. One poster, Learning Circuits Answer Geek Godfrey Parkin, wrote that he sees blogs as "a sort of missing link between knowledge management and informal learning."

Great stuff. Feel free to jump in if you're a trdev member or would like to join the list. Or post your thoughts here.