Sébastien Paquet, Université de Montréal

In this two-part document, I analyze an emerging form of knowledge sharing that I call personal knowledge publishing. Personal knowledge publishing has its roots in a practice known as "weblogging" that has been rapidly spreading on the World Wide Web over the last three years. It is a new form of communication that many expect will change the way people work and collaborate, especially in areas where knowledge and innovation play an important role.

If you are a researcher or knowledge worker who is not very familiar with weblogging and personal knowledge publishing, reading this document should help you grasp the significance of this practice and better understand how you might benefit from getting involved in personal knowledge publishing. Although the emphasis is on research work, most of the ideas generalize to other kinds of creative knowledge work where knowledge sharing plays a role.

In the first part, I describe what weblogs are, and explain how they are altering communication patterns on the Web. The second part focuses on personal knowledge publishing and similarly describes the new patterns of communication that this practice is giving birth to. In particular, I explain how these patterns can facilitate the emergence of new communities of knowledge. I also point out the current limitations of personal knowledge publishing. I review the most important points in the conclusion.

Part I. Weblogs

1. Defining the term
   
2. A brief history
   
3. How weblogs foster quality
   
4. Uses of weblogs
   
5. The technological evolution of weblogs
   
6. Further reading

1. Defining the term

Weblogs may be viewed as an evolved form of personal Web pages, or "home pages". The term, coined by Jorn Barger in 1997, refers to a web site that is a "log of the Web", indicating a record that points to material available on the World Wide Web. A weblog editor is often called a weblogger. The shorthand terms blog and blogger are also commonly used; usage of the word "blog" has become so common that it has recently been drafted for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Before I get into the full-blown definition, you may want to look at figures 1 and 2 as indicative examples.

Many definitions of the term "weblog" have been proposed. Since the genre is evolving quickly, there is currently only a rough consensus on what properly constitutes a weblog. However, a number of features are commonly agreed to be defining characteristics of the genre. In what follows, I will use the term weblog to refer to a web site that exhibits those features:

1. Personal editorship

   The content of the site is under the responsibility of a single person (although visitors may post comments in designated sections) and to some extent reflects this invidual's personality. Whereas the creation of web pages may be outsourced, you cannot have someone else run your weblog, because then it would no longer be your weblog.

2. Hyperlinked post structure

   The site's contents consists in typically short posts that feature hypertext links referencing material outside the site. These may be links to news items from sources such as CNN.com or the New York Times Online, or to other weblog posts. The selection of links is entirely up to the editor, who may link anywhere on the web. There is also no prescribed length for a post - some posts simply consist of a single link to content elsewhere, but most often they also include additional information and/or personal commentary on the issue under discussion. The presence of links is what distinguishes the weblog from the online diary, in which an author mostly recounts personal events and thoughts, and which is not especially relevant to anyone outside the author's circle of friends.

3. Frequent updates, displayed in reverse chronological order

   A weblog is a continuously-running publication, much like a daily or weekly newspaper. The latest posts (hence the freshest content) appear at the top of the weblog's main page, and older content appears further down. This characteristic creates an expectation of updates that incites readers to visit the site on a regular basis. A relationship is established between author and reader and strengthened with each visit, just as happens with other regular publications. This probably marks the most fundamental distinction between weblogs and personal web pages or "home pages", the latter often being seen once and seldom revisited.

4. Free, public access to the content

   The site's contents is freely accessible via the World Wide Web without restriction such as payment or membership. (This is often taken for granted on the Web, but it distinguishes weblogs from commercial forms that make sharing more difficult.)

5. Archival

   While older posts may disappear from the front page, they are archived and may be accessed elsewhere on the site. Each post is assigned a permanent hyperlink or permalink which makes it possible to reference older material.

Setting up a website and following the basic template above is all it takes to become a participant in the weblogs community.

2. A brief history of weblogs

In this section I very briefly sketch how weblogging has come about and become a widespread practice on the Internet. More detailed accounts have been written; see this list for references.

Early years

The first weblog was Tim Berners-Lee's "What's New?" page at http://info.cern.ch/, which pointed to new Web sites as they came online. The second weblog was Marc Andreessen's "What's New?" page at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (archived here), which performed a similar function until mid-1996.

Several new weblogs appeared with the explosion of the web in 1996-1997. Early weblogs include Dave Winer's Scripting News, Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom, and Cameron Barrett's CamWorld. Although it is now collectively edited, Rob Malda's Slashdot deserves mention, as it became (and to this day remains) phenomenally popular.

The content of early weblogs was most often a mix of links and commentary that was tailor-made to their editor's taste. Over time, those weblogs built sizable followings because they provided a unique selection of fresh content that appealed to a segment of the online population and because of their personal flavour. The personal nature of early weblogs is captured in Rob Malda's comment, "Slashdot got successful largely because I was my target audience. I wasn't trying to make a site for someone else, I was creating the site that I wanted to read."

Figure 1: Cameron Barrett's CamWorld, 1998 (click to enlarge).

Figure 2: Dave Winer's Scripting News, 2002 (click to enlarge).

The beginning of the "weblog boom"

Most of the first weblogs were home-grown by web designers and software developers, who were the most aware of the capabilities of the technology. In the early years, there existed only a handful of them. In 1999, however, several free or inexpensive weblogging services, such as Pitas, Livejournal, Pyra Labs' Blogger and UserLand's EditThisPage.com, were introduced. As using these systems requires little technical knowledge, the practice suddenly became much more accessible. This resulted in a spectacular growth in the number of weblogs.

There were around a thousand weblogs in mid-2000. As of mid-2002, estimates put the number of weblogs at around a half-million, with the Blogger system alone currently reporting more than 350,000 registered users and creating a new weblog every 40 seconds, or more than 60,000 a month (Steven Levy, Living in the Blog-osphere, August 2002). However, as Rebecca Blood pointed out, many of the new weblogs lean more (if not completely) towards the inward-looking online diary form and would not qualify as weblogs under our definition.

One of the most significant things that happened with the growth of the weblog community is that weblogs became a conversational medium. Many editors would use their weblog to discuss things that had been said by another editor, using links to enable readers to follow threads. Arbitrary numbers of people could participate in such conversations, provided they had their own weblog.

On the surface, this may appear like another incarnation of online many-to-many communication as already implemented in the form of newsgroups or mailing lists. However there is a crucial difference. Since contributions are posted on their author's space, replying to someone else's post does not necessarily mean that the reply will be seen. This has a bearing on the quality of the material that one can find in weblogs, as I will explain shortly.

Another thing that happened during the recent boom was that, as webloggers started reading other people's weblogs, a practice called blogrolling became widespread. The Microcontent News glossary defines a blogrolling list as "The section of a weblog that lists the sites that the blogger reads on a regular basis. This is usually located on the side of a blogger's frontpage, or on a separate page linked off of the frontpage." A unique aspect of these link lists is that they make explicit the social connections that exist among webloggers.

Recent years

In recent years, the weblog phenomenon has continued its expansion, and the population of webloggers has become increasingly diverse. Growing numbers of professionals have started weblogging and use them "to reflect upon their work, to follow developments in the field, and to publish ideas" (Mortensen and Walker, 2002). Apart from software developers and web designers, the most well-represented professions in the "blogosphere" are information architects, journalists (starting in the fall of 2002, UC Berkeley is offering a journalism course on weblogging), librarians, lawyers, and education specialists. Knowledge management specialists, information technology consultants and researchers are also increasingly using the medium to engage in conversations about the problems they are trying to solve in their work.

Weblogs are even making incursions in politics. For instance, Tara Sue Grubb, a U.S. politician running for Congress, started a weblog in August. Grubb uses her weblog to enable people to ask her questions about her views on topics important to them, and periodically posts short commentaries, essays or questions to readers. In a sense, her weblog thus provides a space to host a permanent virtual press conference to which everyone is invited.

3. How weblogs foster quality

At this point you might ask yourself, "If there are no reviewers and anyone can write anything in their weblog, how is it then possible to find high-quality content in weblogs?". The answer is that quality emerges in weblogs largely as a result of the web of hyperlinks that is weaved by the community of editors. Although it is true that there is no review process prior to publishing, one definitely occurs immediately after publication.

As people read others' weblogs, they link selectively to the content that they find interesting. Content that has been referenced more often directly obtains more visibility. But this effect is amplified by search engines such as Google that rank web pages according to the number of pages that link to them. As a consequence, when people search for a term, the pages that turn up first are the ones considered most relevant or authoritative by the overall community of editors. The relationship between Google and visibility is further discussed in Cory Doctorow's How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon and John Hiler's Google Loves Blogs.

Note that these dynamics mirror those of academic publishing: articles that are cited more often are more visible and are read more. This is useful in two respects: it encourages quality, and it makes it more likely that people will find the most relevant documents. Obviously, in both cases, relying on the number of citations as a reliable indicator of quality requires that one trust the community. Further note that insofar as references yield visibility, they carry to some extent the power to structure knowledge, a connection that is further explored from a critical humanist perspective in Walker's Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web.

The other factor that helps quality emerge in weblogs is personal ownership. Although webloggers participate in a community, the contents of a weblog is not a communal space; it is under the sole responsibility of its editor. Now, most people write in order to be read, to engage other minds. As with any publication, the best way to build and keep a readership is to have an output of consistently high quality. As each individual makes personal decisions as to what to read, higher quality weblogs are read regularly by more people, and thus are linked to more often and appear in more blogrolling lists.

Personal ownership makes weblogs different from other electronic forums like mailing lists. In a mailing list, anyone can write anything and it will automatically end up in everyone's mailbox (unless a moderator is introduced; but this kind of centralized management does not scale easily). By contrast, although a weblog editor may say anything he pleases, in order to be read widely, he or she must build a reputation over time. In the words of David Walker, Weblogs' users don't vote within the site; they vote by choosing the site as a reliable source of guidance. In effect, they say to the site's author: "you make the choices I'd make if I had time". Also, as a weblog keeps all of a person's writing over months or years in a single place, people tend to care more about what they put in it.

To summarize the above two points, quality content is found in weblogs in spite of the absence of centralized control because of the continuous post-publication review process and because good contributions can be published, read, and linked without being bundled alongside lesser quality content.

4. Uses of weblogs

In this section, I explore how weblogs serve a number of important functions for the people who use them.

Selection of material

A tremendous amount of content is published daily, in print as well as on the Web, piling on top of an already enormous amount of literature. As it is impossible to read even a fraction of it, people need means of filtering this output to find the material that will be most relevant to them.

Specialized publications, focusing on a particular domain of interest, provide one such means. A weblog operates in much the same manner. By reading a weblog that is edited by someone with interests similar to yours, you obtain a view of possibly relevant material without having to scan that person's sources. By combining the output of several chosen weblogs, you obtain a tailor-made publication that gives you more "personal relevance per unit volume" than any news source that caters to large demographics.

Since weblogs offer reviews of other material, they give an informative perspective on this material. Especially noteworthy material gets several mentions in different weblogs, along with views from each of their editors. This helps a reader gauge the significance of a particular document before even having to look at it. (This process is called triangulation.)

It is important to note that this filtering is a post-publication process, in sharp contrast to traditional publishing, where some content is culled at the source, never to be seen by anyone other than the editors. Thus this process can produce obscurity, but not censorship.

Personal knowledge management

A weblog that you edit also serves as a chronological record of your thoughts, references and other notes that could otherwise be lost or disorganized. When the need arises, you can either look up the weblog's contents using a search engine or visit it chronologically. Links between different posts that were put in by the author help trace threads of thought. Further discussion of this aspect can be found in My Blog, My Outboard Brain by Cory Doctorow and the next section on personal knowledge publishing.

Conversation

As I have already mentioned above, weblogs have evolved to become a medium for public discussion, in the process making the two-way nature of the Web much more prominent. A custom has evolved of linking to sources, paralleling the academic practice of citing other works. As a result, outsiders can more easily track the conversations and get involved in them.

Social networking

Weblogging affords an opportunity for social networking. Over time, weblog editors come to be known quite well by their regular readers; these personal ties may prove invaluable in giving them opportunities that they would not have had otherwise. For instance, it is not uncommon for a weblog editor to ask for, and receive, advice or help from his readers.

Networking among weblog editors is most evident in two aspects. First, hyperlinked conversations can be found everywhere and attest to the existence of a web of relationships. Second, blogrolling lists go further, essentially asserting that a particular weblogger has enough interest in another to regularly read what he or she has to say.

By collecting and examining data on what pages linking into their weblog were used to reach it (commonly known as referer lists), people often find like-minded people by following the links in the other direction. Thus they can connect with "who found them". Sam Ruby provides an account of this in Manufactured Serendipity.

Information routing

Taking a bird's eye view, we can see that the global system of weblogs has the beneficial effect of letting information circulate more freely across communities. The reader and editor of a weblog often do not belong to the same community or organization. Nothing prevents, say, an european architect from reading and quoting from an american gardener's weblog. Ideas, information and inspiration at the intersection of architecture and gardening can enter a community of architects thanks to such a relationship, which could be hard to establish and maintain outside the system of weblogs.

5. The technological evolution of weblogs

Weblogs evolve quickly

The technologies and practices that underlie weblogs and the resources which complement them evolve very quickly, on a timescale of months if not weeks. This owes to several facts:

• The weblog community is decentralized. In other words, its operation does not depend on a single piece of software or specification that is under the control of one particular organization. Individual participants are free to experiment with their own weblog, modify its layout, work new features into it, etc., without requiring the sanction of any official body and without threatening the overall system. This loose coupling means that many innovative features can be tried simultaneously and independently in a way that does not endanger the overall system.
  
• There is a large and diverse population of users who are willing to experiment with the medium, give feedback, and learn from one another's experiences. Since weblogs implement a communication network, the word about an interesting innovation circulates very easily.
  
• Many editors of weblogs are also web software developers. Having first-hand experience as webloggers makes it easier for them to identify new features that could improve the experience. Having knowledge of web development enables them to craft tools for themselves.
  
• A philosophy of sharing generally prevails in the weblog community. Many tools are freely distributed by their authors, so good ones can get widely adopted quickly, and people can build upon them.

Examples of innovations in weblogs

Here I give one-paragraph descriptions of two innovations that have been successfully deployed in the weblogs community. Although there is a lot more to be said, I will not go into any further depth on the technological aspects of weblogs. One of the best resources to follow this evolution is Jon Udell's Radio Weblog. I note in passing that, although weblogs generate tremendous interest, by and large, academics have not been involved in technical innovation in this area (one notable exception being Cameron Marlow).

Content syndication and aggregation
The idea of syndication in the context of weblogs is to make the content of individual posts available on the web in a standard format known as Rich Site Summary or RSS. The combined availability of RSS feeds and software known as personal news aggregators makes it possible for you to select the sources you are interested in and subscribe to them. Subsequently, your aggregator automatically retrieves content from all selected sources and displays them together on your screen, which means that you don't have to actually visit any of these sites to look for new content. It is possible to subscribe or unsubscribe from any particular source at any time. Nowadays most weblog tools offer the possibility of publishing an RSS feed, and a lot of people publish such a feed and use aggregators to make more efficient use of their time.

Social networking tools
Together, the millions of links present in weblogs form a giant, visible web of affinity, which provides fertile new ground for studies relating to social networks such as Flake et al.'s Self-Organization And Identification Of Web Communities. Several people have created systems that collect weblogs' inbound and outbound links and in some cases compute a "weblog neighborhood", that is, a list of other weblogs whose content appears to be related. This information is used by webloggers to find other people with similar interests that they may not already know about.

6. Further reading

I have only presented a succinct overview of weblogs. The phenomenon is big and diverse enough that no one can claim to have an all-encompassing view of it and it is thus advisable to get many perspectives. I have already linked to a few of these in the text above. Among sources that are mainly concerned with weblogs, there are Radio Free Blogistan, Blogroots, and compendiumblog. The Weblog Kitchen is a collaborative site that explores current research into weblogs and other hypertext systems.šI should also mention that several books on weblogs have been published. A list is available as part of the blogroots resource directory. Finally, bear in mind that simply reading about weblogs will not reveal all about them. The best way to really understand the phenomenon is to participate in it.

Continue to Part II. Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research