I’ve also participated in many highly successful Wikis, most notably the WikiPaedia that vastly surpassed the meagre success of the closed, cloistered and “expert reviewed” big-brother NuPaedia; these two are my best example of the immense power of open collaboration vs the cloister approach. DMOZ is another: The search engine information flow shows that Yahoo may be richer, but all search engines are deriving content from DMOZ.

On your other point about not blogging the actions you do take, that is an excellent point. I take actions because of blog content all the time, some of it directly work related (and often critical to work, having outlined issues I had overlooked or misunderstood) — even if it is only as an ice-breaker or a topic of dinner-time conversation to get the kids engaged in some family interaction. This morning, our local radio station morning hosts did a bit they called “Best of the Web” where their second leading site to talk about was Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and I thought to myself, “What will they do tomorrow?”

And then thought how their daily “top content” problem is instantly solved if only they knew about DayPop or Blogdex, and if they were only running their own commentable blog, or better still an IM client, or even if they had more than one general-delivery email for the entire station, I could have told them about it right then and there!

Thanks for joining the conversation. Your point about filtering what you blog is a good and a very valid one. And I am beginning to see more now of how I myself let blogging generated thoughts trickle through to my working and personal environment.

My main point I think becomes somewhat clearer to me now as well: there is a lot going on in my blog that I would love to turn into action but that is discouraged or stonewalled in the environment I am in, i.e. my work. In some of those instances I’m sure I could turn it into action with a few people who ‘get it’, and the most obvious ones are my fellow bloggers whom collectively came up with the stuff in the first place. So I am looking to turn some of those bloggers on some topics into colleagues for part of their and my time.

I think open channel can also work well where you are the business entity (i.e. you are self-employed) – because at the end of the day it is entirely down to you. The issue I’m conscious of and wrote about is when you work for a larger organisation – my instinct is that if I wrote openly about the sort of problems around which I need to generate knowledge I would find myself in water that was at least uncomfortably warm… I may be being over-cautious of course!

i have been following lilia’s ‘loose ends’ conversation as well and you add an excellent conversation topic – a delicate tightrope we all walk, consciously or unconsciously – about how much we reveal about the questions and challenges we have in our daily lives.

even as a business owner one must have a degree of sensitivity and awareness of one’s languaging on this open network.

that being said, it is refreshing when more general daily business problems and dilemmas are openly aired and shared. in the large fortune 100 companies that i have worked with – when there was an openess regarding the business challenges and questions there was always more room to invent and create effective solutions.

Of course you are right – a climate of openness within an organisation about the challenges it faces is essential to the successful mobilisation of the combined thought-power of all concerned to deal with those challenges. The place I work for is actually very good at that. My concern is more that if I were to write more openly about what we get up to, I would have to be careful to adopt “the voice of the organisation”. That isn’t far from my natural voice (I wouldn’t still be working there if it was) but it would nevertheless be a distortion in this personal space…

Yet we still require places that allow “free-wheeling” and “thinking out loud”. “Brainstorming Rooms” may be better than personal blogs for such activities “where unapproved risk” is involved or the context later forgotten. Too strong a delineation between corporate and private destroys the capability to really bring others in. We all understnad that this is a trade-off.

Then we know blogs that are about “blowing off steam”. Those personal aspects are probably not the best things to be blogging if you are interested in self – preservation internally or externally.

However there is also a safer place someplace in the middle. It’s a “collective” sharing space where boundaries are more appropriately crossed. Customer exchanges are examples.

Plus there’s advantages for enabling others to work on common problems. Best Practices are one example. This form of sharing may even go cross industry. Perhaps blogging and wiki’s can take that form of collaboration to an even higher level.

Like with profiles degrees of access for blogs will likely develop.

Time to find a thesaurus!