Last year’s KMWorld keynote speaker and information architecture expert, Peter Morville, pointed me to a discussion of search as a wayfinding system for websites.  Author of  the discussion, David Hatch, says web users are moving toward “search as being a standard, hard-wired, lizard brain reflex when confronted with moving through the vasty content spaces that are out there. The Googles have had no small impact on our wayfinding approaches. “  He also believes Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering would not agree.  Jared is a speaker at KMWorld 2009 so it will be interesting to hear what he shares about making an intuitive interface design.

Here are some useful statistics as reported in, Blogging: The Best SEO Tool for Small Businesses. Hub sport recently published a study on that showed companies that blog have far better marketing results. Those who blog see 55% more visitors to their website.

In addition, they get 97% more links to their website which is a primary factor in determining search results. If you want a higher ranking, get quality links to your site. They also get 434% more indexed pages – this is the number of pages that show up in search engines. Simply because you have a web site doesn’t guarantee it is being indexed and is thus findable by search engines. If some of your pages are in search engines it does not mean all of your pages are there.

This is useful evidence to support what I have seen over the past five years. Blogs get you on the front page of Google and other search engines if you do them right. I first discovered also by accident when I saw that many of the various niche topics that I wrote about appeared on the front page of Google. I noticed this first by looking at the referring source and seeing that it was often a Google search. Usually the search had my post in the top returns so that people saw it and came to t the blog.

The results above show how a blog can boost a regular web site if they are connected in some way. I feel that it is better to have then as separate but closely linked, rather than have the blog embedded in the site. It tends to make the blog easier to find and have its own identity.

I am doing a workshop on Blogging in the Age of Twitter at this year’s KM World. I hope top see you there.

Carla O'Dell

We are very excited that Carla O’Dell, President, APQC & former KMW keynote speaker,  is  joining the faculty of KMWorld 2009. She is participating in our Thursday morning panel discussing and envisioning the “enterprise of the future”.  along with Art Murray, CEO Applied Knowledge Services, Dave Hersh, CEO Jive Software, and Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Telligent.  Carla’s fields of expertise include knowledge management and sharing, the transfer of best practices, benchmarking and organizational improvement and change management.  We look forwrad to her participation in KMWorld 2009.

Patti Anklam, long time KMWorld conference speaker and participant, posted an interesting piece about three types of KM — big, little & personal.  She describes big KM as enterprise-wide which includes:

• Content management (including KM portals, search strategies)
• Consulting (to business units) on knowledge container and sharing methodologies, embedding knowledge capture and sharing into business processes
• Providing thought leadership on the application of KM to IT and the implementation of the KM infrastructure
• Innovation and ideation services
• Social software advocacy
• Key community (centers of excellence and expertise) support to build and transfer vital corporate knowledge
• Project materials
• Stewarding a collaboration strategy in support of communities of practice
• Providing learning and knowledge transfer opportunities through best practices, stimulating conversations that matter, and experiential learning practices for teams

I find that KM means different things to different people and I like Patti’s definition:  a “collection of disciplines, methods and tools embedded in an information infrastructure that supports creation and sharing of knowledge assets to achieve business goals.”  What do you think?

Patti mentions several KMWorld 2009 speakers in her post — Stan Garfield and Dave Snowden and says, “The continual flow of new methods, ideas, and perspectives is what keeps me involved in the KM community.”  The exchange of ideas, description of methods and practices, and perspectives will be many at the KMWorld 2009 Conference in San Jose, November 17-19.  Join us!

Euan Semple

Interesting post about Enterprise 2.0 from a former KMWorld speaker, Euan Semple. His secret to success:  “Focus instead on the things that are desperately trying to happen but aren’t and the people who are desperately trying to connect but can’t. Do things that make the impossible possible and your success rate will soar.”

Andrew McAfee

Hugh McKellar of KMWorld magazine recently interviewed KMWorld 2009‘s keynote speaker, Andrew McAfee.   They talk about Enterprise 2.0 — a “fundamental shift in the way that organizations can share knowledge and gain collective intelligence and ultimately increase the bottom line.”

Have a look at the article, join us in San Jose on November 17th for McAfee’s keynote at KMWorld 2009, and check out McAfee’s forthcoming new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. Here’s what you’ll find in the book according to the author:

I start with four case studies about organizations facing challenges or missed opportunities, and hopefully those big challenges or missed opportunities will be pretty familiar to the reader. Then, I get into Web 2.0 and the significant improvement in technologies available for collaboration. I show how, in each of the four cases, the organization grabbed some portion of that toolkit and made it work, helped address the challenge they faced.

I present a framework for thinking through what Enterprise 2.0 can do for you and how to think about it. At the end, I present some guidance about deployment–once you’ve made your decision, what you need to do to ensure a successful rollout. The book concludes by looking into the future a little bit and making some hopefully grounded predictions about where all this is headed.

You can also view Andrew speaking about Enterprirse 2.0 here.

Charlene Li

Hear a podcast with KM World 2009 and Enterprise Search Summit Keynote Charlene Li.   EContent & Intranets editor Michelle Manafy interviews Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. They discuss leveraging social strategies in and outside organizations–and for search in particular. They also talk about Li’s forthcoming book on Open Leadership and how understanding how open your organization should be (and achieving the right degree of openness) will determine its chances for success in the future.  Join Charlene in person at KMWorld 2009, Wednesday Nov 19 in San Jose.

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation has set created “a tool, [2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning] for thinking about, preparing for, and shaping the future. It outlines key forces of change that will shape the landscape of learning over the next decade.”  With the theme of KMWorld 2009, Resetting the Enterprise: Focusing on People, Talent & Knowledge,  and many sessions around Enterprise 2.o, you make want to check out one of the “drivers of change” sections — Amplified Organization/s: Extended human capacity remakes the organization.  There is also a section on Open Leadership & Socialability: A Trend of the Amplified Organization which includes a video of Chuck House, executive Director, Media X, Stanford University’s membership research program on media and technology, who talks about the new skills needed for the 21st century jobs.

The 2020 Forecast webiste contains four types of info:

* drivers of change — major forces of transformation that will shape our efforts to remake learning

*trends — distinct directions of change that point to new concepts or new patterns of behavior that will shape the future of learning

* signals — examples, or early indicators, of the changes described by the trends and the drivers of change. By providing analogies, data, and explicit stories, signals help make the future seem more concrete.

*learning agents — new roles and functions that might emerge in the future ecosystem of learning