In the current world of knowledge management, blogs are not exactly the most cutting-edge tool, and for this reason they have never gained widespread use. But blogs are more than just outlets for personal musings and political rants. For businesses, they can serve all sorts of purposes that help to enlighten and inform individuals within the company, and they can actually be quite efficient for sharing and storing information that needs to be accessible to many people. Let’s look at a few of the features that make blogs potentially very useful components of a good knowledge management system.
Organized information
Most standard blogging platforms have sophisticated categorization systems that make finding information easy. WordPress, for example, a popular content management system, allows for posts to be categorized as well as tagged, providing two intermeshing systems of categorization that help in grouping posts on similar topics. Meanwhile, posts can also be archived according to month and author, which makes it easy to find them when you need information from a certain time or that was generated by a certain person.
When you combine these organizational features with search functionality, blogs are actually highly efficient ways to store lots of information. Sure, it is typically not stored in the visually organized way such as what you see on computer hard drives and servers, but it is organized nonetheless.
User-generated knowledge
Blogs can be opened up to an unlimited number of contributors. By giving many individuals credentials in the system and incentivizing them to contribute in ways that are relevant to their areas of expertise, large companies can efficiently generate a huge amount of useful information via a blog.
Internal-external connectivity
If you run a business for which it may be beneficial or useful to share information that can be accessible to the public, a blog is a great way to do this. Just put everything online in the form of blog posts and make it public and crawlable to search-engine spiders, and it becomes accessible to everyone. Of course, having a blog with useful information is also a great way to market a business.
Relevant information
While blog content is typically archived and stored permanently, one of the great things about blogs is that all the newest and most relevant posts are shown first on the main page of the blog. So for companies that need to get new information out to employees, a blog is perfect. And once the information is no longer new, it can then be accessed through the blog’s archive structure.
Backup functionality
One of the downsides about blogs is that servers can go down and systems can crash, with the potential of not just lost access but in some cases lost information. Most blogging platforms allow for backup functionality that gives users the opportunity to download and store backup files containing all the blog’s information. Other platforms have plugins that can be set to automatically back up the information regularly and either store it on a server or email it to someone for them to store. If managed properly, this makes backing up quite simple.
