Blogging Practices of Knowledge Workers
PhD Thesis: Between passion and work: blogging practices of knowledge workers. By Lila Efimova.
URL = http://www.telin.nl/index.cfm?ID=385&context=386&language=en
Description
"Iceberg (the metaphor best describing the invisible nature of knowledge work) is a short name for "Between passion and work: blogging practices of knoweldge workers", a doctoral research project. '
Weblogs are personal "diary-like-format" web-sites enabled by easy to use tools and open for everyone to read. Since their early days, weblogs have been envisioned as a prototype technology for enabling grass-roots knowledge management and they are also increasingly used for knowledge development and sharing in companies or in academia. These uses inspire thinking about future development of technologies to provide individuals with easy ways to organise their knowledge and connect with others, and thinking about reshaping organisational practices to support distributed (bottom-up) knowledge management.
Despite the growth of weblog adoption in the corporate world in the last few years (e.g. 5,4% of Fortune 500 are blogging), the research on uses of weblogs at a workplace is limited. From one side, existing business literature focuses primarily on covering business benefits of blogging, especially in relation with marketing and PR, while rarely providing a glimpse into knowledge worker's practices of using weblogs. From another side, the broader research on weblogs aims on mapping specific characteristics of blogs, blogging and bloggers across multiple user categories, technologies or application domains and do not necessarily distinguish or characterise work-related weblogs as a specific category.
This PhD research aims to fill in this gap. Specifically, it focuses on blogging at knowledge-intensive environments and aims to describe blogging practices of knowledge workers, as well as implications for introducing/using weblogs in business contexts." (http://www.telin.nl/index.cfm?ID=385&context=386&language=en)