knowledge management

Explaining Collective Intelligence - Haiku may be the only way to go

I’ve been pondering a recent McAfee post, “Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content” and have blogged on this in TheAppGap, but I was so tickled by his references to definitions by Kim Rachmeler on the topic of “collective intelligence:

• The network knows what the nodes do not
• The nodes know nothing. The nodes know all. Both are true.

These resonated with me partly because my view of the three eras of knowledge management (I will not use the vogue-ish 1.0, 2.0 terminology), I say that:

• in the first era, knowledge was considered to be in documents (artifacts)
• in the second era, it was acknowledged that knowledge is in people
• in this third era, knowledge is in the network

Kim’ statements above are a much more elegant and thought-provoking way of stating the third.

Meanwhile, Nancy White has posted on Haiku as Conference Capture one of the Haikus blogged by praxis101 at the recent SXSW:

Your social footprint.
Or your ghost on the network.
You have to choose one

If you go and read the McAfee article referenced above, you’ll see that he makes the distinction between the explicit content (what we know we’ve written, tagged or linked) and the implicit content on the web, which he describes as “fingerprints.” There must be a haiku there somewhere.