Just finished reading
Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story about one of the first and biggest .com crashes. Its an entertaining read, and changed my sympathies for the founders. I'd love to say their downfall had a KM basis, but from what's reported it seems largely financial. Mind you, there's no way that their rate of expansion could have supported inter-office learning. Some transfer happened by good old fashioned 'people flying around'. So I'm sure poor KM at least contributed to their scary burn-rate.

Personal Knowledge Management
I've just finished reviewing Mick Cope's 'Know Your Value?' (see www.wizoz.co.uk or Amazon) for KM Magazine. To me KYV is about the only book that tries to take KM principles and scale them right down to what inividuals should be doing. It appeals to me more than, say, all the Me plc and personal branding stuff that comes from (mostly) the USA.

However, I'm disappointed that the Personal KM movement doesn't seem to have taken off. I thought it was almost inevitable as people grappled with the 'culture' question that we'd have to more-or-less have a conversation with everyone about what it means to be a knowledge worker. Only a few (e.g. Rumizen in 'The Idiot's Guide to KM - best intro there is by the way) and Gurteen in his workshops (www.gurteen.com) seem to have picked it up. Some are saying that Blogging is the practical tool that PKM has been missing so far (OK, by 'some', I mean me, just then, but I'm sure that's what the 'blogging=KM' articles elsewhere mean). But to me the bigger issue is that Copes book sets out why people should share ideas (vs. never Blog in case my ideas are stolen), get over 'Not Invented Here' syndrom and be more creative in working out 'what's in it for me?'. In short, all the barriers to making KM work that are usually labelled culture.

I wanted to call this Blog 'Not Invented Here' but I see its already taken - more apt than I realised.

My starting premise is that I don't believe in Blogs as a useful thing to do. Largely because they're so unstructured that it seems like too much effort to get any value out of somebody else's Blog. However, I promised Dave Gurteen I'd give them a go and see if it changed my mind.

What I want to see, then, is evidence that anybody reads this stuff. Whereas most Blogs try to attract readers by telling them useful things, I'm going to go straight in there with a plea for you to tell me stuff instead (or at least to get in touch with me at sammarshall@yahoo.DELETE-THIS.com [anti spam thing - sorry])
* anybody out there looking at how extreme programming relates to teamwork or KM?
* anybody interested in knowledge management in start-up companies or new ventures?
* anyone else work in a large R&D department as a KM specialist?

Thank you for your attention.