Monday 24 October 2011


Self-generated silos - it's worse than we thought.


Shattered glass
I blogged a while ago about how social media can fragment into small silos of discussion, and how the wisdom of the crowd can fragment into the self-reinforcement of the clique. I cited the fact that there were over one hundred Knowledge Management discussion groups on Linked-in as an example of how discussion can fragment into silos.

It's worse than I thought.
According to a recent post by Ian Wooller, there are now,




  • 26 Alumni groups
  • 32 Corporate groups
  • 20 Conference groups
  • 132 Networking groups
  • 16 Nonprofit groups
  • 196 Professional groups.

  • All purporting to cover Knowledge Management.

    That's a total of 422 groups.

    What a mess!

    Where would you go to ask your Knowledge Management question? Where, in those 422 groups, is the person who can give you the most useful answer? You don't know, they could be anywhere. Looking for knowledge in the Linked-In groups is a total lottery.

    1 comment:

    Stephen Dale said...

    This was one of the problems I was trying to solve with the Knowledge Hub (for local government). I knew there was no way of stopping the growth of social networks, groups, blogs etc., so Knowledge Hub (http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub) would aggregate, categorise and match content (e.g. conversations) according to user profiles. Unfortunately they cut the budget before all of this could be delivered. However, I'm working with PFIKS (developers) to see what can be salvaged. The root problem of disaggregated conversations hasn't gone away; in fact, it's getting worse!

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