[Excerpts from an internal email I posted the other day in response to a remark about internal communication via threaded discussion forums, edited slightly to adjust the dates]:

Most of the day Monday at the Social Tools for the Enterprise event was
*EXACTLY* about this very issue!!! The overwhelming consensus (in that community at least) is that a kind of ‘(lighweight) semantic blogging’, particularly one where ‘topic-indexed’ comments-on-blog-postings are allowed/encouraged, facilitates exactly the best of all worlds.

Each medium has its advantages, of course…

* Email = least-common-demonitator, low effort, wide reach (hence your group email, and this email right now!!)

* Discussion forum = archival and nicely manageable repository for free-ranging and focused discussions [in fact, anyone can start an instant forum with ubiquitousD3E for example, that has a lot of these properties... though historically these have always proved to be rather short-lived]

* Personal Blog = stronger sense of ‘ownership’ (my blog vs group/corporate forum)

* Group blog / wiki = ownership + feedback

* RSS Feeds & Aggregators = powerful (and smarter) way to integrate/manage and span a wide range of everything from personal blogs to BBC News, trigger alerts when something new/interesting arrives, etc.

**’Holy Grail’ (with today’s technology) = blogs, with comments (that can trigger email alerts), trackbacks (that can tell you who’s linking to you), feeds/aggregators (that can help ‘bootstrap up the chain’ from personal to enterprise-wide knowledge exchange), and topic indexing (for later retrieval and organization, and done in a mixture of bottom-up/ad hoc styles from existing posts, and top down ontologically-clean organization from an initial ’seed’), gives you the best of several worlds.

KMi, as was pretty apparent at the gig yesterday, sits at the centre of TWO fantastic crossroads:

(a) the semantic web and blogging worlds, and

(b) the synchronous and asynchronous worlds …

Your post is exactly timely for this very reason; indeed I’m torn myself because of my situation this very moment, where I probably need to post an email (this one), a Planet story, an Impact entry, a personal blog entry on my home page/blog, an stes.evectors.com blog entry (where I’m an author), and possibly an Internal Planet story with a longer diatribe on the matter — yes, they are all slightly different, but it would be nice to do chunks of them in ‘one go’, and to receive back blog comments in a ‘threaded-discussion’ style as you suggest (which some tools
allow)…. let’s do it!!!

[and while I'm at it, why not allow a post-hoc threaded view of cross-blog postings... as long as they use trackback links, it would be a very useful alternative 'slice of the pie', no?]

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