While I’ve owned knowledgecog.com for a few months, and I’ve had a few ideas of what I wanted to do with it, it wasn’t until recently that I actually put my ideas into practice.

I wanted to create a site that acted as a portal for all the great knowledge management blogs out there, and would automatically pull content onto that site so that I (and anyone else of course) could read it all in one place.

So I created Knowledge Cog — which pulls in the feeds from a bunch of knowledge management blogs (you can see which blogs on the right-hand sidebar) every two hours. And the site updates automatically, so we can always read the latest posts.

But I also didn’t want to detract from anyone else’s page views or visitors, because that wouldn’t really be fair to the people who create this great content. So instead of displaying all the content of a post, the site simply display the first 125 characters, and links to the original site’s content.

This way, you can browse through a whole bunch of fresh knowledge management content on the front page of Knowledge Cog, and click on the post link, which will take you to the actual article on the site of choice (you can also visit the site directly from the right sidebar).

My hope with this site is that it provides a new way to present and explore content, as well as showing only the freshest content — so one visit to Knowledge Cog will show you what’s new in the knowledge management blogosphere.

There a few bugs that I’m still working through with this. For instance, the feeds don’t always display a summary beneath the post title (I’m assuming this is because the feed is not fully syndicated, so I don’t think there’s much I can do about that).

I still also need to install a plugin to forward the original Wordpress feed to the Feedburner feed that I’ve set up for this. Apologies in advance — the RSS metafeed will be working soon enough. If anyone has any comments on how to improve the site or functionality they would like to see on it, please just let me know! UPDATE: The RSS feed is now working.

I’ve often heard the argument that one of the best reasons to implement a knowledge management program is to harness innovation — yet the relationship between knowledge management and innovation is certainly a complex one.

While it seems intuitive that more knowledge sharing equals more innovation, since it enables us to think and act collaboratively, knowledge sharing also allows us to sort out the good information from the noise.

We all attempt to process an incredible amount of information every day — and if you’re anything like me, by the end of the day, there is a good amount of that information that ends up unprocessed or half processed.

As Jack Vinson points out in the link above, we all rely on others to help inform our decision-making, and this biased (OK, maybe bias is a strong word) information is what we use to help us decide what’s important and what can be left to another day (or what we can just ignore).

In that informed decision-making process, knowing what not to do is just as important as what to do. While we often get the positive side of the innovation story, it’s also important to get people to share their failures and things that just went wrong — these anecdotes keep the same mistakes from being repeated.

In February, I talked about the ROI of blogs – and how it’s often difficult to measure the time or effort that you put into them. While reading an article in the Special Libraries Association monthly publication, Information Outlook, I was reminded of the fact that’s it not only blogs that are tough measure a return on — knowledge management fits the same category.

According to the article by Gretta Rusanow, head of Curve Consulting in Sydney, 84% of law firms describe themselves as “having a culture that supports knowledge management”. However, only 13% of the responding firms actually measure any returns on that investment.

These responding firms also describe the goal of their knowledge management activities to be improved client service delivery, with leveraging expertise, gaining competitive advantage and speeding up service delivery times coming in second.

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A few weeks ago, I published a list of 26 essential knowledge management sites (which ended up growing to 35) — which has gotten a few thousand visits since then. So I wanted to update my list with some more sites that were suggested to me by visitors (as well as some new sites I’ve visited since then).

Check out the updated list and let me know if you know of a site that should be added to this list. All the feedback I got on the last list is what has allowed me to add so many more to it!

1. Aa..ha! - This blog is an eclectic mix of thinking about the human condition as well as knowledge management. There’s a good mix of knowledge management, wisdom and just general stuff about life.

2. ActKM - I have to give Keith De La Rue credit for pointing this one out to me (as per his comment below). A great site for finding out what’s happening in the KM world.

3. The American Productivity & Quality Center’s Knowledge Management Blog - Thoughts and discussions on knowledge management by Jim Lee from the APQC.

4. Anecdote - Anecdote is a consulting firm that specializes in organizational change, leadership and storytelling. While not a strictly KM site, the blog on the front page includes many thoughts and links related to communities of practice and other KM-related areas (thanks Vincent).

5. Association of Knowledgework - At the Association of Knowledgework, people from every specialty cross professional, geographic, cultural, economic and hierarchical barriers to learn together.

6. Boxes and Arrows - While this site doesn’t focus exclusively on knowledge management, it does have a great deal of content in peripheral areas like content management and design.

7. BRINT - Developing leading edge thinking and practice on contemporary business, technology, and knowledge management issues to facilitate organizational and individual performance, success, and fulfillment.

8. ChiefTech - While this blog is mostly about information technology, there is some very interesting stuff there about the web and social networking. This site also talked (very kindly I might add) about this blog.

9. Chris Collison’s blog - This is an excellent resource for collaboration-related knowledge management stuff. Chris is a fantastic resource on anything collaborative (and has even been kind enough to leave an insightful comment here).

10. Cindy Gordon - Focuses upon knowledge management, human capital and innovation.

11. CIO’s Knowledge Management section - The magazine about business, technology and leadership has a specific section on their website devoted to KM. The other sections are also interesting and definitely worth checking out as well.

12. Cognitive Edge - Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge talks about all aspects of knowledge management, and is updated quite frequently.

13. Collaborative Thinking - Mike Gotta’s blog on collaboration, social software, social networking and knowledge management trends, including community-building methods and practices.

14. Column Two - News and opinion articles by James Robertson on the general topics of knowledge management and content management. Features archives and RSS/XML syndication.

15. A Compound of Alchymie - John Curran’s viewpoints on knowledge management, intellectual capital, social networking and related topics.

16. Creative Chaos: Dina Mehta’s blog - An eclectic mix of posts about knowledge, blogs, marketing and more.

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One of the endless information science/knowledge management debates is on the value of connection versus collection. For anyone unfamiliar with this debate, it’s basically this: is collecting information all in one place better than providing connectors among the people who share that information (or knowledge, if you like that word better). Or vice versa?

Obviously, there’s no one right answer (or maybe even an answer at all) to which is of more value. It always depends on the specific context we’re talking about, as well as the type of information or knowledge. But even more importantly, if you only do one, how do you how valuable the other approach could have been? You can’t measure what you didn’t do.

I’ve noticed a growing trend toward lists of things in people’s blog posts — something like this list of 83 beautiful Wordpress themes. My own list of knowledge management sites has also been by far the most popular post on this site. Digg users also love these lists, and they often get thousands of Diggs.

So while blogs provide a connective link between individuals and create communities of people interested in the same topics — there also seems to be a trend toward collecting information all in one place. I know some people absolutely hate these lists, but they seem to be mostly bloggers who feel it’s not original writing (perhaps someone should put together a list of reasons why they hate lists).

What do you think? Does collecting information in a blog post defeat the whole connectivity element of a blog? Or does it enhance that connectivity?