An organization has to be ready to share knowledge, and there is very little that can be done to push it further down that path. While educating management and staff about the importance of sharing knowledge can help, if the culture is very much ingrained against knowledge sharing, then you’re going to be fighting an impossible uphill battle.

As far as categorization systems go, the real tough part is finding a categorization system that is good at categorizing, but is also transparent to the end user. For example, Library of Congress classification is a great way to organize things, but it’s certainly not a system that the end user is going to intuitively understand. Not to mention that everything contained in the Library of Congress already meets a certain standard of quality. The web or corporate information is similar, in that a quality judgment must first be made about the content before it gets into the repository.

Transparency to the end user is a really tough thing to achieve — which is why most end users, when asked what they want in an enterprise search engine, say “something like Google”.

Clayton — thanks for stopping by. I think you’ve got a really interesting idea there, I’ll be sure to stop by your site and check it out.

I particularly like the idea of not categorizing information unless absolutely necessarily. I think valuable information is often overlooked because it has been categorized (intentionally or unintentionally) as something that would generally be considered unrelated.

However, in the absence of an open knowledge/information sharing environment, how does one go about effectively and efficiently collecting information? In this case, by removing the human interaction aspect of sharing, you are essentially forcing the individual to depend on some sort of categorization process, whether it be effective and efficient or not.

I enjoyed checking out your blog. I’m a recent grad in Silicon Valley, and I’ve just started a company that is mapping the blogosphere to our world. Here is an example of a blogger in Georgia who’s plugged in: http://www.verveearth.com/landing/#type=user&id=772. It can be fun to explore different localities.

It’s an easy process to get on board, and I can be reached at clayton@verveearth.com for questions or feedback. If you resonate with the vision of painting a global canvas of voices, please give VerveEarth a mention.

Cheers! -Clayton