There’s certainly no shortage of things to talk about in the world of Knowledge Management and Intranets, as is evidenced by the packed 4-day schedule of workshops now winding up at the 2005 KM and Intranets Conference in San Jose, California. Why then are there so few people blogging about these topics on a regular basis?

The Aussie intranet guru James Robertson writes that he’s having a good time at the conference, but finds it distressing how few Intranet focused blogs he’s able to find. (Note, this is about intranets in particular. There are many blogs on KM in general.)

What these recent conferences have really highlighted to me is that there is actually a fair bit of intranet expertise about, within organisations or consulting firms…These intranet folk, however, are almost entirely invisible. In my news aggregator, for example, I have over a dozen CMS feeds, two dozen usability/IA feeds, but only only two (!) intranet-specific feeds…So this is my call to everyone working in the intranet space: make yourself more visible, as there’s a huge need to build a stronger community around intranets. A simple starting point would be to establish a blog, and to start posting on your day-to-day experiences. Even write a small article or two.

The KM and Intranets conference has a wonderful blog and wiki hosted by the wiki firm SocialText, including a wiki page for atendees to list their own blogs. A great idea, but so far only 6 people have added links to their blogs there!

The conference wiki is undoubtedly a great resource site, and will continue to be for a long time, but where can you find RSS feeds about Intranets? Here are some suggestions for more fruitful places to subscribe to:

• Del.icio.us items tagged “Intranet” (feed)
  Currently delivers 5-10 items per month from a variety of users.
• Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability
  This service regularly addresses Intranet issues. It doesn’t offer it’s own RSS feed, but you can subscribe to the scraped headline links via RSS here: AlertBox Feed
• For Immediate Release
  A popular podcast about PR and organizational communications, FIR appears to discuss intranets explicitly about once per month, according to their show notes. To recieve notification of episodes that do discuss the subject, you can subscribe to this feed: FIR on Intranets This show is a good one to listen to on a wide variety of topics.

Well, those are some pretty sparse resources! Robertson seems correct in bemoaning that the field he is a star in is not well represented in the blogosphere. Roberston’s own site and feed are amongst the best sources on the topic.

It may seem counterintuitive to blog about your experiences with intranets on the open internet, but what could be more useful than a number of blogs and feeds to chose from that adress lessons learned from internal communication? Hopefully the KM and Intranets Conference and the efforts of pathbreakers like James Robertson will help spur the launch of more resources like this.

Technorati Tags: KM, intranet, blogs, James_Robertson