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This is a good post for those new to k-logs and klogging, and is the first of two items regarding the interaction of klogging with employers/co-workers -- should we/shouldn't we, when/when not, what to say/what not to say, etc.
Below, Paul Holbrook discusses the difficulty of exposing what we think to those around us. He says (better than I could) what it's like to try and come to grips with speaking privately in a public forum. I suspect his words will ring true for many who are new to the idea of thinking in public.
I completely overlooked this post, even though I'm specifically on the lookout for pieces relevant to new kloggers. Having found it, I added it to my klogging culture package for helping future users. But I missed it. And had I waited more than a day or so to peruse Paul's site it would have fallen below the water line. I may have never seen it.
But Ron Lusk caught it. I don't know Ron Lusk. I just found his url in my Referrer log today, so I went to check it out. I liked what I saw so I subscribed to Ron's RSS feed and a little later today this tidbit from Paul showed up in my aggregator. Ron had looked where I looked, but had seen something different.
This points to the value of two things:
- Mining one's Referrer logs for little bits of gold like Ron Lusk's weblog, and
- How weblogs begin to form what Cory Doctorow calls the Outboard Brain -- an external web of information and insight that can make us all a little bit richer.
By knowing a little about who is reading my log I found a valuable resource -- Ron. And now that I know Ron exists, has similar interests, and is prowling the web for items similar to what I would seek, I can rely on him to catch some of the salient things I miss. Which means I don't have to catch them all on my own. As |Matt| says in this post:
I'm not Atlas to the internet.
Even to my own small chunk of it.
In return, I should do the same for Ron, or anyone else who reads this weblog. That is the benefit and culture of k-logs. Now, go read Paul's post and feel for yourself some of the struggles of thinking out loud.
Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog. Paul's original RSS item was shortened, with no link to his own comments on klogging. He speaks of the discomfort in revealing one's klogging to others on a grand scale.
Shortly after I arrived, I started keeping a klog of my work. So far I've clued in the few people I've worked with so far to my klog, but as best as I can tell, they haven't paid much attention. I've been struggling with the question about when and how to let the larger project team know about my klog, but so far I've been reluctant to do so. Today I was in kick-off meeting for the large project I've been working on. Towards the end of the meeting, I was almost consumed with the desire to tell people about my klog, but I just couldn't bring myself to speak up.
I've asked myself why that is, and the answer isn't straight-forward. I've only been at Tech for six weeks; higher-ed politics are notoriously complicated, and I don't know how people might react to the things I've written. A klog is by definition not politically correct; you say what you think, not what you believe others might want to hear.[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog] [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog]
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