They update these notes and ideas frequently and engage interested viewers to converse back-and-forth on those points. While some blogs aren’t much more than online diaries, others include interesting insights and tradecraft, and knowledge relating to a person’s job. These so-called “knowledge blogs,” or klogs, begin to look like something that could be a valuable component of a knowledge network of community of practice. They may be especially useful as a mechanism for surfacing new ideas, which the community of practice could evaluate and promote for further consideration.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Interactions. The most well known example of P2P music exchange software is Napster, which enables distributed users to share the music contained on their machines with a distributed network of other others/contributors. Other examples of P2P functionality include the Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer program which linked two million PCs around the world to support medical research. The Groove provides encrypted, shared space that can be used for workgroup collaboration among distributed, P2P participants in communities of practice, corporate sales forces, or other dispersed groups of users. P2P interactions are a key element of communities of practice and will be a central feature, in some form, of tomorrow’s knowledge sharing environments.

In the area of P2P technologies for learning, the Knowledge Management Research Group in Stockholm have participated in the development of Edutella, a search service based upon context descriptions. It is an educational application that is a prototype for learning on the Semantic Web and designed to enrich the Semantic Web with a “Conceptual Web.” Its “driving vision is a learning web infrastructure which will make it possible to exchange/ annotate/ organize and personalize/ navigate/ use/ reuse modular learning resources, supporting a variety of courses, disciplines and universities.” (Nilsson, et al. 2002).

Knowledge workers will depend on vibrant communities of practice and peer-to-peer networks to engage in a rapid-fire, perpetual exchange of ideas and insights involving their tradecraft. Tacit knowledge and insight will be cultivated and shared to a greater degree and with greater velocity than is possible today. New ideas will churn and be evaluated by the community.