Why are blogs working?

Life is funny, you’ll work like a dog on something, and it will just plain won’t work. And once in a while, a very simple concept will just work. I think that research and life has more to do with luck, as in “try many things and hope that something will work”, rather than pure intellect. Which is why I think that centralized, authoritarian systems are doomed to failure. And I think it also explains why the Americans, with their relatively free flowing class structure are eating up the rest of the world. Build all the castles you want, and force people to be your servants… but you’ll never be able to compete with a loosely controlled community. This doesn’t mean anarchy works: I said loosely controlled, not out-of-control.

This also means that as a researcher, you shouldn’t be too focused. I didn’t write that you should be unfocused… but don’t be narrow. You might get lucky and hit gold even if you had a single target, but maybe that will just be luck.

I found this post called A Partially Definitive But Slightly Abstract Guide To Why Blogs Are So Successful through a post by Seb. I really like some of the comments:

• Blogs are “person-centric not place-centric”. In this day and age where you’ll probably have 20 different employers in your life, go through 20 different cities… who wants to be place-centric? Universities have to take this into account. They should stop assuming that their students are their students. They aren’t. Just like banks realized some years ago that because you had a bank account with the Royal Bank, you might not have a VISA card from them. People are not loyal nor should they be. Realize this and the students will love you. In practice, this means that instead of trying to fit students into a mold, they should put the students as much in control as they can. Universities that get this will win.
• “Don’t Try And Make The Computer Do Things It Can’t And We Can” : I’m all for Knowledge Management (KM) research and I consider myself to be a KM researcher, but I know that computers can’t do KM. They just can’t. We should stop fooling around. Humans do KM and until computers get much, much, much improved, they won’t do KM. We have to let the humans be in charge, always. Software is there to help humans with KM, but it doesn’t do KM.