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Introduction
Individuals have many options how to collaborate and share their knowledge. Couple of years ago, only professionals were able to publish on-line; these days we see crowd of people collaborating among themselves with massive help of Internet. This new wave has got a name, it is web 2.0 – next level of Internet generation.
Main characteristics of web 2.0 are rich user experience, participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards, scalability, openness, freedom and collective intelligence based on users‘ participation and knowledge sharing.
„Web 2.0 services allow users more than just to retrieve information; they can create and own information on Internet. These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort which limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site’s owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax, Flex or similar rich media. The sites may also have social networking aspects. “ [41]
Technology used the way that facilitates creativity, sharing and collaboration among users called into existence hosted services such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies as results of this evolution.
On-line social services linking people together became popular very fast. Since their introduction social networking sites have attracted millions of users; many of them integrated these sites into their daily practice. Overwhelming majority of teenagers has their profile with list of friends on MySpace or Facebook; on-line networking in not considered unusual any longer.
Social networking sites are important for building networks between people they would never meet, but we can not consider them best tool for knowledge sharing. It is blog and wiki that makes people share their knowledge effective.
Blogs changed the way how people identify Internet. Nowadays, it is common that computer literate person is publishing own blog under hosted blogging service and share ideas with readers. Reasons why blogs became so successful are explained in chapter three of this paper.
Wiki is popular tool for knowledge management. Its features as easy editing and collaborative freedom allows users to contribute and share knowledge without any obstacles. Chapter four is dedicated to wiki philosophy, qualities and new perspectives brought. Wikipedia.org as an example is talking loud enough. But wiki - it is not only Wikipedia. The reality is that organizational wiki site differs forcefully from this open encyclopedia.
Conclusion
This paper is focused on aspects and methods of on-line collaboration as part of knowledge management process. New tendencies in communication, sharing and cooperation opened up thanks to web 2.0 applications.
Knowledge management is getting important in business more than ever. Research shows it is the informal networks that increase organization intelligence. Questions “who knows whom”, “who knows what”, “who knows how”, “who knows why” and “who knows when” represent issues of strategic knowledge in organization.
Web 2.0 opened up new horizons in collaboration and networking. Individuals are able to contribute and share on-line without knowing programming, there is even no need to run website by own thanks to hosted applications. This evolutionary approach in technology have lead to rise of hosted services such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies.
All these technologies give people excellent support for knowledge sharing and collaboration what leads to enormous increase of information that is embedded in corporate wikis, blogs and company’s information system as a whole. Today the moving around is going forward to helping with interpretation of all the data and information.
There are already some ways how to connect and mashup informations from different sources, for example feeds mashups, connection of personal calendar with public available maps, etc. However this field is very novel and is starting to becoming next hot think in company’s IT. Bunch of startups have started already and also well known internet companies started to release their products in this field. We should be very curious what the whole web 3.0 comes with and how all these technologies helps not only in our daily work day.
But this is the future of information technologies and today there is still big issue an incorporation of already available technologies and processes into daily usage. Goal of this paper was to explain qualities of on-line collaboration and bring into light benefits of blogs and wikis for knowledge management to help them to be better understandable and as a consequence also more used in company’s information systems.
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