Eclectic Bill on the difference between Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management 2.0, triggered by this comment by David Weinberger in KMWorld:
[…] Web 2.0 is not a disruptive set of technologies but just the “continuous and incremental changes” as the Web has evolved in popularity and usage. The web has always been collaborative from the beginning and the new technologies just make it easier to collaborate.
[…] KM 1.0 was all about “managing and controlling information environments” while KM 2.0 is “bottom-up, participatory, rapid innovation, more mixing up and and mashing of information.” […] KM today is a decentralized group of methods and technologies that is very different from the IT-focused centralized group of applications.
He goes on expressing his concerns that
[…] KM 2.0 will suffer from being too-closely associated with the latest technology. Even though IT applications help enable KM, it is more than the software. You can practice much of KM without technology because it is people that create knowledge – not computers. This collaboration between people is what makes KM work. But with the focus on Web 2.0 and its collaborative technologies, KM 2.0 will be confused with the Web 2.0 tools. And as these tools become outdated or fail to live up to the hype, KM 2.0 will suffer much KM 1.0 suffered during the early 1990s. There is more to KM than the tools and the KM community needs to stress that point.
Yes, it’s about people, not about technologies … see my posts here and here for further evidence.