In recent weeks my Facebook "wall" has started to yield a treasure-trove of high-school era picture, stories and flashbacks, including associations of names to groups, events and interests I never then fully appreciated - but do now. A few years back, I was addressing a US National Archives program called the " Electronic Records Archives " (ERA), a program aimed at improving the nation's ability to "indefinitely" (i.e. even after Google and Microsoft go out of business in the year 3000) preserve government electronic records - including emails, online chat, digital photos, video and other data. One of the key challenges was promoting this program to users and organizations, and coming up with ways to encourage authors and managers of electronic records to identify, tag and contribute items to the records management system (to ultimately be assessed and possibly saved "forever" in the ERA system). Facebook is apparently the new "National...

Had a conundrum the past few days with Twitter - among several IDs, one was being populated with a mix of "business" and "community" news. With twitter, there's no clear way of categorizing tweets or conversations by tags or categories; the conversations are aggregated but reflect not necessarily a single topic, but either (1) a non-purpose-driven dialogue, either instance-based or continuing, or (2) or purpose-driven dialogue, where the communicators intend to resolve a question, promote something or provide alerts/updates. In traditional knowledge management terms, communities typically exist as (a) communities of interest (COIs), (b) communities of practice (COPs), or communities of purpose (COPRs). Since the ultimate outcome of these sorts of communities was to add to and share elements of a knowledgebase, the concept of "communicating for communications or simply socializing's sake" isn't really included in these three community-type defi...