YouTube a KM Platform?
- Author: Arjun Thomas
- Filed under: Knowledge Management, Social Media
Jun 5,2007
YouTube a KM Platform?? Are you out of your mind? thats probably the first reaction you had when you read the title of this post. Honestly? i dont blame you , i was having the same thoughts a week ago , but then as you know when an idea takes hold it takes a while to shake off.
So I asked myself this very simple question, What makes a good KM platform? and then started listing the points down one by one. This is what i’ve come up with so far ( this is a very basic list, so bear with me) .
- Communities of Practice
- Expertise Map
- Great Search feature
- Collaboration
- Information Repositories
The whole idea behind institutionalizing KM anywhere is to for people to get to the right information at the right time. While there are hundreds of applications out there ( open source and otherwise ) the fundamental success factor for any KM initiative is to establish a self sustaining knowledge sharing culture that uses the platform to facilitate collaboration. Something YouTube has excelled at, now whether this fits your corporates definition of a KM tool is question that we shall tackle on another day.
Right, back to the question at hand. Analyzing what YouTube has to offer gives us a pretty good insight on how the knowledge ( headbanging teens and American idol wannabes ) is stored and structured. Here you can get to any information using a category tab, a great way to structure your information. Tags are another huge feature here which makes structuring and subsequently locating information a lot simpler.
Channels allow you to subscribe to your favourite information sources and receive a steady stream of information without searching for it. Finally and most importantly a Community section which gets people of similar interest together to discuss about information / interests that they have in common.
As with any self respecting KM tool the option to rate information is a must, YouTube accomplishes that with aplomb. Users are allowed to rate videos, post comments and so on enabling the “weeding” out of less desirable content.
Information like which are the most viewed videos, favourited videos and such add as a bonus to the information seeker as it gives him/ her the opportunity to feel the pulse ( so to speak ) of the community.
Statistics on how many videos were viewed /submitted by individual users can be pulled up very easily enabling ( further down the line ) a creation of an “expertise map”.
There you have it, while YouTube is not what one would call an ideal KM tool it addresses one of the most difficult issues KM practitioners face, getting people to share information. Filling the other functional gaps shouldn’t be too difficult. Now if only we can get our corporates to start shooting embarrassing videos of themselves.
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11 Responses for "YouTube a KM Platform?"
As I read your message, “There you have it, YouTube is a great KM tool it caters to most…”, I thought of KM tool and KM features distinction. Think YouTube is not a great KM tool. In my views, it is a classic example of what KM features would have like that could help to improve access to knowledge.
Nevertheless, I like YouTube. By reason of, it expresses and captures one possible modes of representation of information and/or knowledge. It also helps to reflect from this information and/or knowledge.
I agree…the purpose of this post was to basically draw attention to certain tools that have taken the medium of information exchange to the next level. There is a whole lot of work that will need to go into a system like this before its ever truly classified as a KM system….
Arjun,
I agree. Thus, I would like to add some more points.
Really we learn, understand, and know the meaning of information and/or knowledge through three main sensory receivers - vision, listening, and touching. Most of the time, we use all three to receive information and/or knowledge. If not, one or more of these receiving styles are dominant. And assuming that we could learn, understand, and know the meaning of information and/or knowledge from YouTude is not the best way to take on. It could only promote disappointment.
Think the best KM tool for us to learn, understand, and know the meaning of information and/or knowledge is a combination of the three sensory receivers. Their combination will help us to produce good results.
Kind regards,
Bong
Interesting idea,
however, i’d consider a tool to be a true KM portal if it has the feature to manage the knowledge and not just content.
Youtube for me is just a content management system, i wont consider it to be a good tool for KM where the knowledge represented by the content can be archived into various forms.
Unless there is a way for YouTube to transcribe the conversation in say text or topic map based classification, i will not consider it a KM tool at all.
Atif,
I agree, like i said, the whole idea of this post was to see how much of a success alternate content platforms were. Using a Youtube like platform is a great way to promote collaboration amongst an audience.
Layering a taxonomy structure on top of existing content using tag words is something they already do.. Its not a KM system, but it does have some elements of a very successful KM system. Namely audience participation.
Thanks for the post !!
Cheers,
Arjun.
It would be interesting if such taxonomies r created automatically, right now either viewers or youtube staff are classifiying stufff. that would be the truly awesome but multimedia information retrieval is far from this at the moment but soon…
True…. but i have a feeling this is probably the next logical step…. It would be a great boost in terms of creating a media KM platform. News services, marketing agencies which are heavily dependent on Video would find this hugely beneficial..
- Arjun.
nice article…
nice article…
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Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
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