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application whereas Gmail (http://www.gmail.com) is a Web 2.0 application. Other
Web 2.0 examples include eBay, a digital marketplace (http:/www.ebay.com); BitTor-
rent, a free open source fi le-sharing application site for sharing large software and
media fi les (http://www.bittorrent.com); Wikipedia, a user-authored encyclopedia site,
(http://www.wikipedia.org); as well as folksonomies, viral marketing and open source
software sites. Many Web 2.0 sites contain RSS feeds — which allows someone to sub-
scribe to a webpage and be alerted to any changes. An RSS feed is much more reliable
than a link to what could be an ever-changing web site.
Finally the harnessing of the collective intelligence is a key attribute of Web 2.0
which means that the collective (i.e., the set of users) determine what is of value, what
is valid, and what is important ( Surowiecki 2004 ). The more people use a Web 2.0 site,
the more the site automatically improves. A key feature of Web 2.0 sites is that the
users of that site contribute the content.
IBM developed a social networking tool called Pass It Along (a free demonstration
is available at http://www.ibm.com/developworks/community/passitalong) to promote
knowledge sharing and skills development. Pass It Along integrates knowledge man-
agement, social networking, and Web 2.0 concepts to help users share and apply
information. Each user can decide how widely they want their content to be shared
and who they would like to collaborate with, for example, new hires, include external
partners or not or limit to a particular community of practice. Users can visually map
out their knowledge assets so others can see them.
KM 2.0 is analogous to Web 2.0 and refers to a more people-centric approach to
knowledge management. Companies are adopting KM 2.0 to varying degrees, mostly
based on their underlying culture and how well it promotes transparency and are less
concerned with control and availability of the underlying technologies. A surprising
example is the Central Intelligence Agency (see the vignette). Other examples include
IBM where a large collaborative online brainstorming session called InnovationJam
was held that included over 150,000 people ( Dearstyne 2007 ). Participants were not
only employees but also customers and business partners. The event ran for three days
with different topics being addressed in different moderated forums. The best ideas
generated were acknowledged and rewarded.
Lee and Lan (2007) suggest that traditional knowledge management (KM 1.0) is
based on knowledge repositories, the storing and preserving of knowledge but in
a largely static fashion. KM 2.0 represents a new paradigm and much like the core
attributes listed for Web 2.0, the authors propose corresponding attributes for KM
2.0 (p. 50). In building on a theme of collaborative intelligence, the following list of