Seth Dillingham wrote an interesting piece on his web site about how I’m using his company’s software, Conversant, for exactly the sort of knowledge management purposes that he had envisioned the software would be used for.
And I’ve really only scratched the surface. One site I have spent a lot of time working on over the past couple years is AnimalRights.Net. There are currently 498 articles about the animal rights movement on that site, comprising about 250,000 words.
That’s an incredible resource if there’s a means to dig through that pile of information and find connections and related stories. For example, sometimes I want to have a look at all the stories about the Animal Liberation Front. Producing a page like that is a cinch in Conversant.
Moreover, there are features now that I haven’t begun to exploit that will make this even more powerful. Soon, this page will show a short description of each article as well — all of it done dynamically (this page took about 5 minutes to create).
Because of the ability to manage and display information so easily and in such a flexible manner, this site is extremely popular. Even though this site is done in my spare time, it is regularly read by medical researchers, people in the pharmaceutical industry, and elsewhere since it is the most comprehensive anti-animal rights site out there.
It’s gradually becoming what I had originally envisioned — a mini-encyclopedia about the animal rights movement — thanks to the tools provide by Conversant.