Rambling Thoughts About Conversant and “Knowledge Management”

This essay is a collection of semi-coherent thoughts I wrote down over a couple of days while thinking of how to review Conversant for FindApps.Com (I wandered far away from my original topic).

I’ve written a lot of words here about how wonderful Conversant is for managing a web site, and if anything I am even more convinced today that it is the best solution for anyone wanting to maintain a medium to large web site with a minimal staff.

Let me just put things in concrete terms. At the beginning of 1999, when I was managing my web site with DreamWeaver, I set a goal of adding 100 pages that year. In just the first five months of this year, I added something like 800 pages. The difference is due almost entirely to Conversant’s intelligent automation of web management tasks.

But enough about the web management aspects of the software. What I’d really like to talk about is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Namely the knowledge management aspects of the system.

All of the web sites I run have one thing in common. Although some of them are semi-commercial ventures now, they started out as basically online notebooks of topics that I was interested in. Sometimes it’s amusing because I’ll have a reporter e-mail me asking if I really put together all the information on Overpopulation.Com as a hobby.

And the answer is yes. That site grew out of a Usenet debate back in 1996 when I was frustrated at not having an easy-to-find source for various demographic and other data. It started out as a basic FAQ and completely mushroomed out of control.

That became a problem in itself. I was very glad that the site turned out to be very popular, but in the old site I had, it was very difficult to find information on the site even for me. The whole thing was extremely disorganized.

Now the organization of the site is still not completed, but it’s magnitudes of order more useful than the old site. Before I switched to Conversant, there was no simple way just to see all of the articles I’d written about China, but now the main China page automatically includes every article on the site about China.

There were times in the past where I knew a certain fact or piece of data was on one of my sites, but it was actually quicker to search for the data via a search engine. Now it’s just the opposite — I can instantly find information on my web site. In fact, with just a few minutes of surfing (if that) I can pull up a half a dozen ways of looking at the pages on the site and drill down to find exactly what I want. That’s cool.

For me, at least, the system really makes it relatively easy to deliver on a lot of the hype that was out there a few years ago about how hypertext would revolutionize the way we manage information. I jokingly tell my wife that my web site has become the front end to my mind, but it’s actually not too far from the truth.

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