I’m on my way to the second Knowledge Blog meeting. Well, sort of. The first meeting was badged the “Ontogenesis Tutorial” meeting; the focus was on developing a tutorial resource for ontologies. Actually, much the same will be true of this meeting, but I’ve decided that, for this meeting, as well as addressing the reviews for my own article on Ontogenesis, I am going to want to spend some time supporting the process itself. In the first place, this means writing a couple of articles for Process: a new knowledge blog that I am starting for discussion of the process itself.

Since the first meeting, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the general idea of knowledgeblogging. As far as I can see, there is one overwhelming truth about the situation; we got 15 articles in 2 days and, since then, we have been averaging between 500 and 1000 page hits a month. Now, of course, it’s an open question whether this is at all sustainable; we have no advertising and no financial support. But, still, our most read article (“What is an Ontology”) has had several hundred reads and, bottom line, that is pretty good going for an academic article. We might like to think that the work that we do is important (well, it is!), but in publishing terms we are pretty much of a niche market.

On the negative side, we have had articles flooding in and none of those from the last meeting have got any further. Thinking back to Nupedia, many moons ago, it’s obvious that getting an authorship is always going to be a problem.

I’m also going to have to think of a snappier and short name for than “knowledgeblog” which is taking far too long to type. So far:

k-log
Simple, straightforward, but already used

knowblog
Good, but a homonym for “noblog” which is confusing.

knoblog
Pronounced “noh-blog” would be great, but English is not a phoentic language

knob
“KNOweledge Blog” — excellent in many ways, but I realise that the entire world does not share my slightly puerile sense of humour.

Hmmm. Comments welcome. So long as they are not about my puerile sense of humour.