Paper- Legitimised Theft: Distributed Apprenticeship in Weblog Networks

Lilia Efimova Sebastian Fiedler, Carla Verwijs and
Andy Boyd have published a paper called: Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks. (download .pdf here)

If you're interested in some of the latest thinking about the internal use of weblogs in corporations, this paper does a good job of describing the possibilities, opportunities and barriers.

For a company employee weblogs can provide a unique opportunity to access usually invisible trails of development and flows of ideas, a window onto practice. It can serve as a learning resource for others, as well as providing a better overview of internal expertise and experts, and may lead to the speeding up of innovation due to earlier cross-fertilisation of ideas. Weblogs can be used as a technology for facilitating and extending existing apprenticeship and coaching programs or capturing stories of retiring experts.

The authors also list some of the barriers to adoption (questions in my own words):

Critical Mass: Will enough people actually read them?
Time Gap: Does the weblogged information have a shelf life?
Embedding into existing practice: Will they fit with other learning initiatives?