In the past months Lilia Efimova conducted a number of interviews with me and other bloggers that write about knowledge management and learning topics. When she interviewed me last July, while Elmine and I were in Vancouver, she asked if it was ok for her to put a summary online of our Skype conversation (which she also taped for transcription), to which I of course agreed. The summary of the interview with me, and those of the other interviews, are now on-line at Blog networking study: interviews.

We talked about how I started blogging  (to think out loud) and how all the resulting interaction and amazing new relationships kept me going, for a bit over 6 years now. And the effects that blogging had on me over the years.
The way we did the interview was a case in point of how blogging helped build connections to lots of great people: I did it from the living room of Cyprien Lomas and his family, while on an extended tour of our  Canadian and Seattle blogging friends. Each and everyone a relationship and connection that started from weblog interaction. It’s an amazing form of wealth that still never ceases to amaze me.

Reading through the transcript of all the interviews some things strike me as relevant. The way we adjusted to how deeper relationships don’t scale well, while at the same time keeping up with a myriad of different people. The way we trust that ‘important’ information will find us, and are not afraid to miss anything. The way we all needed to find a way to deal with context collapse, and the different answers we found (even more transparancy, anonymity, closing blogs, opening more blogs, different languages). The way several interviews talk about finding out you’re not ‘alone’ in your interest in KM. How some of us feel or express we somehow share a lot of values with those we are connected with (which I guess also says something about the state of the blogosphere at the time exactly when most of us first got exposed to weblogs, 2000 to 2002, even when not writing then), and how our blogs are stable low-threshold access points for others to get in touch or into interaction.

I am looking forward to reading more of Lilia’s PhD writing that is steadily getting closer to completion, but going through these interview transcripts was already very worthwile in itself.