Knowledge – the ultimate resource? I can’t argue with that.
As a writer I’m in the business of providing knowledgebase elements. I take my own experience and that of others, I then turn it into some form of written document that may be understood and acted upon by the intended audience.
Quote from Wikipedia -
Human-readable knowledge bases are designed to allow people to retrieve and use the knowledge they contain, primarily for training purposes. They are commonly used to capture explicit knowledge of an organization, including troubleshooting, articles, white papers, user manuals and others. The primary benefit of such a knowledge base is to provide a means to discover solutions to problems that have known solutions which can be re-applied by others, less experienced in the problem area.
· The most important aspect of a knowledge base is the quality of information it contains. The best knowledge bases have carefully written articles that are kept up to date, an excellent information retrieval system (search engine), and a carefully designed content format and classification structure.
Just having a common repository for knowledge and experience does not really fill the bill. The knowledge needs to be easily findable by whoever would benefit from it.
Books and libraries have been the traditional knowledge base for this society and one only has to examine the standard library classification structure to know that indexing is as important as storage.
Now we have the Internet and the search engines to act as index mechanisms. All that repository needs is validation and it will be perfect.
Personal knowledge is another matter entirely. Do you sell it or do you give it away?
The ‘Guilds’ of earlier centuries established traditions of great secrecy. This is propagated in modern times in legal and financial practise, where knowledge is only disseminated for a price, and only ever by a qualified practitioner.
Without doubt there is money in knowledge. My personal experience is that while knowledge may be disseminated either for profit or for free, the real trick for the recipient is being cute enough to benefit from knowing.
Could wind power be a viable alternative to conventional methods of power generation? The UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair has recently said - "We are not going to be able to make up through wind farms all the deficit on nuclear power," Yet, if looked at from a slightly different perspective, wind power may already be a viable alternative - the link below is a web page where you can buy your own domestic wind turbine. http://www.diy.com/diy/jsp/bq/nav/nav.jsp?action=detail&fh_secondid=9414908&fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB&fh_search=wind+power&fh_eds=%c3%9f&fh_refview=search&ts=1180379362679&isSearch=true It produces around 1Kw at moderate wind speeds and costs around 1500GBP. Okay, so it’s not cost effective, but it is a step along the road. The manufacturer and retailer must believe they have a market. If they have, the unit cost will fall as sales rise. Once competition gets hold, the performance of equipment from alternative suppliers will i...
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