Strength of weak knowledge sources

The strength of weak ties explains that you never find your new job through your friends; you find it through their friends. Your pool of contacts overlaps that of your friends; there’s nothing new there. But their friends are members of many different communities. In diversity, there are job leads.

The same principle holds true for information. Go to training conferences for a few years, and you find that you can almost mouth the words of some of the speakers. Novices learn lots; that’s who most of the conferences are for. Old hands may hear a few new terms, but breakthrough ideas are rare. Hence, if you’ve been around a while and are hungry for new concepts and fresh approaches, look outside of the training realm. Tune into conversations about business strategy, brain science, futurists, computer games, conceptual art, and advertising.

I’m assembling the un-book sequel to Informal Learning. It’s nothing if not multi-disciplinary. I clearing the eLearning books out of my library. Searching for something edgy, I arrive at John Hagel’s site. John’s blogroll was to the left of the article I was reading. I know, or know of, everyone there, but most of them aren’t among my incoming RSS feeds.

* BGSL - Umair Haque
* Chris Anderson - The Long Tail
* Confused of Calcutta - JP Rangaswami
* Creativity Exchange - Richard Florida
* John Battelle’s Searchblog
* Joho the Blog
* Lawrence Lessig
* Loosely Coupled weblog
* Many-to-Many
* O’Reilly Radar

When I come against an issue of, say, learning culture, I’d be more likely to get a fresh perspective from these folks than from the usual suspects in the training blogosphere.

Why not set up a custom Google Search on these blogs? It’s as easy as shooting ducks in the bathtub.

Here’s the custom search page.

If this proves useful, I’ll set up custom searches for other topics in the un-book.