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McAfee first explains why past knowledge management "solutions" rarely solved anything. He then explains what makes Web 2.0 technologies different. "The good news," he writes, is that the new technologies "focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on the practices and output of knowledge workers." By providing both a platform for collaboration and a means of recording the details of the collaboration, the technologies create a public record of previously private knowledge-sharing conversations, a record that's permanent and easily searched. Knowledge is captured, in other words, as it's created, without requiring any additional work. As people search and use that knowledge, moreover, they refine it - through commenting, linking, syndicating and tagging, for instance - which makes it even more valuable.

If we have a lump of coal - and *only* a lump of coal, then there are three types of things to be known about it:- its colour and shape and other qualities- its mass and size and other quantities- the way its parts are connectedAnd as a result, we have three types of knowledge about this particular lump of coal:- qualitative- quantitative- connective

The trend suggests that predictions of an economy run by freelancers -- such as those made by Daniel Pink in his book Free Agent Nation, and by MIT's Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher in their 1998 paper, "The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy" -- were shortsighted. In 2000, research firm EPIC/MRA of Lansing, Michigan, estimated that 41 percent of all Americans would be private contractors by 2010. But today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that self-employment numbers have not grown at all over the past four years.

Context is usually removed when you remove the human element, whether that is by archiving best practices to a "database," or by asking experts to "tell me what you know" about a given topic, or assuming knowledge is a fixed thing as opposed to an interconnected flow of many things.

The Web 2.0 aspect gives you the ability to pull together knowledge from many different sources, independent of how it was generated.  The implication of this for businesses is that they should focus on their business processes and making sure they have access to that knowledge (i.e. the people).

Open up the business to any applications that provide these knowledge flows; ban email attachments (forcing people to use blogs / wikis / etc); and lock down truly proprietary data.