I wrote quite some reports to my Weblog about the UKUUG 2003 conference in Edinburgh. Some people might ask – and I asked myself: “Why does he give away his knowledge?”. In fact, travelling to conferences is quite some fun, but also quite some work.

The reasons to go to conferences is meeting with and talking to people, doing “human networking”. If you’re a speaker, conferences are the platform for your project to let others understand what you are trying to achieve. Conferences don’t pay out quickly in terms of new customer deals. Instead, they often pay out only in terms of “knowledge exchange”. Thus, it might be a good idea to keep to yourself all the good contacts you made at the conference, and all the good talks you have heard.

Writing reports about any session that you’ve visited is even more work. Especially if the aim of the reports is to let other people assess the importance of the talk in terms of “did I learn something new?”. Usually, this is done within companies – but I do it for the public of the Weblogging community.

Why? Because I am a saint? Definitely not! I do it for purpose and I want to “earn” something. Weblogging is about selling, brokering, and buying knowledge. The whole Internet is. By providing precious information to others, I hope to raise awareness of people and thus my share in the knowledge market. Being known to be knowledgeable can in fact pay out in real cash – or at least in Blogshares 🙂

Weblogs perfectly fit into the mechanisms of knowledge markets. They are a vehicle for selling, brokering, and buying knowledge. They offer the ability to individuals to invent themselves as a product in the knowledge market: to show what they know, how they deal with information, on what their decisions are based, which actions they take, which results those actions bring.

Saints? No. Egomanics? Maybe. Rather clients as well as servers of the knowledge market 🙂