Destination Knowledge Management has a good story on how big business is waking up to the power of blogs and wikis. Here are the ways these collaborative knowledge tools are benefiting companies:

*Companies are using collaborative web technologies to help alleviate the cost of lost expertise while cutting down training time and reducing startup costs for new hires.

*Companies are using wikis to convey knowledge to new hires.

*Living documents like wikis are a means to maintain continuity and consistency among disparate groups using various applications.

*Amazon.com uses blogs, wikis, plogs (personal web logs), and social tagging to generate site stickiness and direct customers toward desired products. Blogs are often published by book authors and wikis are used to allow customers to enhance information about products.

*Call center reps are finding that wikis, as dynamic self-structuring documents, offer a more updated, cohesive knowledge base from which to address customer problems. In some cases, customer service organizations are extending wiki-style knowledge bases to their customers, allowing them to add to it for the benefit of the broader community. Some wiki tools can also be personalized and secured to show customer service reps an insider's view of the same documents the customer sees.

*One company we talked with intends to publish the CEO's strategy as a wiki and--believe it or not--allow employees to edit and alter the document freely. Risky and provocative, no doubt, but it's sure to get more attention than a newsletter.

*Much of the early enterprise use of wikis and blogs was to help IT departments manage document change. As they work more actively with partners, supporting employees in various locations and in multiple time zones, they needed a persistent way to see what changes were made and why.