Helen Day writes The state of KM, CM and intranets based on her attendance at a conference on knowledge management and content management. KM does seem to be undergoing a resurgence. I've snipped a couple interesting comments from her longer article.
... here was a conference full of people wanting to make KM work for them and their organisations, still discussing ways in which people’s tacit knowledge (the stuff in their heads) could be captured before they leave a company, how it could be shared and reused.
... Now, in the newer era of Web 2.0 ... and all things ‘sharing and communicating’ online, Knowledge Management has become a real possibility again.
For those who believe knowledge management is about knowledge sharing and connecting people, then many of the social software applications out there make these things so much easier. A key comment that Day makes is that, while technologies have been available, they haven't necessarily been the easiest to use (or setup) within the enterprise.
This relates to the idea that Knowledge needs to be personal. I also hear a connection to my History repeats in KM comments a few weeks ago. Organizations want to find ways to connect people, and social software provides both the opportunity for connecting and a means for collecting anecdotes (and some semblance of knowledge).
I note that the Intranet Benchmarking Forum appears to shift authors every month. Interesting model.