At the crossroads of knowledge management and social software

The growing phenomenon of Social Software seems to provide an opportunity to complement the top-down approach based on central knowledge repositories with tools that are simpler, smarter and more flexible. This article in-cludes a brief description of the main categories of Social Software – weblogs, wikis and social networking sites - fol-lowed by an analysis of their utilisation in relation to the five core Knowledge Management activities of the Knowledge Management taxonomy proposed by Despres & Chauvel in 1999. Examples that illustrate the support Social Software could provide for knowledge management are presented. Finally, some of the problems that hinder the usage of Social Software tools, together with some of the latest developments and trends in the field are mentioned.