Weblogs, awareness and transactive memory

How come weblogs, awareness and transactive memory are related ? As a matter of fact, weblogs, by presenting somebody's thought, references, activities, plans and so on, is a kind of asynchronous awareness tool. Dourish and Belloti (1992) gave one of the best-known definitions for awareness: “awareness is an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity”. Asynchrouns means that information is presented in an historical perspective. It can be a summary of the whole information collected after a period of time (compile function) or a differentiation between recent information and past ones (decay function). Information presented in weblogs in a longitudinal/historical way provide users with a context for their own activities.

Transactive Memory is a theory proposed by Wegner (1987). This theory examines the process by which individuals determine who knows what and who knows who knows what. Information presented in weblogs are a way to enable transactive memory within a team