Chris,

I'm a developer at Knogee. Thank you for the review and for taking the time to dig down and find out what we're all about. I hear your concerns about confusion, we defiantly have some work to do in that department! It's not easy to get everything right but we are passionate and working hard to get it there!

I'll go over a few of your points to clarify a bit about what is going on.

When you create a topic, you are taking what you know about a subject and building what you called a "knowledge map". This is kind of like an outline of the topic that will both guide people who visit and also allow knogee to

'understand' the topic so the harvester can do what a simple search engine could not.

When a new topic is created it takes about 15 minutes for the harvester to start adding relevant content. (tiny company, not many servers...yet) It will then continue to improve the topic continuously.

Why would you want to do this? --> Well lets take your social networking topic. Imagine that you fill out the 'knowledge map' to represent how YOU see the world of social networking. You then add some of your own content and vote up/down what knogee finds. This would be and excellent staring place for someone who visits your blog.

You can now embed the topic directly into your blog so that someone new to your site could easily browse and benefit from your expertise. Your regular visitors can also help keep the topic up-to-date and even expand it.

--Now about those darn walls you were running into--

Once you have built the inital structure of your topic, you can add to it in several ways. First if you answer questions on the hunt page you can click the "extend topic" button. This will present you with the same wizard you used at the beginning. Anything you add here will be added to the 'knowledge map' at the point you reached by answering questions.

For example you answer "YES" to "Is there buisness value in enterprise social networking". Then you click 'extend topic' to add deeper questions down that branch.

You can also use our wizbang advanced tool called KBEE. { Link }

I hope this helps a bit. We'll be working hard to improve how easy the site is to use and I hope you'll stop by every now and then to see what we've been up to.

Pharos

Pharos - I am glad you found the review so quickly. I will definitely check out the advanced tool. I think I was confused on that fact that I build the questions and then answer them and expand more. A knowledge map to me lays out the different paths as a part of brainstoring, but it seemed yours had to be in a question with answers. Not all sections would have that. I suppose it could be statements that then have choices to dig further.

I think of it like CoMapping (I did a site review on them previously) with your added bonus of the harvesting. Let me go back and dig into it more and see what we discover.