An article in “Knowledge Management World”:http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=readarticle&Article_ID=1725&Publication_ID=108 suggests a lot of what knowledge workers do is re-creating knowledge that is already available but they didn’t find.

It’s ironic (and infuriating) – particularly for a magazine all about knowledge management – that none of the catchy factoids like, “90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists” come with citations so there’s no way to check their methods (though I’m guessing they aren’t particularly rigorous).

Thanks to Lilia ‘Mathemagenic’ Efimova for the link. She notes interestingly that maybe some people prefer to re-discover things themselves because learning for yourself is more fun than researching it…

Jill Walker mentions how people visiting a post on the “Noetech blog”:http://blog.noetech.com/archives/2004/04/13/overhaulin.shtml which mentioned watching a TV show seem to think that the blogger actually runs that TV show.

It’s bizarre but this sort of thing has happened to me, too. I “mentioned”:https://blog.org/archives/000617.html months ago that Philip Pullman’s trilogy was being streamed by the BBC and I received several comments (since removed to avoid confusion) that clearly suggested the commenters thought that Pullman was reading or even writing the blog. It’s as if readers just skimmed looking for their keywords, ignored the context and blurted out whatever was in their heads…

I guess if I want readers “all I need to do”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html is talk about how I enjoyed American Idol during spring break and when I finished I listened to Howard Stern talk about Iraq with Halle Berry and Lindsay Lohan.

Thanks to “Lila”:http://blog.mathemagenic.com/ for the link

Eszter Hargittai recently asked ‘what can you not find online?’ – what is often missing is anything that is more than ten years old (unless it is in ebook form or in a paid-for archive).

One of the interesting exceptions I have come across recently was a A Prison-scene During the Reign of Terror from Harpers. Not a contemporary one from Iraq but one from post-revolutionary France they dug up from the archives of their 150-year-old publication. It is fascinating and chilling to read an eye-witness account of events from more than 200 years ago…

By sheer coincidence I also just found a “historical archive of material on the French Revolution”:http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/ – part of the “Centre for History and New Media”:http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/ – but this does not invalidate my point that historical information can be hard to find online…

1) “BBC Radio 7”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/ – the BBC’s digital speech radio channel which broadcasts classic comedy and drama – now has a Listen again feature (audio on demand in other words). It is still streaming audio like the rest of the BBC’s offerings but
2) Someone at the BBC has decided to allow the “Reith lectures”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/ to go out “as MP3s”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/mp3.shtml as well as streamed audio, just as one of the first and most popular campaigns on their “iCan campaign site”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/G30 requested. It’s a pity they decided to record voice at 64Kbps only (so the file size is large). Even if you don’t want to listen to the Reith lectures visit the page where there is a form and register your support for MP3s!
3) The “News Quiz”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/newsquiz.shtml – a topical humorous discussion of the news similar to NPR’s “Wait Wait don’t tell Me”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/ – is back on the air.

Microsoft is offering a “preview (beta) version of the software”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/prodinfo/sp1/default.mspx for free download. Here’s “what OneNote offers”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/prodinfo/sp1/guide.mspx. It claims to be ‘a single place for users to electronically capture and organize typed and handwritten notes, audio recordings, graphics, and other rich media’ – sounds a bit like “NVivo”:http://www.qsr.com.au/products/productoverview/product_overview.htm the qualititative data analysis software I have been using recently. As you’d expect it is a lot more glossy in feel and more consistent with Windows conventions than NVivo but is unlikely to have the kind of depth of ‘serious academic functionality’ NVivo provides. Still I am looking forward to kicking it around. I wonder when this preview edition will expire? It is not clear whether the software will expire at all. Certainly there is nothing that tells you when you install it.

As a bonus I find that with this new version of OneNote I can use the Microsoft speech recognition software that was installed when I installed Unreal Tournament (it would not work with my old copy of Microsoft Word). I am finding it works remarkably well so far.

Does anyone know where I can get some documentation on how to use Microsoft’s voice recognition software? (Things like how do I indicate I want to use punctuation?) There doesn’t seem to be any that was installed when I installed the game.

Thanks to Steve Hatch for the link

Lessig’s arguments are familiar to me by now (as they will be to many readers) – what is striking and important about his work is that he buttresses these arguments about the rather dry topic of copyright law with well-chosen and interesting examples.

He suggests that copyright owners are no more entitled to use digital right management to hold back file sharing than “the Causbys had to hold back flight”:http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Introduction because property rights extend to the sky.

He points out that in the battle between the capabilities of new technology and law that would mis-regulate it, the common sense does not always win (citing the sad case of Edwin Howard Armstrong whose invention of FM radio was stifled by RCA in America).

And he slyly uses the example of “Disney’s own work”:http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Creators which was very often derived from or inspired by the work of others to suggest that it is wrong for corporations (like Disney) to prevent others from producing derivative works based on their own characters.

And that’s just what I’ve come across in the introduction and first chapter. Hopefully the accessibility and clear logic of this work will ensure it gets read more widely than just among us Internet policy wonks.

See my “earlier post”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_copyright.html#001080 for information about how to download or listen to the book – you may also wish to simply “buy it from Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200068/lessigorg-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1 or “read it online”:http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Main_Page in an annotatable wiki form.

Thanks to Ezther Hargittai for the link (and creating the graph)

A recent blog survey on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability from Fernanda Viégas at the “MIT’s media lab”:http://web.media.mit.edu/. The results found were interesting but I found one of the asides in the report interesting as well, for a different reason. Ninety percent of those blogging in their (admittedly biased) sample have better than a high school education but the report begins by being critical of the notion that weblogging is “a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy”?

Wired News’ “Leander Kahney”:http://www.wired.com/news/storylist/0,2339,30,00.html has been writing about how us Brits have supposedly been in the forefront of using the Internet and mobile phone technologies to meet up for anonymous sex.

“Yoz Grahame”:http://cheerleader.yoz.com/ has written a stinging satire entitled Sex-Crazed Brits Just Doing It Everywhere, Like, Everywhere Man, You Can’t Stop Them, They’re Like Dogs In Heat Or Something, And Dude, I Gotta Get Me Some Of That.

The Guardian tries to find out by following a blouse donated in the UK from donor to recipient. It turns out that, “Only about 10-20% of the clothes collected in charity shops are sold in Britain to be worn again.” Most of the clothes are sold to specialist for-profit clothing recyclers who pay £100 a year for the right to give their clothing bins a charity logo. The recyclers in turn sell the clothing on to countries like Zambia, where it provides the basis of a local industry (again for-profit) that – arguably – has a devastating impact on domestic clothing suppliers. In the end, shirts get sold for £1.50 or less apiece – a day’s salary in Zambia.

As you can see I find this state of affairs disturbing – the Guardian’s writer is less more optimistic. I suppose I will continue to give away surplus clothing – it is better that it be used than thrown away. But I would like to see charities paid a lot more than £100 a year by companies using their good name to make profits.