Information Research Weblog

This week's Computer Weekly has more items of interest than usual for me. On the front page is an item about problems with a big merger project involving the clearing house system for the banks. Accenture has been called in to try to sort out the problem, and LCH Clearnet is looking for a new IT director. A box on the page points out that 60% to 70% of similar projects fail to hit budgets and deadlines and up to 40% are total failures. You'd imagine that by now some lessons would have been learnt, wouldn't you.

Also on the front page, a short item about Tony Blair's intention to monitor the government's top twenty IT projects. Amazing—he's running the country, invading Iraq (and possibly, Iran, Syria and North Korea), sticking his finger into every ministerial pie and he still has time to do this! Perhaps he should focus.

Inside, we have an item about the Prudential insurance company's hopes of saving £26 million through an outsourcing deal with Wipro (an outfit in India), while two pages further on we have an article on how Bedfordshire County Council is in trouble with an outsourcing deal! Mmm - are Prudential's hopes optimistic, I wonder?

Also in the news: Google's new 'Mini' - an 'integrated hardware/software search appliance' for searching corporate intranets and Websites, while on another page, another article about the use of desk-top and enterprise search engines.

Next, a questioning item as to the delivery of promises about Java, and a different item on how Java is bringing benefits to British Airways. Did the editors plan these coincidental items, I wonder, or did they just happen to happen?

...and, finally, an item about early adopters of technology.

The Mozilla site recently announced that the latest build of Firefox has a 'new' feature - pages are locally cached so that, when the Back and Forward buttons are hit, the page is delivered instantaneously. Just one small point - Opera has had this feature for ages. And there is some doubt as to when this feature will actually get into a full release - at present it's only available on the versions downloaded from the nightly build. Firefox has had a lot of publicity recently, but I suspect that, had Opera been completely free - and free of ads. - Firefox would have been languishing.

I've never been particularly interested in the various standards battles that have taken place over the years - if you wait long enough someone wins and you can then start buying the gear :-) However, on the wireless Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) front there are a couple of contenders currently slugging it out, the WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum. WiMedia Alliance is a combination of two other bodies - WiMedia and the Multiband OFDM Alliance SIG (MBOA-SIG) and has recently announced that Microsoft has become a 'promoter member', while the UWB Forum includes big players such as Motorola, Samsung and Siemens. The goal of both is to set the IEEE standard for UWB but my guess is that industry standards will proliferate here as they do in so many other technical areas.

No, I'm not suggesting that they are related, but just that there is news out about the two of them.

First, Janco Associates Inc. reports that in the business sector, Firefox now has 10% of the browser market. However, the total market share seems to be about half of that and if MSoft gets its act together in launching a new version of IE, the growth may disappear. Still, Firefox has lots of advantages in terms of customising by add-ins and 'themes', so companies may begin to adopt it, suitably customised, as company standard.

The picture from the point of view of Information Research seems to support Janco's data: this is a table of the distribution of hits over the browser used - a snapshot taken today:

1.	Internet Explorer 6.x	80.3 %
2.	Mozilla Firefox 1.x	9.1 %
3.	Internet Explorer 5.x	4.5 %
4.	Netscape 7.x	1.5 %
5.	Mozilla Firefox	1.5 %
6.	Mozilla 1.x	1.5 %
	Unknown	1.5 %
	Total	100.0 %

The news from Skype is interesting - the first announcement passed me by, since Skype appears not to have informed existing users. Skype 'Out' has been available for some time: you can call a land line from your computer - at low cost - and I use this for some international calls. Now, however, you can also have Skype 'In' - that is, you can have up to 10 telephone numbers assigned, for different countries in the world, which will allow residents of those countries to call your Skype number and get through to your VoIP phone at local phone rates. Very handy if your friends and relatives don't use computers: and also very useful if you are abroad, without a computer, and want to call home - you can call your own local number and make the international call at local rates. The service costs, of course, the princely sum of €30 a year!

I'm glad I'm now subscribed to the Information Research Weblog. I was looking forward to receive fresh feed from the weblog in my recently installed Mozilla Thunderbird. It just happened that the last message was about Japan, and -- what a coincidence -- I am presently living in Japan, and I certainly have an opinion on cell phones here, as well as information related issues. What a nice way to start a contribution! :-)

As for previous entries on the subject, I must ask: "What if, in this case, information was just personal feelings?" The original article doesn’t show any scientific basis (and actually doesn't pretend to have any). Molly Wood could have used numbers to add credibility to his article, but she chose to use only personal observation, maybe influenced with previous thoughts she had about the country, and extrapolated her personal views to make us believe this is reality. Since most people have a stereotypical view of Japan it's not difficult to convince them that she's right about what she says.

While I'm talking about my own experience of Japan, I always try to keep in mind that everything I say can be contradicted by any other's experience, since we all have different points of views according to our background, personal opinions, and maybe pure chance.

Let me tell you about cellular phones. Before I came here, I was completely against this annoying, environmental-unfriendly tool. But I have to admit that, since phone lines in Japan are so expensive, and maybe because of social pressure, I was just 'forced' to get my own 'keitai'. My feeling was that everybody needed that tool, and, in the end, I found it very useful. I now use it as my personal agenda, as an English-Japanese dictionary; I use it as a camera too; I even use it as a mirror, sometimes! So I agree on Wood's view on the fact that (almost) everyone in Japan has cellular phones, but people might not use it as often for talking, since we are not allowed to talk in the train.

On the other hand, I completely agree with the fact that our stereotypical 'technologically crazy' Japan is exaggerated. I guess it depends where you are in Japan. I live in the Chiba prefecture, not too far from Tokyo, in a relatively small city. Probably the picture could be different in Tokyo, and even then! It's hard to have an accurate picture, and it’s probably not a good idea trying to resume Japan into one idea. In my first trip to Japan, I was really surprised how much nature is present in this land. This might look cliché, but both worlds are living here, in a strangely peaceful harmony. If it’s probably true that that many 'techno-gadgets' are invented and bought here, probably more than everywhere else, the idea that Japanese are gone crazy with technology is not accurate.

Felix Arseneau

Molly Wood has an interesting little article, Good-bye, computer; hello, world! on the C|Net site. In it she proposes that Google may be developing a strategy of providing Web-based services:

I think Google's going to build a Web-based thin client-type hosted environment-slash-operating system replacement.

...Google has been working with a combination of Web application development technologies that have recently been dubbed Ajax. Ajax, which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, combines JavaScript, dynamic HTML, and XMLHTTP to, in essence, let you build Web-based applications that run as quickly and seamlessly as local software.

[You'll find more about Ajax on the Adaptive Path site.]

I found this on Peter Cochrane's Website and thought readers of this Weblog might enjoy it.

Hang a banana on a string and put steps under it in a cage containing five apes.
Soon, an ape will start to climb towards the banana.
As he touches the first step, spray all of the apes with cold water.
After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result.
This continues through several more attempts.
Pretty soon, when an ape tries to climb, the others apes try to prevent it.

Now, turn off the cold water.
Replace one of the apes with a new one.
The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the steps.
But all of the other apes attack him.
After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Now, remove another of the original apes and replace it with a new one.
The newcomer goes to the steps and is attacked.
The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third original ape with a new one.
The new one makes it to the steps and is attacked as well.
Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes, which have been sprayed with cold water, have been replaced.
But no ape will again approaches the stairs.
Why not? Because that's the way they've always done it and that's the way it's always been around here.
And that's how company policy begins...

I was directed to Peter's site because of an article he has written on VoIP. He describes how the use of Skype has reduced his mobile phone bill from $500 a month to $10, and asks how the telecomms companies are going to survive, since most of them have done nothing, although they were aware of the threats. He also asks who is going to maintain the wired infrastructure if the telcos go under—a good question!

UK Online, a broadband supplier, is now offering an 8Mb connection to those whose lines are up to it and where the BT exchange has been 'unbundled'. Unfortunately, my exchange doesn't fit this description - in fact, I'm hoping that the line is good enough for an upgrade to 1Mb, which I'm hoping to get. In any event, I don't think I'd be prepared to pay the £39.99 a month for the privilege, since I'm not in the business of downloading films and video files.

However, it is a welcome sign that 'broadband' in Britain is really beginning to mean broadband, rather than a measly 256Kb connection that some ISPs offer. I suspect, also that more competitive services will come along - at present, my 500Kb connection is £1.00 a month cheaper than UK Online's offer, and the 1Mb connection I'm hoping to get is actually a full £7.00 a month cheaper, which makes me suspect that 8 Mb will be available from others for, say, £35.00 a month?

There's an interesting little discussion going on at ZD-Net about the open source browser, FireFox. One of the staff writers is bidding farewell to Internet Explorer and, as one or two of the discussants ask, "Why's it taken you so long?"

I've been using alternative browsers since Opera first appeared and I now use FireFox most of the time - it's something of a toss-up between these two: Opera has many of the same features as FireFox (and had them earlier) and it does some things better; but I like the way FireFox does tabs better, even though its inability to stop sites from launching windows without the navigation bar is frustrating. Also, unless you aren't bothered by ads, FireFox is free, whereas Opera costs - not a lot, but...

With Opera and FireFox in the market I just don't understand why anyone uses IE any longer, other than for those sites that seem to imagine that nothing else exists.

Weblogs

My thanks to folks, on and off the Weblog, who've written to encourage me to keep the Weblog going—I'll plod on when I know that it has some effect. Carol Cahill kindly says:

Our library probably wouldn't have a wireless Internet connection if my interest hadn't first been piqued by your Weblog. Now we have a four-laptop wireless training lab and patrons can come in and connect with their own computers.

Which I think is rather better than a citation in a journal :-)

"The Chief's" comments on Weblog membership counts is also interesting - as are the usage stats for the Weblog - last year 13,776 hits, this year, so far, 13,588 with those hits distributed over the continents as follows:

1.	North-America	10,780	39.4%
2.	Europe	10,565	38.6%
3.	Asia	2,961	10.8%
4.	Australia	1,735	6.3%
5.	Africa	415	1.5%
6.	South America	277	1.0%
7.	Central America	133	0.5%
	Unknown	498	1.8%

Yahoo! does a Google

News today of Yahoo!'s purchase of an e-mail start-up, by the name of Bloomba (why does the Internet generate so many silly names? Scope for a PhD dissertation here!). I'd never heard of Bloomba before, but it is an e-mail client, rather than a Web-based service. Reviews suggest that its killer feature is its search capacity; it indexes your mail as you receive it, including what's in attachments. Whatever plans Yahoo! has for the system, no one seems to know. The original parent company, Statalabs, says:

What does Yahoo! plan to do with the technology as a result of the acquisition?
At this time we do not have any announcements about the ongoing plans for the technology or the specifics of the transaction.

A case of 'Watch this space' - well, not this one, since I can't guarantee that I'll spot an announcement, but perhaps the Yahoo! site - and while you are there, you might like to take a look at MySearch

I think that Skype is useful if you are a member of a scattered team - as I am, in relation to the group in Leeds that I work with and also in relation to my work in Sweden - it brings down the cost of phoning a long way - I can talk to someone in Sweden for an hour for about 66 pence - which I can't do on the ordinary phone - and if all my contacts get themselves connected, the cost comes down to zero.

Of course, many organizations are now implementing VoIP for internal phone systems, so you may find yourself caught up in it regardless :-)

As for the Weblog - yes, I'll keep it going, in all probability - it just feels a little lonely from time to time :-)

I tried that Skype and even put some money into being able to use it to ring
someone, but tried it once and have never got back to it. Mostly because
I'm used to using all the free methods and only occasionally make the effort
to talk to someone on a phone anyway. Guess I wasted a bit of money, or I
need to get back to using it.

And on the general lack of interest in the IR Weblog, I guess I would be
really disappointed if the IR Weblog disappeared. But I guess it's not
being a proper weblog so I guess I won't fight it. I get enough mail and
info as it is and that's part of why I haven't chased why I'm not getting
more!

See the item in Cordis News

What PC has an interesting article on Europe's failures in the information society area, with Ewan Sutherland pointing to the fact that:

'We don't have data services. We don't have a pan-European service. We are badly behind with 3G. Korea has 11 million broadband lines and the leading operator has 23,000 hotspots. Where is the so called e-Europe in all this?'

Where indeed? My bet is that if all the R&D funds that have gone into so-called 'research' programmes under the various DGs had been invested in delivering broadband to every home, school, office and factory in Europe, we'd be leading the world. Instead of which, the 'market forces' ideology (ignored by Korea!) has been mindlessly followed, with the results set out by Sutherland

A news item from Reuters carries information on broadband developments in Europe, and especially Sweden. The core of the story is about a broadband supplier in Sweden (Bredbandsbolaget), which delivers 10Mb broadband for 399 SKr a month (£29.33 or $52.52) - just about the same price that people in the UK are paying for 0.5 Mb ADSL connection. There's more: Bredbandsbolaget will deliver 24Mb for just 100 SKr more (a total of £36.68 or $65.68). Clearly, 'broadband Britain' has a long way to go!

There's a new report available on the state of the 'alignment' of countries in the European Union in respect of ICT infrastructure.

Produced by INSEAD, the international business school, it suggests that, on a variety of measures, the most advanced countries are (in rank order:

1	Denmark
2	Sweden
3	Netherlands
4	United Kingdom
5	Finland
6	Germany
7	Austria
8	Belgium
9	Ireland
10	Luxembourg

This is an important report and potentially very useful to anyone exploring the concept of the 'information society'.

Broadband again - in Thursday's Guardian Online, Victor Keegan pointed out that while Britain has wonderful, DSL-provided "broadband" running at half a meg, France has announced a programme which will start in Paris and roll out to the rest of the country - but twelve times faster. At 6Mb, customers will be able to have streaming video and Web-delivered films whenever they are prepared to pay for it. Does the government in the UK believe the hype or are they desperate to persuade the citizen to believe it?

Meanwhile, broadband is said to be set to boom in the USA.

Internet and taxes - it seems that the US Senate is determined to encourage Internet growth. It has just voted 93 to 3 to continue the ban on taxing Internet access for another four years. However:

McCain's successful compromise measure includes specific language that attempts to ensure nothing in the bill will affect state and local taxation of voice telecommunications services, VoIP, or other telecom services that are not purchased or used directly to provide Internet access.

Wi-fi in Westminster? - a story in The Register got me interested, but it turns out to be less exciting than it promised. Westminster City Council is to extend its Soho test to cover the whole of Soho - for its own purposes, however, not for general public access. That means wi-fi CCTV cameras instead of the wired kind and other Council applications; eventually.

A kind of Weblog is produced by the "Wi-Fi Guy", who appears to be travelling around the USA, discovering the state of wi-fi connectivity. Now that's what I call a true nerd!

Denmark takes the bacon: according to a survey by IBM and The Economist, Denmark is the leading country for Internet use. The top rankings are:

1. Denmark
2. United Kingdom
3. Sweden
4. Norway
5. Finland
6. USA

George takes an interest: in what you are doing on the Internet. ZDNet reports in FBI wants to watch you type, that that service would love to wiretap the Internet -

The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers of broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in backdoors for easy wiretapping.

Welcome to the police state!

Do we call it a wireless or a radio?

VoIP for real? I see that AT&T is determined to become the biggest provider of telephony through VoIP - it seems to be making a strong start with services operating in California, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Massachusetts.

Since getting broadband and connecting my computer to the hi-fi system, I've been enjoying Internet Radio - the sound quality is excellent and technical hitches are infrequent. I'm using the RealAudio free media player, rather than the Windows Media Player, since I find the latter rather unfriendly to work with. People complain about the difficulty of finding the free download on the Read Audio site, but you can get a copy quite easily by going to the BBC help page. Not that I've got anything against Real Audio making money by selling the 'professional' version - good luck to them in their battle to survive the Microsoft juggernaut.

My exploration of the Internet airwaves is far from complete, but some favourites are:

• BBC Radio 3 - for its classical concerts and related programmes and for its jazz and 'world music' programmes, like those of Andy Kershaw.
• Hober - continuous music with only the occasional 'station identification' message - usually whispered :-). Comes from Takoma Park, Maryland and sent out by what seems to be a Web design, hosting, etc. firm, for the benefit of those who want something to listen to while they do computer work. Folk, 'world music', etc.
• Grassy Hill Radio - linked from Hober - folk music old and new. Like Hober, continuous music. The big advantage of these stations, apart from the music, is the lack of inane chat that bedevils the usual DJ programme.
• Prairie Home Companion - the famed Garrison Keillor radio programme - wonderful archive of complete shows, nicely split into sections if you want that.

Let me have your recommendations and I'll post them on the log.

An interesting item on wireless in the public library from LIS News.com

...and a longer piece on IT in public libraries from D-Lib Magazine

Turning to the University sector, I picked this up from Seb's Open Research - a couple of courses at Prince Edward Island University are using Weblogs as resource pages and communication. Here's one on 'Networking, knowledge and the digital age'.

And here's an interesting one! I initiated a debate on the JESSE list some time back on the extent to which Web citation was beginning to overtake journal citation as a performance tool. I then found that this had been picked up by a couple of researchers (Vaughan and Shaw, Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference? JASIST, 54(14), 2003, 1313-1322) and now ISI is getting together with NEC: Thomson ISI and NEC Team Up to Index Web-based Scholarship

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON & PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2004--Today, Thomson ISI and NEC Laboratories America (NEC) announced their collaboration to create a comprehensive, multidisciplinary citation index for Web-based scholarly resources. The new Web Citation Index(TM) will combine a suite of technologies developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation indexing" tools from NEC's CiteSeer environment, with the capabilities underlying ISI Web of Knowledge(SM). Thomson ISI editors will carefully monitor the quality of this new resource to ensure all indexed material meets the Thomson ISI high-quality standards.

During 2004, Thomson ISI and NEC will operate a pilot of the new resource to receive feedback from the scientific and scholarly community. Full access to the index is projected for early 2005.

When fully operational, the new resource will be a unique content collection within ISI Web of Knowledge. It will complement the Thomson ISI Web of Science®, and provide researchers with a new gateway to discovery -- using citation relationships among Web-based documents, such as pre-prints, proceedings, and "open access" research publications

OK - that's enough for now - I've got to go off to talk with the people at Orange about mobile technologies.

WiMAX is actually an industry consortium, but its name has become shorthand for the standard it is promoting - IEEE 802.16 - for broadband wireless access. It comes to notice today because of trials by the BBC, which Yahoo! News reports as follows:

Four radio-broadband trials being conducted by BT in rural parts of the UK could be the prelude to a full-scale deployment of WiMax in Britain.

These trials involve broadband fixed access, with customers attaching a receiver to their houses, but the telco is very interested in the idea that more advanced versions of WiMax will support high-speed mobile broadband.

Ian Robinson, head of emerging products at BT Retail, said: "If the potential benefits of WiMax, such as voice services and portability, are realised, then there might be a case for rolling out a WiMax service more widely."

Found a long article today in Fortune - not available at its Web site, unless you are a subscriber, unfortunately - but you can read the first page there - about a start-up Internet telephony company called Skype. These are the guys who brought you KaZaa, so peer-to-peer communication is their game and what is telephony other than P2P? However, unlike KaZaa, which was funded out of their savings, Skype has attracted the attention of the venture capitalists who believe that their software for Voice Over Internet Protocol (otherwise known as VOIP) is a winner - to the extent of investing $25 million in the first round, with the second round of funding over-subscribed.

This is serious enough for the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to be saying that telecom as we know it is finished:

I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype. When the inventors of KaZaa are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic... - it's over. The world will change now inevitably.

The key is that phrase, 'the quality is fantastic' - VOIP has been around for some time now, but it's been a hassle and the time delays were dreadful and the quality was poor - with broadband use growing and the quality problem apparently solved... well, I'm now among the more than 7 million who have downloaded it, and I'm looking forward to getting set up to use it.

Coincidentally, this week's Time magazine has an article called 'Back from the dead', devoted to the resurgance of interest in, among other things, VOIP. [Thanks for drawing this one to my attention, Alistair... and thanks, Charles, for the link to the inevitable.] The separate bits of the article are on the Time Europe Web site - and the VOIP bit is here.

It looks as though this could be the next big thing!

Ah! A trade mark dispute - a pity really, the Phoenix metaphor that started it led naturally to Firebird - and I've never even heard of the database group that was objecting.

However, from a hint on the discussion forum, I discovered that Firefox will launch if you also have Firebird running and it nicely picks up the Firebird bookmarks and add-ins. Tab Browser Extensions are one of these, so I'll see if disabling them results in Firefox launching every time.

Keep tuned to this station for further announcements.

The Firebird browser gets unstinting praise from Forbes magazine.

I'm now using it pretty well all the time, since IE causes so many problems under XP. From time to time javascript doesn't function under Firebird, but that seems more likely to be the result of poor coding than of a fundamental failure in Firebird. Version 0.8 is almost ready and will be released on Monday 9th February.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned Mozilla Firebird as a desirable browser and my liking for it grows. I found that it is delightfully easy in import one's bookmarks from other browsers - IE is very straightforward, but even for Opera, all you need is another very useful open source program, BookMark Bridge. This checks what bookmark files are one your system and then merges them under the desired system. There's some tidying up to do, but it works very effectively.

A list member, Carol Cahill, draws my attention to a couple of items worth looking at:

• PC magazine Feb 17 issue has an article about the value of public library subscription databases "Your library online" by Janet Rubenking
• Today's Seattle Times has an article about Joe Janes' new ischool class on Google: "Google for a grade: UW class to study popular search engine"

A good read from Peter Jasco of the University of Hawaii on the ups and downs of 2003.

...and some guesses from various persons about what 2004 might hold for us.

Finally, IST Results e-bulletin has the following item:

• Need help navigating the Internet? Maybe Mayva can help. Mayva, the first implementation of the AsAnAngel project, is a conversational and customisable virtual assistant for Internauts and cellular phone users.

I'm very impressed by the Mozilla Firebird browzer. It may even displace Opera as my preferred system.

One of the big features is the extent to which it can be customised through 'Tips and Tricks' which allow you to do practically anything by inserting code into one or another of three text files: user.js, userChrome.css, and userContent.css

Try it out, I think you'll like it.

I see that Tony Blair is gushing about broadband again. Of course, this is DSL broadband and the item is about the upgrading for telephone exchanges to allow 90% of the population in North-east England access to the astonishing speed of 512 kbits/sec, when most European countries are going for at least a 1 Mbit rate. Higher speeds are available through various ISPs, of course, but at a price, and as a Datamonitor was predicting in 2003:

monthly subscription rates for high-speed Internet services will need to fall to at least USD25 before mass-market uptake becomes a reality.

At the current rate of exchange $25 is £13.69 - and I am currently pay £23.95 ($43.71) for a 512 kbit/sec service - and that is with one of the cheaper suppliers. So, again, as with the 'weapons of mass distraction' [his Freudian slip] Tony doesn't really know what he is talking about.

We seem to be blessed in the UK with a bunch of politicians whose only skill - and they aren't very good at it - is news manipulation. No wonder the voters stay away in droves.

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, has a nice piece on 'information pollution' as his first 'Alertbox' of 2004. Much of what he recommends was recommended by David Allen and myself following our project on 'information overload' - in fact, 'information pollution' is a significant element in overload, in our view. Worth reading, and noting!

Readers of Information Research will recall Terry Brooks's special issue on the semantic web. Another contribution to this topic is found in Oryon Update - the newsletter of the consultancy group in the Netherlands "Oryon KMD".

The author of the piece appears to have a somewhat restricted definition of 'understanding' - apparently, he believes that 'understanding' is reached when the computer can be programmed to interpret the instructions on a Web page. Not my definition of 'understanding' :-)

While we in the UK, what is, I believe, the fourth richest economy in the world stumble along on dial-up and s l o o o o w, so-called 'broadband', I see that South Korea is planning to upgrade its national network to 100mbps by 2010.

This, of course, is the country that our Minister of Trade and Industry returned from last year, singing the praises of the impact of broadband on the economy. What she forgot to say was that this development was state-financed, whereas she, along with the other members of Tony Blair's band, "The New Thatcherites", was convinced it could be delivered by business.

I keep on mentioning Ian Mackintosh's book, 'Sunrise Europe', published in 1986, which set out the rationale for state investment in cabling every home, school, factory, and office in Europe. How much more useful that investment would have been than the millions of Euros poured into so-called 'research' programmes that have led nowhere. Perhaps Mrs Hewitt could read it now, and reflect.

This is actually from Wido Bosch:

The difference in a knowledge worker and a traditional worker is the main resources he or she is using to perform his or her job. Toffler wrote in 1980 a book, called "the third wave", in which he argues that we moved from the agricultural age in the industrial age and that we now are moving from an industrial age into an information age. In the industrial age the main source for a worker was his labour skills, phisical work. Of course he had to use his knowledge to perform but the physical element of his work was larger than the knowledge part, which made him easier to replace (see for this the power industrial giants had in managing their human assets). In the third wave, information age (or knowledge society as you wish), for a lot of employees the main resources for their work is their knowledge, their brains. These so called knowledge workers form the largest part of the value of the organization nowadays. In defining the value of an organization we used to sum up the assets (capital, machines, physical assets, and so on) but nowadays the organizations value is much higher but with less physical assets. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young for example is an organisation which has a high value but they have no assets (they lease everything). When their employees walk out the door at five and don't come back there is no organization left. And unfortunately a traditional worker in the sence that I mean it is easier to replace than a knowledge worker.

Last example, industrial companies are outsourcing the work which has low knowledge intesivity to countries with lower costs on loans, but they leave the knowledge intensive work in the western world. Philips is stating that they trade knowledge and not goods. Knowledge intensivity is increasing enormously. For more informatoin on knowledge workers and the shift in thinking in this area I recommend the following books: "The knowledge creating company" by Nonaka and Takeuchi, "weightless wealth" "Value based knowledge management" and "Zero space" by Tissen and research performed by Gartner, Xerox and McKinsey. The book "weightless wealth" might be a good start since it is easy to read and provides a good profound insight in the evoluating economy/society.

I agree with you that for all work, no matter how mundane, some knowledge is required but I disagree with the statement that this obviates the term knowledge worker.

I also do not think that knowledge optimalisation (or the use and sharing of knowledge) should be narrowed down as a function for HR only. Since knowledge management is about creating a culture in which people act and behave based on the fact that they recognize that sharing knowledge implies increased value adding, because sharing does not mean dividing but multiplying. If I share 1 dollar with you, we both have 50 cents, if I share my knowledge with you we both have this knowledge and I don't lose 50%. So when we create and stimulate a culture in which knowledge sharing is common and accepted, organizations can create a differential advantage. But to achieve this, new ways of organizational structure is needed. To share knowledge people need to have trust, a common goal or shared ambition, high attraction to the company, and a fitting rewarding system (amongst others..), but they way we organizate now we lack all of these aspects (due to short sighted management, rewarding systems based on hours in the office, lack of trust due to reorganizations and so on). It is in this context that I mean that we don't structure our organizations well, or in other words, we don't structure our organizations to achieve sustainable advantages.

Focussing on only staff knowledge is too narrow, since (as you state) for all work knowledge is requires, so it would be a focus which is too limited. Secondly, focussing on HR implies that they are responsible for knowledge sharing, which will lead to institutionalisation (not invented here syndrome).

When I posted this issue I was concerned on two things, the place (is IR the right platform to talk about KM) and the form (these topics require face to face conversations since there is yet no consensus on knowledge managemement and the basic assumptions and paradigms). Seen the nature of the discussion now, I assume face to face conversation would increase the benefit and seen the number of reactions (1) I feel confirmed in the fact that this topic does not fit the nature of this platform, which is IR.

In sincerely apologize for the inconvenience I caused.

Many Regards, Wido Bosch

And was in reply to:

Hello Wido,

Firstly, I was wondering if you could clarify for me the difference between a knowledge worker and a traditional worker? It seems to me that most jobs, no matter how mundane, require some knowledge to perform them, obviating the need for the term 'knowledge worker'.

I don't think there is a need to restructure organisations to make knowledge management successful. Knowledge Management (or Knowledge Optimisation as I would prefer to call it) should just happen in organisations that that are committed to a particular governance model that includes optimising the knowledge held by their staff. Ideally it would happen through the HR area, just as training usually does,

Bob Jackman

You've probably all read this one already, but it was new to me today. The School of Information Management and Systems has had a project runnning to calculate how much 'information' is produced and/or distributed annually. Their current estimate is that:

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

What's an exabyte? Here's a definition from SearchStorage.com:

An exabyte (EB) is a large unit of computer data storage, two to the sixtieth power bytes. The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term. Two to the sixtieth power is actually 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, or somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

Or, as the authors of the SIMS report put it:

...five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

I knew there was too much of the damned stuff!