Spotify playlist: Relaxed

Spotify is a great service for people that love music, normally download it for free… and decide they want to try a legal variety. It is also a great tool for discovering new music, I have found lots of new acts through my few weeks on Spotify, and will use this blog to talk about some of the playlists I am putting together.This is apt because Spotify allows you to share playlists with other people, so if you want the playlist I describe here, you can click on this link (after installing Spotify) and this playlist will be added to your Spotify automatically!

This is the first list I made, based on music I like. I called it relaxed as all songs have the ability to calm me down. Feel free to give me feedback!

The Fun Loving Criminals

First up the Fun Loving Criminals. These guys from New York are well known in the Festival scene for producing some of the most distinctive and soulful Blues/Rock whatever you want to call it. Smoke em’ was their key-song on Dutch festivals, wonder why…, and is still great after all these years.

Fleetwood Mac: Albatross

I never really knew Fleetwood Mac, they were from well before my time, but when I heard the Chain on the radio I knew I had to find out what else they made. Although the Chain is my favourite FM song, Albatross is the one making it onto this list. When I hear it I can just see tropical beaches!

Jamiroquai: Seven days in Sunny June

What better follow up to tropical beaches than a song about Sunny June. Although Jamiroquai is by no means an artist I would consider part of my “favourites”, this particular song is both uplifting and soothing.

Iam: Sans Issue

Iam

Iam is hardly known at all outside of France, which is odd as he is a great hip hop artist. Recent collaborations with Beyonce and other American commercial drab proof this, but in my opinion this guy doesn’t do himself justice by collaborating with ’superstars’. Sans Issue is one of his masterpieces and it is both soothing and impressive. Not a clue what he sings about though

Blof & Heather Nova: Mooie Dag

Blof are definitely in my favourite bands top ten. This Dutch band has been changing the Dutch pop-scene since the mid nineties and are going from strength to strength. This song is about the day their drummer died in a car accident. It is beautifully written and composed, and in this version Heather Nova actually contributes to the strength of the song.

Pearl Jam: Gone

Another band with a knack for writing great songs. Their album Ten, which triggered their breakthrough, is one of my favourite albums, but this song from the album Pearl Jam is up there with Alive and Jeremy in terms of strength and lyrics. Oh, and it is relaxing in a weird way.

U2: With or without you

I doubted this song should be on this list, but the underlying guitar riffs and the pace of the song warrant a spot anyway. I don’t think I need to say a lot about U2 do I?

Lenny Kravitz: I belong to you

Spotify does have a quirk in that it only plays what the record labels allow it to play. That means that a classic Lenny album with some great songs is missing. Fortunately this track has made it to the Greatest hits album and is well worth listening to.

Mellon Colly and the infinite sadness.

Smashing Pumpkins: Tonight Tonight

One of the best bands of the nineties, which fortunately have decided to reform some years ago, publishing the great Zeitgeist album. Tonight Tonight is a massive song, with brilliant composition and strength.

Nirvana: Something in the way

My musical taste is revealing itself rapidly in this list I suppose… Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins… Bush is missing of Spotify but would have made it otherwise. Grunge really got me going in the nineties! But it is still music that stands out from the rock-crowd. Eventhough over the past decade we have been blessed with a raft of great bands coming through to the top of the charts.

Roykssop: Eple

Another festival favourite, although I don’t like all of their work, Eple (with the famous melody that keeps floating in and out) is a classic and manages to free my mind from any thought.

Prince: Sexy Motherfucker

Prince is an icon, unfortunately he sank away into oblivion but to me his music is still ten times better than anything ever produced by that other eighties icon, Michael Jackson. This song brings lots of different influences together into an orgy of gorgeousness.

The Prodigy: 3 Kilos

At the end of the album, Music for the Jilted Generation, tucked away from the rougher and tougher side of the album, are three electro tunes that never interested me earlier. But the more I listened to the album, the more I fell in love with these jewels. I could have picked any of them, but 3 Kilos is great.

Wax Tailor: Positively Inclined

This guy I discovered through Spotify and boy am I pleased I did! French trip-hop producer Wax Tailor is a gem, one of many to be uncovered by me using Spotify I hope!

Responsible data policies in Universities

Now that Google is getting a foot in the door at British Universities, offering far superior mail-systems than Universities are able to offer, the question of data policies is becoming a real one. Universities have a tradition of care and diligence when it comes to research data, but that tradition does not necessarily extent to the way e-mail is managed and governed. Not only e-mail, but data released through Virtual Learning Environments is increasingly hosted on servers that are outside the property-domain of Universities (and colleges, schools etc.).

Squeeze on data security?

This move is understandable, external parties can offer specific advantages unatainable by the University. Each student an e-mail box with gigabytes of storage? It is only possible through using a service like Google which has petabytes of storage available all over the world.

But it does beg the question: What happens with potentially confidential data? Google will scan the Gmail account to build a profile of the account-holder so they can target their ads specifically. But what else do they do? Do they ensure a bulletproof safety from hackers?

The simple answer is no, it is impossible, therefore Universities will have to educate their students and staff to understand the risks involved with online storage. A new age of responsible information literacy is dawning and Universities better make sure that they embrace the challenge.

I am in favour of outsourcing services like e-mail and hosting of low-grade sensitivity. But when it comes to research data, grades and personal details there has to be a significant red line between internal and external hosting.

Furthermore, Universities will have to start thinking how this material (whether it is of high or low sensitivity) is protected under intellectual property laws. Are we signing off part of that responsibility? How about a Creative Commons model where the end-users decide?

Plenty of questions, few answers (yet).

Google Homepage

This post is a bit of a test really, but it could well generate a new topic for the coming weeks as well. I am currently playing about with the Google Sites functionality, and I have to say, it looks like a half decent way of getting a website sorted in a short time.

I am a bit of a Google-holic I suppose, discussing it with a friend the other day we concluded that we would probably even pay for the suite of services on offer, but that should not make the potential any less appealing for other people.

Shortly I will publish the site address, if you are curious already (not that there is anything there) feel free to Google me…

Knowledge and e-mail: Codification pur sang?

In the OrganiK project we have finished most of the data collection to assess criteria for the new Knowledge Management system we aim to develop. One very interesting factor kept coming up during various visits, the use of Outlook to store work-related knowledge.

Several interviewees send e-mails to themselves with working tasks, snippets of information they picked up on and links to websites they find useful, they also send these mails on to colleagues when they think this is useful.

In essence they are using e-mail as a codification tool, effectively making knowledge available in written down format with the aim of recovering it when appropriate.

This is by no means a new ‘discovery’ MS itself is aware of the potential of Outlook as KM tool, the question then of course is; why do they not exploit that potential further?  And, as a Thunderbird user, why is Mozilla not all over this weakness in Outlook and trying to improve on it?

The interesting player in this respect is Google who, with an ever expanding toolkit, are offering brilliant ways of using Gmail as a codified information repository. Time to steal ideas Mozilla!

The problem with definitions in a social context

Currently I am writing on a State of the Art review with three main parts, Knowledge Management, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.

Of these three there is only a solid definition of the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management are based on discussion and defined by O’Reilly as:

“Not having a hard boundary, but a gravitational core.”

A star exploding, empty core!

As the image above shows, this could indicate that there is not a real centre for the definition, a highly contested area, circled by numerous, partial, definitions, shapes and forms. This ‘paradigm’ is what needs to be caught in any document discussing the topic, in the case of O’Reilly this is a problem to describe Web 2.0, for me the problem is related to describing Knowledge Management.

Wish me luck, when I come up with the ‘definite’ definition I will post it here.

More on networking

In a previous post I discussed the value of LinkedIn as a networking tool. I expressed my surprise that there is no real culture of networking in the UK. In the Netherlands it is one network event after the other, here it is all more formal, networking for networking sake seems to be out of order.

No matter whether I am right or wrong about this, I think it is my duty to write about networking the Dutch way so that I can educate the English. I know I am arrogant like that…No really, I have a different interest and that is that I think Web 2.0 features are going to push forward the concept of social networking in a large way throughout the World.

Read this blog on Yahoo to get an idea about what networking is when applied to face to face situations. Where Web 2.0 is actually helping us to understand this concept better and better, as well as helping us to get better at it, it is no substitute for ‘real’ networking events. In a sense the technology gags us, as shown by this excellent picture:

thanks to noblelglobel@Flickr

At the University of Groningen network events are commonplace, lets make this part of the Sheffield culture as well!

Part of my networking affliction stems from the fact that I have a broad knowledge rather than a specific knowledge, I am always painfully aware of shortcomings in, let’s say, my programming knowledge. Knowing the people I know however I can almost always find the answer to questions (once I decided how to best formulate them!).

This is the essence of good knowledge management, knowing what you know, and knowing who knows what you don’t. There is no codification effort that can replace that basic stance, there are however codifications (of knowledge) that help find the knowledge you need. It is this area of codification I am currently investigating in the OrganiK project, on which there will be more info in later blog posts.

Knowledge management in SMEs, non-existent?

Quite a number of authors argue that knowledge management can not effectively contribute to operations in Small and Medium Enterprises. This is an odd statement related to the misunderstanding of Small and Medium Enterprises as well as the misunderstanding of knowledge management.  This is not an unusual combination, SMEs are notorious for having a diverse character (ie. it is hard to describe types of SME or even to define their precise markets) and knowledge management has to be one of the most ambiguous fields of research out there as Wilson demonstrated in 2002.  Wilson however comes from a field that was once as ambiguous and hard to define as knowledge management and considering that should perhaps have demonstrated a bit more patience for the topic.

It is easiest to state that knowledge management is joint to information management at the hip, where information management deals more with systems (Not just information technology, but the wide range of systems like P. Checkland describes.) Knowledge management is more involved with the actual interaction of people between people. Although this can be defined as a system, the specific nature of the theory of knowledge transfer differentiates knowledge management from information management, that and the understanding that knowledge is different from information, described in the now famous DIKW triangle.

Once one starts seeing knowledge management as broad as defined in the (too) brief paragraph above, it becomes feasible to see that this ‘management fad’ can potentially occur in any environment where knowledge gets transferred.

Where I draw the line is where people start considering any micro business, from coffeeshop to toilet-lady as an environment where KM is relevant, that is simply over the top, the only purpose that serves is to make the concept of KM broadly acceptable.

I am pleased to be working on a European funded project called OrganiK that is looking to assist the development of KM practices in SMEs through the use of Web 2.0 tools. Soon I will start blogging on this in some more detail, at the moment I am waiting for the project website to come online, so I can link to that.

GoogleGear

Everybody knows Google, does everybody here know that Gmail (Googlemail) is by far the best, most reliable mail-client out there? It is, for example, virtually spam free. It has more than enough space available for all your needs. (over 6 Gb, and counting) and, most importantly! it offers access to all sorts of other Google gadgets. Read on for some of the best tools out there!

Learning Objects: Metatagging

One of the modules I follow this semester is Educational Informatics, the application of information management to education. It is truely interesting and offers a remarkable insight in the difficulties involved with ‘virtual learning environments’. Not only is there a plethora of vendors that are all fighting for their marketshare, there are also numerous problems with providing the content.

The strength of networking

LinkedIn is a serious flavour of social networking. It enables you to find people with a similar career, interest or background and hook up with them. I signed up years ago but forgot about it and let it be. Until one of my contacts from the past (a Dane) contacted me to link. I then proceeded to find some others to link with and although I found a couple of old classmates, I failed to find many people from the UK and specifically my department at the University. And that is weird!

We are continuously talking about Web2.0, the power of user created content and using sites like Facebook and even Flickr to share our deepest feelings and images. But we somehow have not mass-encountered LinkedIn yet, eventhough there are over a million users in the UK alone. I reckon this is down to the simple fact that most of the students have not yet been tempted to use networks like this in a professional setting. They all like Facebook and use that instead, but it really is not the same thing.

What I find odd is the following return when I search for University of Sheffield and Information Management:

Annemarie Zijlema

Tim Zijlstra

and then the name of someone I don’t know. (Non-English)

That is odd! That is me and one of the other Groningen grads that did the same course as I did but a year later, and did a year here in Sheffield before I came… Where is the rest? Looking at the new sign-ups for the University of Sheffield and the new sign-ups for the Hanze in Groningen (where me and Annemarie did our first degree) there are hundreds of Groningers and only 35 from Sheffield.

The Dutch economy is networking like mad, the whole ethos of the way Dutch professionals work is drenched in a lovely coating of social interfacing through the internet. Companies like Pentascope are entirely based around the network-concept. They don’t have a hierarchichal structure anymore, everybody is just part of a network.

What I am really trying to say here is: I want those of you that read this to sign up for LinkedIn and find me there, Facebook will get even more annoying, LinkedIn has a different function. Use it!