My wife Susanne and I visited NOLUG on Monday and talked about search engine intelligence for librarians.

Nolug, or Norwegian Online User Group, is a community for users of online databases and search tools.

There are a large number of search oriented sites out there, but you only have to follow a few to get the essential news and commentary.

Susanne also presented her favorite RSS web feed readers and online bookmarking services and discussed why such services help you cope with information overflow.

Here is the main presentation in Slideshare format:

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You can also download the PDF file from Pandia.

We also made a short presentation of the history of our search engine oriented site Pandia. It is, indeed, a strange story. Pandia is definitely the only site of this kind out there that was indirectly caused by an act of parliament!

Well, you can read about it in this short slideshow:

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Mark Vidler, the mashup artist of Go Home Productions, has made his first mashup video.

Given that he has included my all time favorite band, the Electric Light Orchestra, I just have to include it.

And yes, it is Evil Woman mixed with Diana Ross and the Supremes plus a dash of Michael Jackson.

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If you are into jazz, you might want to take a look at a collection of online resources gathered by my friend Johan Hauknes and his colleagues in the Behind the Music - Profiting from Sound project, a Nordic study from 2003 of the music industry.

It is presented as a gateway to information with links to institutions and resources on the Nordic and global music industry and to a range of online jazz resources.

Go to Some music and jazz resources on the net .

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There is a general agreement that the windows-based user interface that was invented by Xerox, adapted by Apple and then stolen by Microsoft was a huge improvement vis-a-vis the cursor and text-based user interfaces of earlier computers.

Nowadays most people take the use of the mouse and idea of gathering files in folders as obvious. It was not.

During my days as a young civil servant in the Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs (don’t ask!) in the early 1990’s I became one of the local “PC user helpers” and was given the task of explaining the concept of files and folders to people who had no idea of how a computer worked.

I remember that i found a card box and put paper-folders and paper sheet into those folder to illustrate the concepts of the hard drive (the box), the folder (the folder) and the paper sheet (the file).

If I didn’t many of them would just hit the save button, having no idea about where the file went. They were not stupid, but no one had explained to them the basic concepts of computing.

Very few user interfaces are obvious. The uses of a water basin tap, a radio volume button, or a screw driver are all learned behavior.

Anyone who have been to one of the modern “designer hotels” know this, as they suddenly find themselves unable to turn off the lights (where is that light switch?) or get running water in the shower (what button to push or turn, and which way?)

Here is a very funny video from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that describes this dilemma in a wonderful way. It is taken from the show “Øystein og jeg” from 2001. Øystein Backe plays the helper from the help desk and Rune Gokstad is a desperate monk trying to understand how to use — a book! There are English subtitles.

(By the way, the book was not introduced in the Middle Ages, but in late antiquity.)

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We have a lot of music. We have managed to rip most of our CDs, and are now buying most of our music online through iTunes and the like.

Our iTunes library has now a whopping 90 GB of music and if you add regular files that are not uploaded to Gmail, we need to back up at least 110 GB worth of data.

Yes, we do have an external hard drive and Apple’s new Leopard OS has an excellent back up facility called Time Machine. It works, but this backup is nothing worth if — God forbid — there should be a fire.

Given our ADSL broadband connection I started to search for online backup solutions. It would be great if we could get the Mac to automatically back up all new files to a remote server, and then forget about it. Whatever happens, we will have a complete copy of all the music and all the images stored away somewhere.

We actually do have a .mac account, that can be used for this purpose, but at least in Europe it is very slow, and it will choke on this amount of data.

I found a large number of seemingly high quality services online, but they all become pretty expensive when you reach the 100GB limit. They are well suited for companies, but not for private homes.

I found one service though, that promises unlimited storage for a reasonable price (USD 4.95 per month) , namely Mozy. Even better, they have a Mac version of the software in beta, and the encryption seems solid.

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Hey mama, she said, I don’t understand
He won’t look my way, he won’t take my hand
I might as well live in another land
Oh mama, please help me, I need a plan

His mother looked up from her garden spot
You have to make use of the things you’ve got
Charm him with basil and bergamot
Invite him to dinner, but make it hot

Serve him pasta with pesto and a bottle of wine
Then add Tiramisu of the classical kind
Top it all with good coffee, the best you can find
I assure you my daughter: He’s yours in no time

Hey mama, she said, you were right again
Pasta with pesto surely beats champagne
If you’re looking for love or a sweet refrain
Serve him pesto with pasta and a bottle of wine

Pasta with Pesto recipe
How to Make Pesto like an Italian Grandmother Recipe

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What are the next challenges for innovation policy development?

I have had the pleasure of taking part in the annual meeting of Taftie , the Association for Technology Implementation in Europe. This is a club for industry oriented research councils and innovation policy agencies in (and beyond) Europe.

It was a very interesting conference program, and our Turkish hosts from TTGV did an excellent job. Still, I am not going to make an attempt to summarize the various interventions here.

I was asked to contribute to the session on global trends on innovation, skillfully led by technology policy veteran Juhani Kuusi. I presented what I believe to be some of the most important challenges for innovation policy development in the coming years:

1. A shift from a technology push perspective to a vision of learning. The linear model is dead, but it won’t lie down, and I am amazed to see how many policy initiatives are based on the notion that most ideas and technologies are born in universities.
2. A better understanding of innovation in resource based industries. There is nothing wrong with investing in high tech industries. Still, one should remember that “low tech” industries like agriculture, fisheries, wine production and oil and gas can be very profitable activities. Moreover, they are very knowledge intensive, even if the companies themselves do not invest much in R&D.

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You know I told you about music mashups, DJs mixing different songs into one coherent whole?

Well, one of the masters of the game, Britain’s Mark Vidler, is releasing his whole collection of “bastard pop” remixes making them available for download.

Mark is better known as the man behind Go Home Productions.

There are no less than 16 albums of mashups, remixes, rarities, MTV jingles and radio snippets, the mashup albums being in majority.

Some of the tracks are just brilliant, and I am amazed to see how he is able to make jointless seams between artists from totally different traditions. He can mix Eminem with Paul McCartney, 10cc with Marvin Gaye, Disney’s Pinnocchio with the Beatles, the Beastie Boys with Las Ketchup and ABBA with Echo and the Bunnymen.

All right, some of these tracks are mostly for fun, but most of them stand solidly on their own two tracks!

Moreover, I enjoy his ability to use material from the last four decades. This is like a revisit to my own record collection. Hm, I must be getting old…

Here is one of my favorites: A mix of Blondie and the Doors courtesy of Mark Vidler. The video — which is edited by a fan — features the Gorillaz, but that band has absolutely nothing to do with the soundtrack.

And here’s one mixing Disney’s I’ve Got No Strings (yepp, the one with Pinochio), Radiohead’s Creep and The Beatles’ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, called — of course — Pinocchiohead On LSD.

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Nordic success may partly be caused by the autonomy and learning capabilities of the employees

In my post on the Norwegian Puzzle – i.e. the fact that Norway is one of the richest and most productive countries in the world in spite of seemingly low R&D investments — I pointed out that there may be socio-cultural explanations for the Norwegian ability to innovate and modernize.

However, I also noted that we have no statistics that can underpin such arguments.

It actually turns out that we have!

In a chapter in a forthcoming book from Edgar (Caraianniss, Kaloudis og Mariussen 2008) Åge Mariussen of NIFU STEP will present research based on the European Working Condition Survey.

In this survey approximately 1000 employed or self-employed in each country are asked about their work (27 countries all in all).

They are for instance asked about who determines the pace of work.

“At this point,” Åge points out, “most Nordics (73% in Denmark, 78% in Norway) say that some external actor, such as the customer, determines their deadlines, as opposed to 68% in the entire EU27. In a somewhat more restricted form of work organization, which may have similarities to a hierarchical organization, one would expect the boss (a superior) to be monitoring progress.”

The percentage of Europeans reporting that their boss is monitoring their progress (35.7% in EU27, 47% in UK) is indeed much higher than in the Nordic area. (Sweden, 16.4%, Finland 15.5%.)

Åge argues that autonomous actors more easily will learning new things and apply new ideas at work, thus making the organization more flexible and innovative:

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In spite of what many believe,there is actually much innovation going on in the public sector.

The public sector is often described as “bureaucratic” – in a negative sense, as a slow moving and rigid hierarchically organized system, as time-consuming, oversized and expensive. This may indeed be the case in some instances.

Still, from my own experience — working in and for the public sector — I have not found proof for the assumption that public sector organizations in general are less innovative than the ones found in the private sector.

Public organizations may be innovative learning organizations

Public organizations are learning organizations with their own share of entrepreneurs and with directives regarding the need for organizational change.

Many ministries, public agencies and public service institutions make use of technologies or services developed and delivered by private firms and organizations.

Public institutions also face technological challenges where the solutions cannot simply be bought off the shelf, and are thus involved in technological invention and development.

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