Colm's Blog Continued

In Session 4 we covered knowledge management. The interesting things for me were:

Wikipedia
Weblogs
Data Mining
Skype
Knowledge management

I use Wikipedia all the time, it definitely has value.

We did the jelly bean jar experiment. I did the typical engineer thing and counted the number at the bottom of the jar and the number along the side and added a few for the filled in voids. I was close. The method of eliminating choices to increase the chances of a successful outcome of an experiment was proposed, as in the kind of collective knowledge in the audience of the ''who wants to be a millionaire show. I am not sure if I agree with this or not, from watching the show myself when living in Ireland, I generally found the audiences to be wrong. But maybe that is just the Irish ....I have no issue with the concept of crowd wisdom, but I think that most general populations (e.g. USA... Paul) are on average pretty dumb....I am not entirely convinced.

The data mining issue is interesting. Personally, I do not like giving away personal details on the internet unless it is absolutely essential. But signing up for websites gives a lot of online companies access to a huge store of information on people who could be potential custemers in whatever business you are interested in.

Blogs are OK but they are uncontrolled (maybe not in China), I think there was a big fuss over some blog sites in some university in the US, called rumours or something. Apparently people left loads of nasty messages on the site about some female student and she eventually committed suicide.

We seem to be in a fairly pro-Google class environment. I changed over to Gmail a good while ago,.....I had a hotmail account before but it kept getting inundated with spam and turned off after a certaian period of inactivity,...gmail is great, never delete anything, google chat is pretty cool and I use it to keep in contact with my family all the time, especially my brother.

Slan leat (bye in Irish)