May 08, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, Search
I was very interested to read this brief piece about the 'new discipline' of 'computational advertising':
Web advertising is the primary driving force behind many Web activities, including Internet search as well as publishing of online content by third-party providers. A new discipline - Computational Advertising - has recently emerged, which studies the process of advertising on the Internet from a variety of angles. A successful advertising campaign should be relevant to the immediate user's information need as well as more generally to user's background and personalized interest profile, be economically worthwhile to the advertiser and the intermediaries (e.g., the search engine), as well as be aesthetically pleasant and not detrimental to user experience. [ACL-08: HLT - Tutorials]
This is from the notice about a tutorial session at ACL-08: HLT which is taking place in Columbus in June. The conference combines the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT) of the North American Chapter of the ACL.
Given the nature of the conference, the tutorial has a particular focus:
In this tutorial, we focus on one important aspect of online advertising, namely, contextual relevance. It is essential to emphasize that in most cases the context of user actions is defined by a body of text, hence the ad matching problem lends itself to many NLP methods. At first approximation, the process of obtaining relevant ads can be reduced to conventional information retrieval, where one constructs a query that describes the user's context, and then executes this query against a large inverted index of ads. We show how to augment the standard information retrieval approach using query expansion and text classification techniques. We demonstrate how to employ a relevance feedback assumption and use Web search results retrieved by the query. This step allows one to use the Web as a repository of relevant query-specific knowledge. We also go beyond the conventional bag of words indexing, and construct additional features using a large external taxonomy and a lexicon of named entities obtained by analyzing the entire Web as a corpus. Computational advertising poses numerous challenges and open research problems in text summarization, natural language generation, named entity extraction, computer-human interaction, and others. The last part of the tutorial will be devoted to recent research results as well as open problems, such as automatically classifying cases when no ads should be shown, handling geographic names, context modeling for vertical portals, and using natural language generation to automatically create advertising campaigns. [ACL-08: HLT - Tutorials]
Via Michael White.
May 07, 2008
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Categories:
Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
I have just received a copy of Web-based learning through educational informatics from my helpful colleagues in the OCLC Library and Information Center.
I have not yet read it, although I look forward to it. The author, Nigel Ford, describes educational informatics as the integration of three major R&D emphases: information and communication technology, education and library/information science. He defines it as follows:
The development, use, and evaluation of digital systems that use pedagogical knowledge to engage in or facilitate resource discovery in order to support learning.
Flicking through the pages, I was interested to see the following on the bottom of each page:
Copyright © 2008, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
This was interesting as an example of how practice and thinking in the electronic environment is influencing practice and thinking in the print environment.
Jeanette Winterson's remarks on book swapping sites I quoted the other day was another example, where she seems to be suggesting greater limits on the use of books than now exist.
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
[Lorcan Dempsey's weblog]
May 07, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
, OCLC
Here are links to several unrelated publications .....
Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment
portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2008.
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2008/dempsey-portal.pdf (.pdf: 195K/18 pp.)
[Lorcan Dempsey: Selected publications [OCLC]]
This is a short piece adapted from an earlier blog entry.
Lavoie, Brian, and Günter Waibel. An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries. (.pdf: 136K/18 pp.)
[Books and reports [OCLC - Publications]]
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) includes the Frick Art Reference Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. This report describes the results of a study of the aggregate collection of these institutions.
Godby, Carol Jean, Devon Smith, and Eric R. Childress. 2008. "Toward Element-level Interoperability in Bibliographic Metadata." The Code4Lib Journal, 2 (2008-03-24). Available online at: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/54.
[Publications [OCLC - OCLC Research]]
I mentioned this before, but in a message about another topic.
May 05, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
Tom Davenport has created a list of the top 20 management gurus for the Wall Street Journal.
Psychologists, journalists and celebrity chief executives crowd the top of a ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal. The results, based on Google hits, media mentions and academic citations, ranked author and consultant Gary Hamel No. 1. [New Breed of Business Gurus Rises - WSJ.com]
The list itself can be found at the end of another WSJ article. It repeats an exercise carried out in 2003.
As interesting as the articles themselves is Davenport's commentary on them in his Harvard Business Publishing blog. I thought two things were especially interesting.
The first is the growing importance of reputation management in our Internet age. Davenport writes about why Jim Collins is not higher on the list (and judging by airport book stands one would expect him to be!).
Why isn’t he higher if his ideas are so good? Unfortunately, the list is not a ranking of the quality of the ideas. A high-ranking management guru has to be a good promoter as well as a good researcher and sound thinker. Collins—like Michael Porter, who was at the top of the 2003 list but fell a bit (to #14) in the new list—doesn’t do a lot of conference speeches, doesn’t have much of a web presence, and doesn’t write much in the popular press. If you want your ideas to be really influential, you’ve got to be out hawking them all the time. [The New Gurus - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport]
The second is the emphasis on ease of reception in an environment which is increasingly resource-rich but attention-scarce:
Interestingly, none of these latter three people are traditional management experts. Friedman and Gladwell are primarily journalists, and Gardner is an educational psychologist. Why have these interlopers prospered to such a degree? I chalk it up to two factors: the increased desire to master people issues in business—we’ve finally realized they’re always the most difficult to address—and the ever-decreasing attention span of businesspeople. Many of them want few academic details and an entertaining story, which these journalists know how to provide. I don’t always agree with the quality of Gladwell’s evidence, but I am certainly impressed by his writing ability. Some of Friedman’s ideas seem quite obvious to me, but he knows how to put together a sentence. That didn’t matter much in the old days of management gurudom, but it seems much more important now. [The New Gurus - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport]
Related entry:
May 03, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, User experience
When we tried out the Kindle a while ago, my son immediately began to touch the screen. But no, the only effect was to leave marks.
This morning in our local Border's I noticed that they had little notices stuck above the screens of their enquiry system. They said that these were not touch screen systems and that people should use the tracker ball and button.
It is interesting how things come to be expected ....
Related entry:
May 02, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - distributed environments
, OCLC
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
Some items of possible interest which were in a little email pile waiting for attention ......
Arrow
An Australian colleague alerted me to the redesign of the Arrow Discovery Service. Arrow aggregates access to Australian research repositories.
Welcome to the ARROW Discovery Service - where you can search 143,582 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.
The ARROW Discovery Service searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories. The list of currently participating universities, and the number of outputs currently in each repository, is listed at the left. [Arrow]
Search box is complemented by tag cloud access. Results filtering by facets, including institutional facets. Alerts can be set (although it does not have RSS feeds, as I notice Roddy MacLeod pointed out somewhere).
Catalog Widget
The Information Resource Centre (IRC) at Jacobs University, Bremen, has produced a catalog widget, jOPAC, as part of its broader initiative to produce a range of 'Web 2 tools'.
The IRC has started developing Web 2.0 tools. Because we want to be able to deliver digital (library and multimedia) services at the point of need, where our patrons are. And because we want to enhance our services by mashing them up with other available services out there on the web. [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]
The are using the Universal Widget API from Netvibes:
Using the UAW API allows easy implementation within various platforms, such as iGoogle, Macintosh, Vista, Yahoo Dashboard, and various others. This way, any developed tool can easily integrate within any supported platform - some of which you might already use! [Web 2.0 Tools - Teamwork at Jacobs University]
See a jOPAC demo here.
I was interested to see the University Confluence-based wiki infrastructure that the pages above are part of. Also interesting is the dedicated focus on such tools that IRC is making.
Linking from Wageningen
As linking between systems becomes more important, so does our interest in identifiers, and in mappings between identifiers. Here is an example from Wouter Gerritsma:
Previously I announced that we made use of the Google Books API to link to the full text whenever possible. We only experienced two problems with this service. First, the quite frequent Google spam warnings, which have been partially resolved but still keep coming back. Second, we did not have the required OCLC or LCCN numbers for the pre-ISBN books in our catalog. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]
He goes on to describe a service from our OCLC Dutch colleagues that returns an OCLC number when fed a Pica Production Number, which they have in their catalog. And the results:
A few examples are: Even when the full text is not available on Google Books, the service can be usefull. In the following example of Hogg, R. (1884) The fruit manual, the electronic version of the 1860 edition is available on Google Books rather than the 1884 edition we have in our collection. [Linking from Catalog of Wageningen UR Library to Google Books at WoW! Wouter on the Web]
May 01, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
There is an interesting short article on book swapping sites in the Guardian, placing them in a 'recycling' context.
For eco-aware readers, the environmental benefits of swapping rather than buying are clear. In 2003, Greenpeace launched its book campaign, producing evidence that the UK publishing industry was inadvertently fuelling the destruction of ancient forests in Finland and Canada. It found that one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year. (In the same year, Greenpeace persuaded Raincoat Books to produce the Canadian edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on recycled paper, saving an estimated 39,000 trees.) But despite the campaign, only 40% of the UK book industry has introduced paper with a high level of recycled content, largely choosing to use paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council instead.
Beyond using the country's dwindling network of libraries, until recently the opportunities for exchanging paperbacks have been limited to friends, community schemes and book groups. But in the past two years, a spate of online book-swapping sites have emerged. Inspired by the goodwill schemes operated by hostels around the world, whereby travellers can leave behind books they have read and pick up something new, these sites generate little profit for their founders. The books are swapped directly between users, who pay the postage; the sites simply facilitate the meeting and identifying of potential exchanges. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
I was surprised to read the following:
Of course, those churches and charity shops that made money from second-hand book sales stand to lose out, as do the publishing industry and authors. "In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called 'file sharing', and technically illegal," the author Jeanette Winterson wrote of book-swapping sites recently. [Charlotte Northedge on book-swapping websites | Environment | The Guardian]
One of the more interesting things to me about the mass digitization initiatives is that they have highlighted that libraries do not 'own' many of the books in their collections, if by 'own' we mean the ability to repurpose at will. Of course, they do own the cost of processing and making them available, and of storing them over time, but for the larger part of their collection, there are limits on what they can do with the content.
April 30, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
We got a present of a couple of children's books from Australia and were intrigued to discover their relationship to the collections of the National Museum of Australia.
Making Tracks takes young readers on a fictional journey through some fascinating Australian stories, inspired by objects from the National Museum of Australia's collection. The series is written and illustrated by leading Australian children's authors and artists. [National Museum of Australia - Making Tracks]
While looking at the NMA site ("Nice bright colors, K....") I was interested to discover reCollections, their journal. From the current issue, an article by Paul Arthur:
This paper surveys the digital history field — a broad field that is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience. [reCollections - Papers]
In recent presentations, I have been suggesting that libraries will need to adopt more archival skills as they manage digital collections and think about provenance, evidential integrity, and context, and that they will also need to adopt more museum perspectives as they think about how their digital collections work as educational resources, and consider exhibitions and interpretive environments. I have used a capture of the home page of the Library at Oregon State University in this context, which showcases several digital collections. These currently include a resource about Linus Pauling and the peace movement which puts digitized materials in a broader context:
The three sections of Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement combine to provide an unusually rich source of information on Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's remarkable body of peace work. Navigate between the sections by using the links on the site's home page or by using the links at the top of any page within the site. [Introduction - Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement - Special Collections - Oregon State University]
April 29, 2008
•
Categories:
Websites: design and role
I think the Pageflakes grab-bag approach works better for some things than others. Anyway, here are three sites that have come over my horizon recently.
- My colleague Karen Smith-Yoshimura alerted us today to a page of library blogs assembled by British Library staff. I was interested to see the classification employed. There was I thinking that this blog had become much more general in recent times, and I see it classified under 'web and library technology'. There are some interesting videos under the photos/videos tab.
- There is always something useful on the BBC Internet Blog page.
- I worked in Dublin City Public Libraries many years ago and so was pleased when Eddie Byrne got in touch a while ago. Here is the page he has put together showing library resources.
April 28, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, General - distributed environments
I am writing a short piece on mobile communications at the moment and have been interested to see that the whole world is writing about the impact of mobile.
The Economist has a very nice special section with articles on a range of topics (see the display panel on the right of this opening section for a list of articles). There is almost no focus on the technology per se, rather it looks at how our working and social lives, our buildings and our jobs, and our attitudes and expectations are being reconfigured. The emphasis is not on 'mobility' but on permanent connectivity in an environment where computational and communication capacity is increasingly pervasive. What is our world like when the network is not something that is 'out there' but when potentially all that we do is network aware.
There are several sections; here is a note from the piece on space:
The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. [The new oases | Economist.com]
I particularly liked this section; it filled out the context for my suggestion a while ago that Starbucks has become 'on-demand space'.
And I was interested to see this little snippet the other day:
Who is the largest camera maker in the world? Nokia. Who is the largest manufacturer of music devices in the world? Nokia. Who is buying the company that provides the map data behind Mapquest? Nokia. [Our Cells, Ourselves - washingtonpost.com]
Related entries:
April 27, 2008
•
Categories:
Miscellaneous
I tend to have several blog entries lying around the place: often they just fall off the edge when my interests move on. Here is some text from one which I left there just that bit too long:
Library blogs are a mixed lot. I am always on the look-out for interesting combinations of reflection and experience. Bob Molyneux has been an intriguing contributor since he began working with Equinox, appearing in two blogs, open-ils and the Equinox blog. John Wilkin and Alma Swan are always suggestive, but seem to have faltered.
Well, John has gone and done an entry - which blows this one up ;-) He talks about the discrimination of opennesses ('open' is a word which is meaningless imho without qualification) and it has sparked some interesting interaction.
Alma has not done a blog entry. She has however produced yet another report: Key concerns within the scholarly communication process: report to the JISC Scholarly Communication Group, March 2008 [Word document]. I will return to this report, in particular to the section on accessibility (in the sense of being able to find, get, use and share stuff). Reading through the recommendations, I notice a profusion of suggestions for further studies: there are not enough good consultants in the UK to do this much work ;-)
April 27, 2008
•
Categories:
The cultural and scholarly record
From an interview with Billy Bragg, the Bard of Barking, in the current issue of Mojo:
Vinyl, CD, or MP3? Vinyl. In a hundred years time, vinyl will be the only medium that has survived. CDs will fade, like old pictures that have gone a bit orange, and MP3s, well you can just accidentally wipe 'em any time.
I know. Another quote from a music magazine for the middle-aged. I bought this issue for the story about Portishead. We lived in Bristol for many years and enjoyed the occasional trip to the sea at Portishead, the town whose name they took (also the home of a lido). This was during a remarkable period for Bristol music, with Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, and others contributing to the Bristol Sound:
The Bristol sound was the name given to a number of bands from Bristol, England, in the 1990s. These bands spawned the musical genre trip-hop, though many of the bands shunned this name when other British and international bands imitated the style and preferred not to distinguish it from hip-hop. [Bristol underground scene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
Mind you, for us living in Bristol, the early to mid-nineties was the era of the cassette, which is not even mentioned by Bragg.
Related entries:
April 25, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
I have noticed that any self-respecting blog has to have the occasional science fiction reference. So here is an off-topic post for Friday.
A remake of Blake's Seven is being discussed.
LONDON -- Hoping to cash in on the success of classic sci-fi revamps such as the BBC's "Doctor Who" and "Battlestar Galactica," Sky One is planning to remake cult '80s space series "Blake's Seven." ...
... Memorable for its cardboard sets and leather-clad arch villainess Servalan, the show was the creation of sci-fi legend Terry Nation, himself responsible for Doctor Who's arch-nemesis the Daleks.[Sky One to revive 'Blake's Seven']
Here is Wikipedia on the original:
Although many of the tropes of space opera such as spaceships, robots, galactic empires and aliens are present, the series is primarily noted for its strong character interaction, ambiguous morality and its dark, pessimistic tone.[3] [Blake's 7 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
I preferred Blake's 7 to Doctor Who, perhaps because it came along when I was older, or maybe because it lasted for a much shorter time.
Avon was a pretty memorable character. And you could never forget that eye-patch!
April 25, 2008
•
Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Identity management, IPR and e-commerce
 We have been looking at Etsy at home recently: "your place to buy and sell all things handmade". It is just nice to use. I especially like the useful search by color ;-)
They have an alchemy section:
Turn your ideas into reality with Alchemy!
Buyers can post requests for custom handmade items, and then sellers bid on the opportunity to make the goods. Please check out the Alchemy overview help guide and the rules for Alchemy before getting started. Have fun! [Etsy :: Alchemy - Public Listings]
They have a range of interesting looking community sections, including virtual labs (billed as "live workshops and online classes"), but I have not tried them out so don't have a sense of how active they are. They look nice though!
I was interested to see that Etsy had made the WebWare top 100 Web apps for 2008 list.
Just slightly more than half of all the votes cast in the Webware 100 went to the top 10 vote-getters. Six of these top 10 are no surprise at all: Facebook, Firefox, Google, iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube. But the other four may not be as familiar to most Webware readers: - DeviantArt. A strong online arts community.
- Friendster. A social network that was big, became small, and may be making a resurgence.
- Gaia Online. A graphical social networking site for teenagers. As I said, a big winner in last year's Webware 100.
- Maxthon. It's a browser that's huge in China, not so much here in the US.
[And the Webware 100 Winners are... | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone]
Webware top 100 via John Naughton.
April 24, 2008
•
Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Metadata
, Standards
There is an interesting note on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:
When we originally launched Sitemaps, we included support for the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2.0 protocol, an interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. In the meantime, however, we've found that the information we gain from our support of OAI-PMH is disproportional to the amount of resources required to support it. Fewer than 200 sites are using OAI-PMH for Google Sitemaps at the moment.
In order to move forward with even better coverage of your websites, we have decided to support only the standard XML Sitemap format by May 2008. We are in the process of notifying sites using OAI-PMH to alert them of the change. [Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Retiring support for OAI-PMH in Sitemaps]
Via Paul Walk, who remarks:
There are a few ways of looking at this. Perhaps ‘open access’ repositories are less concerned with Google rankings than the typical website owner. Perhaps the penetration of OAI-PMH in the world is still below any level that Google could find particularly interesting - certainly they never went to great lengths to advertise this support while it lasted. Clearly, Google have come to the end of a ‘trial period’ for their support for this protocol in their main indexing service. [paul walk’s weblog » Blog Archive » Google gives up on supporting OAI-PMH for Sitemaps]
April 23, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Social networking
Lovereading is a site for readers ...
Lovereading was founded for book lovers by book lovers in 2005.
These days, it is harder than ever to find the book you want to read next - particularly because of the sheer volume and choice of books you can find on the net. So at Lovereading, we only feature books we have read and believe are great reads in their category.
We have developed some unique online tools to help you choose your next read, including free 10-15 page Opening Extracts of every one of our Featured Books. And our readers particularly appreciate the regular magazines we send them recommending books they like might love to read in their categories of choice these are completely free and come with no commitment to buy.
Since we started Lovereading, we have added more and more books, ( we now have over 5,000 Opening Extracts) more and more unique features (you will love Author Like for Like) and more and more readers all of whom we would like to thank for their ongoing help and support. [lovereading - make the most of lovereading]
It is interesting to see the focus on the human touch here when so much is made of ranking, relating and recommending based on the aggregate trace of the crowd.
I have just returned from a trip. The emphasis of Lovereading seems to be on fiction, so I thought I would check for the three novels that accompanied me on the trip:
- I took C.J.Box's Savage Run, based on a recommendation from somebody who had seen my previous note about Wyoming mysteries. OK, but I might not read another one, I thought.
- I bought Borderlands in Dublin airport, curious to read a contemporary crime novel set on both sides of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. I didn't like the story but might read another one given the setting.
- I bought Open doors and three novellas by Leonardo Sciascia in the very fine London Review Bookshop in, er, London. I like the author and hadn't seen this particular collection before.
So, armed with this test collection I approached lovereading.co.uk.
Savage Run was not listed, although there were two other books by Box. There were no 'like for like' recommendations for C J Box.
Borderlands was listed, and in a 'like for like' search on Brian McGilloway, Declan Hughes was returned. I have seen Declan Huges in bookshops but have not read anything by him, so I do not know how good the recommendation is. There is also a useful link to a Google search for reviews.
There were several books by Sciascia but not this one. There was no 'like for like' recommendation for Sciascia.
I wonder will they open the site up to reader input at some stage? And let the crowds in?
April 23, 2008
•
Categories:
General - distributed environments
Microsoft has announced its Live Mesh initiative: you must have heard the rumble? Another network word to join grid, graph, and web.
We will have to see how it rolls out, but it is a reminder of how much is at play as Google, Microsoft and a few others race to build out our network world for work, learning and living.
Here is a concise statement from the Live Mesh blog:
The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations). [Live Mesh : Live Mesh as a Platform]
The aim seems to be to allow you to synchronize and share: to synchronize your data across your different device and application environments and to share them within your various affiliation groups. Key components are the integration of local and cloud, and the use of feeds as connective tissue.
Jon Udell extends:
There’s another pattern for Live Mesh applications, one that’s less familiar. In this pattern, a website uses Live Mesh as a pipeline to communicate with Live Mesh users. If you’re running a travel site, or a bank, you can use that pipeline to transmit structured data to your users — for example, itineraries or transaction reports. It’s easy to create those XML feeds, you can leverage the Live Mesh infrastructure to deliver them securely and reliably at scale, they synchronize across all devices in each user’s Live Mesh, and they’re accessible to local applications using same RESTful feed APIs that were used to create them. [Jon Udell]
Check out the memo from Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, describing Microsoft's view of the current environment and Live Mesh responds to this, and also the interview between Ray Ozzie and Jon Udell. Here is Ozzie on content:
Content has changed at both the “head” and the “tail”. The line between editorialized portals and blogs has blurred, and all are consumed through feeds. Beyond news, movies and music and television have all expanded to embrace the web. And the interrelation of content and community has created a world of “social media”, where both head and tail content is intrinsically social by virtue of community linking, tagging, and ranking. Relationships and collective behavioral intelligence have changed how we stay informed, find and share media, and interact with one another. [Full Text of Ray Ozzie Mesh Memo - ReadWriteWeb]
Phil Wainewright also has a positive assessment based on this early information:
Notice how the application no longer resides on a specific machine — quite a departure from Microsoft’s current licensing regime — but instead is defined in relation to the individual’s mesh. No wonder this isn’t even in beta yet. Imagine how much work has to be done before this can be delivered commercially. [Meshing the desktop into the cloud | Software as Services | ZDNet.com]
April 21, 2008
•
Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Miscellaneous
From Fred Stutzman, who is looking for network-free moments in which to 'code, write or create':
In an attempt to resist the encroachment of network into the spaces of productivity,  I've created Freedom. Freedom is a Mac application that disables your computer's networking capabilities for a selected time interval. Some of you may turn off your network when you need to be productive; I've done that, but always found myself popping the network on at my next break (and losing 20 minutes to YouTube/Wikipedia/etc). Freedom takes this approach a step further, locking you out of your network for your selected time interval; Freedom enforces freedom. [Unit Structures: Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom]
April 21, 2008
•
Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I spoke at the JISC conference in Birmingham last week. It was at a session related to the JISC's Libraries of the Future initiative. A special supplement on academic libraries is appearing in the Guardian Newspaper to accompany the initiative. A range of topics is covered; the treatment is high level and journalistic, as you would expect. This is a nice achievement by JISC, as it puts a range of positive stories about libraries in front of the University community (where, in a note to non-UK readers, the Guardian has high penetration). Via eFoundations:
Material from the supplement, covering information literacy, physical learning spaces, Library 2.0, business models, digitisation, users and librarians is already available on the Guardian Web site. [eFoundations: Libraries of the future]
jiscconference08
April 20, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
A late Friday afternoon note .....
I was watching an old episode of 8 simple rules this morning. Rory had to do a book report on To Kill a Mocking Bird. His father got the Gregory Peck movie, but his mother suggested he actually read the book, or read the book and watch the movie. I was amused to hear Rory say something along the lines of ...
Forget it. I am not going to read a book and watch a black and white movie too.
Luckily, he later came across notes on the book which mean that he could give up reading it ;-)
I was reminded of my own note about 'black and white' movies a while ago ....
I was surprised to discover a while ago that the children had never actually seen a western! We agreed we would look out for one on TV and watch it. The first we saw was in black and white. No way would they watch a movie in black and white ;-) It was soooo old. We never did manage to watch a full one ... [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Westerns]
April 20, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, General - systems and technologies
Having moved from London to the Mid-west we are very aware of the impact of location on life-style, the switch from public transport to the car being a major example. In this context, I was interested to read this paragraph by Castells et al in Mobile communication and society: a global perspective which I am reading quickly to help me address a writing obligation in which I am currently delinquent ;-)
Another critical difference between national systems is related to the predominant transportation method: in the States, for example, where most people drive their own cars, certain types of mobile communication activities (such as SMS) are less viable. In contrast, where public transport is the main means of movement (as in parts of Asia and Europe) people have a greater ability to use wireless technologies on-the-go and consequently develop expertise faster. [Mobile communication and society: a global perspective, p.37]
I sometimes wonder about reading in this regard, but have not done the work to see if there has been any research about the correlation between 'predominant transportation method' and reading levels. For example, I would read a newspaper on my way to work when I traveled by train or bus; I spend less time reading newspapers now that I drive.
April 18, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - distributed environments
, OCLC
I recently came across xignite, a financial web services company. Here is their blurb ....
Financial events around the world impact not only finance professionals but every business. This is why successful businesses integrate key financial information into the processes and applications their employees or clients use every day. Until now, this integration has been a challenge. Xignite answers that challenge by letting you access the latest financial and industry data on-demand, and easily integrate it straight into your company's mission-critical applications using through web services. With Xignite, you can make your business financial-aware in minutes. [Global Financial Data, News & Information Web Services - Xignite]
I liked the expression 'making your business financial-aware' through web services.
Worldcat.org is a bibliographic 'destination' and is used heavily in that way. For example, it is an important scholarly tool given its topical reach and historic depth. I recently came across an interesting niche use, when I was told by a used book seller that he uses it to discover how widely distributed an item is, or to identify libraries who might be interested in buying an item.
However, very importantly, it is also a switch into the library network. It connects discovery to actual locations, and depending on your institutional affiliation it offers you various services against those locations. In this way, Worldcat.org discloses library collections and services on the web.
In recent years, we have seen many bibliographic destinations emerge. They are variously positioned in terms of value creation. Amazon, AbeBooks, Goodreads, Google Book Search, LibraryThing, Live Search Books, OpenLibrary, the Library of Congress catalog, many national and regional library union catalogs (for example Libraries Australia, COPAC, OhioLink, Bibsys, ....), and so on. This variety seem healthy to me, and Worldcat sits alongside this range as one more destination with its own characteristics and uses. An increasingly valuable destination, we trust!
However, we also hope that Worldcat is also used by the other sites - and it is - as a switch. It is a way for other sites to add value by providing access to library resources. And it creates value for libraries by making them present in other environments where people look for, work with, share information about, books and other resources. It allows libraries to disclose collections and services in other environments.
As we move forward with the Worldcat API, this allows Worldcat functionality to be made available to other applications. So, adapting the xignite phrasing above, the Worldcat API will make applications 'bibliographic-aware'; however, thinking of the switch functionality, it will also help make applications 'library-network aware'. It will allow applications to incorporate access to a network of library assets, and to focus in on particular ones of interest. We can do this because of the collective investment by the library community and OCLC in Worldcat and registry data.
I was prompted to do this post by another interesting post from Mark Dahl where he talks about (my words) how OCLC can make the library network available at the network level, to other applications as well as to user interfaces.
OCLC has this valuable data, and great potential to develop things with it, as well as a general current towards network-level computing moving in its favor. When an libraries compare OCLC's products with that of a traditional ILS vendor, they need to see that the OCLC product is more than technology. Rather, it is an extension of a community, a network. [synthesize-specialize-mobilize: OCLC's competitive advantage]
April 18, 2008
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Categories:
Marketing
, ebooks and other e-resources
I bought [i] a New York Times yesterday in our local Borders and, over coffee, was interested to open up a large two page spread advertising the newly named Thomson Reuters, A new name and a new logo.
I was interested to read the following in the business pages (under an 'advertising' label).
Thomson’s desire to raise its public profile as it completes the $16.6 billion transaction is partly a reflection of an era when information has never been so accessible and the struggle to maintain profitability at the companies that provide it, particularly among incumbents, has never been more difficult. “In the simplest terms, we see this as the opportunity to be the new power brand in the global information industry,” said Gustav Carlson, Thomson Reuters’ chief marketing officer. “We don’t simply accumulate data. Thomson’s strategic evolution has been from print to digital and now into a supplier of intelligent information.” Thomson’s newspaper holdings once included The Times of London, The Globe and Mail in Toronto and an array of less distinguished smaller newspapers. But as it abandoned paper for digital publishing, Thomson became the antithesis of companies like Google that treat information as a no-cost commodity for selling advertising. Instead, Thomson has focused on building vast databases of material that is dull to most people but of great value to professionals, and the company charges them accordingly. More recently, that data has been integrated into systems that sift through it, organize it and, in some cases, make suggestions to users about actions to take. A litigation lawyer researching a case involving asbestosis through the company’s Westlaw service, for example, will be presented with information from Thomson Scientific about the disease along with legal decisions related to it.[A Name to Herald Its Merger: Thomson Reuters - New York Times]
I was struck by the parallel with the Elsevier note I did a couple of weeks ago, on how information wants to be both free and expensive.
What we see here is a reallocation from the 'information wants to be free' arena, where business magazines (including Library Journal, part of the group being divested) are increasingly supported by advertising revenue and are in competition with a network environment rich in alternative sources, to the 'information wants to be expensive' arena where the value resides in providing business-critical information tightly integrated into workflow solutions. [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Free and not free]
Providers are taking steps to increase the value of data - through workflow integration, timeliness, data mining, and so on - to differentiate their offer from generally available information. In this case, the article talks about information never having 'been so accessible', and places the focus on added value professionally relevant information. The data is mined to create new relationships.
Thomson-Reuters seem to want to capture the idea of this added value in the expression "intelligent information". I am not sure if that works for me .....
Related entry:
[1] Too much paper there to justify a subscription ;-)
April 16, 2008
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Categories:
Miscellaneous
I am en route from the UK to the US, and was interested to read an article by Gordon Brown, Enlarging the Anglosphere, in today's WSJ Opinion pages.
He is talking about how to renew and extend relationships between the US and the UK and proposes a list of areas for attention.
I was struck by the fact that Brown placed greater links between universities at the top of his list,
Already some universities are planning to require all of their students to spend some time abroad as part of their degree. The principal of King's College in London and the |
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