Skinkers alerts deliver key corporate information

Skinkers is making a name for itself as a desktop news alert system. It has been signed up by a number of media companies, including the Financial Times and the BBC.

The technology is straightforward enough. At one end, a web-connected server and, at the other, a thin Windows or Blackberry client. A Windows Mobile version is on its way.

Mac and Symbian users can avert their gaze. True multi-platform capability has been sacrificed in favour of a powerful and elegant client.

The point of telling you this is that the same technology can be used inside companies to maximise the chances of truly important material being viewed. Skinkers offers a push channel which delivers only what people want to see/hear about.

The alerts appear in a Flash-powered ticker or a small popup box. You can choose where to go for further information - to a Skinkers news browser or to the original source.

It sounds intrusive but, if the information being delivered is highly relevant to the person receiving it, they shouldn't mind. They can change their category selections and even add in their own favourite RSS feeds. They can switch the alerts off or hide them, which somewhat defeats the object. But without this choice, resentment could easily build.

Skinkers alerts mean that your users don't have to delve for important company notices in their email. And it means they don't have to keep looking at the corporate portal, just in case there's something there. It keeps people in touch with what's important to them. It requires no effort on their part. The tip-offs just appear and they can choose whether or not to act.

Elsevier MDL releases drug safety database

Pharmapendium is a new drug safety and pharmacology database released by MDL, the science and medical information subsidiary acquired by Elsevier in 1997.

The site allows you to browse drugs according to their generic categories - antiparkinsons agents, antiperspirants, antipsychotics are among the As - and then to investigate the class by looking at data about individual proprietary drugs, their targets, adverse effects/toxicity, and indications.

The database is very US-focused, featuring a FDA Approvals package for each drug, but this will still be of interest to global users.

Pharmapendium also allows you to browse animal species on which drug treatments have been tested to get a complete picture of the research undertaken or being completed.

I've taken a quick peek at it, and like what I see, but hope to be able to review it in depth for our Resources section in the coming months.

Macmillan BookStore looking strong unlike publishers

Publishing giant Macmillan is taking on Google BookSearch with its Book Store online service. IWR had a sneak preview and has learned that the publishing industry still won't collaborate.

MPS Technologies, the tech division of Macmillan would love to develop a single destination site for the publishing industry, but they tell us that attempts to get the publishing industry to work together have not been met with enthusiasm. BookStore, like Google Book Search allows users to conduct keyword searches of digitised book content. Users can then view two pages and then purchase the title.

From what IWR saw today, MPS has created a similar interface to Google Book Seach, but sites like this are about the book pages, so there won't massive differentiation in them.

Amazon is without doubt the main destination site for books online and Google BookSearch could be a challenger. Neither of these sites allow publishers any control. The MPS offering does at least offer the publishers the chance to control the rights of books online, prices and special offers.

BookStore is unproven and of course may not be the answer to the might of Google and Amazon at all, but it is sad to hear that the industry cannot collaborate and will, once again lose out on a chance to take the bull by the horns.

Science Direct interface overhaul set for August

Elsevier is on course to make some dramatic improvements to Science Direct, as our sneak preview of the new interface below demonstrates. It could well be, quite simply, a great leap forward.

In advance of the official announcement this week, I had the opportunity to chat with Science Direct director Joep Verheggen, who outlined the key objectives of the redesign.

These are: a task-oriented homepage (as opposed to a homepage packed with marketing collateral), a simpler navigational path for users (fewer clicks to get at information) and improved Quick Search options. They all suggest that Elsevier is getting its priorities well and truly right on usability.

As this screengrab of the new interface shows (left) search, browsing and personalisation features are now all central to the user experience when you log-in. As Verheggen says, recent actions (articles accessed, saved searches, issues browsed) are important to users, who want to start where they left off.

So having these, quick links and alerts at the centre of the homepage makes sense. Elsevier also wants to encourage users to browse its library of content, hence the menu on the left.

Currently, the site is very much structured around Elsevier's different publishing units - books, journals, serials, etc (see screengrab left). Now the emphasis is on allowing users to operate within a subject area or multiple areas.

Quick search options have also been improved, and QS will now be available on all pages beneath the main green menu bar. It allows you to search on specific record fields - author, title, volume, etc - as well as words in titles, abstracts and full text. It also lets you specify timescales more easily.

Verheggen tells me that this is just the first of a rolling programme of changes - Elsevier expects to upgrade its main search engine for Science Direct in the new year.

Verheggen also says he is entirely confident Science Direct will hit the deadline to switch over in the middle of August - I imagine the date has been fixed when user levels are their lowest while everyone takes their summer holidays. The prototype goes live in a couple of weeks, and I'm looking forward to getting access to it for review purposes.

Watch this space.

Google Zeitgeist renews emphasis on core activities

Google's big Zeitgeist executive shindig at the high-class Grove hotel in Hertfordshire yesterday certainly caught the imagination of our broadsheets – not least because it was a platform for Conservative leader David Cameron to polish off his credentials as a new age believer in "flexible working policies" and the need for a better work-life balance. The speech was so tumescent in meaning that The Guardian published it in full.

To IWR Blog readers outside the UK, Cameron is positioning himself as the next Tony Blair, with a carefully crafted series of speeches designed to appeal to women voters. As someone desperate to capture the Zeitgeist, his speech was apposite, and it had extra resonance when you remember that Google encourages its workers to spend a fifth of their working week playing around and developing new ideas. A company's workforce as a cauldron of creative energy.

The UK Zeitgeist event was also an opportunity for Google chiefs to hob-nob with European business leaders and make pronouncements on the state of internet business in Europe.

The previous day, Google's Europe vp, Nikesh Arora (left), lambasted Europe's tardiness in online development. The Daily Telegraph reported him as saying: "The internet will change the shape of commerce, advertising, newspapers, entertainment [and] of most industries it touches. Europe has not embraced the internet as a commerce platform as much as the US."

The paper also reported some big names were expected at the Grove – Orange ceo Sanjiv Ahuja, Labour peer and media mogul Waheed Alli, and BT Retail ceo Ian Livingston among them - though noticeably absent from that list were more Google-sceptic leaders like Elsevier's ceo Crispin Davis or Pearson's ceo Marjorie Scardino.

They might have had a few choice words to address to co-founder Larry Page (who made a surprise appearance) or ceo Eric Schmidt. But no such fireworks. Instead, Page had an opportunity to restate Google's core mission, and probably reassure shareholders.

As The Independent noted, Page's ambitions are not diminished by riches. He's quoted as saying: "People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 per cent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence."

Dan Sabbagh at The Times chose to focus on perceived differences between the two men. Schmidt is quoted as saying: “Innovation is best delivered by small teams, but there is a penalty for that. We are changing our strategy to ensure that products are not developed in isolation.”

That seems to me to be a reinforcement of Page's views. Google is clearly going to fight hard to remain the dominant player in the search market, and not be overthrown by Microsoft's manoeuvrings or cash mountains. Focus on its core activities will be needed to avoid the fates of Microsoft's past scalps. Who remembers Ashton-Tate, Lotus 1-2-3, and Netscape?

Ebsco ISCTRC takes global perspective on security

I've been reviewing the new interface on Ebsco's database, International Security & Counter-Terrorism Reference Center, for the next issue of IWR.

It's an impressive resource, bringing together relevant materials from a wide range of global sources - academic journals, government documents, mags, newspapers and reference books. Alongside these, there's country reports from Datamonitor and the EIU, as well as proprietary Ebsco-generated profiles and background reports.

One of my key concerns in advance of looking at this full-text database, and its cleaner interface and more powerful search, was that much of the marketing material has been so US-centric.

When you log in to the database, the homepage is very much geared to its core US market. The spotlight  is on the 9-11 Commission report (even though it was released in 2004), but probably understandable as this is the central concern of all US security and counter-terrorism policy these days.

And at first glance, the Common Topics (which are really advanced search strings that bring up a lot of wide-ranging material on a specific topic) appear to be from a US perspective (Homeland Security sticks out - no other English-speaking country that I know of uses the phrase). But on further investigation, many of the Common Topics bring up material with global reach.

And once you start searching for specific global security concerns, the database proves its worth. A search on "London bombings" returned 1050 links; though a more specific search on "London July bombings" brought up just one article (ironically, from The Australian newspaper).

A search on "Basra" returned 1554 results, including Iranian News Agency reports and abstracts on video clips from Arabic TV. A search on "chemical AND weapons AND UK" returned 62 results, though little of recent relevance. Tony Blair's report on WMDs in Iraq may not have been a great deal richer as a result of access to this database, but for many researchers on the subject it will bring many useful perspectives.

Cilip kicks off the "Noms for Gongs" season

The awards season is only six months away, but calls for nominations are already going out to find out who in the industry is doing work that deserves special merit.

Cilip has kicked off the nominations process for two awards it presents during the Online Information show at Olympia this November.

The Tony Kent Strix Award, awarded by Cilip sub-group UKeiG, is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval. The Jason Farradane Award is made to an individual or a group of people in recognition of outstanding work in the field of information science.

The big event of the year is the International Information Industry Awards, a glamorous awards evening and industry party held at the end of the year in London. I've been lucky enough to attend for the last four years, as a co-host and presenter, and the evening is a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on individuals and teams who are blazing new trails for the information profession.

Prizes are awarded for the best information/knowledge teams in an Academic Environment, Business Environment, Public Sector Environment and Scientific Environment. Project awards include Innovation in Knowledge Management, Innovation in Content Management, Best Intranet/Extranet Project and Best Implementation of a Business Blog. Major individual awards include the coveted Information Professional of the Year and the Lifetime Achievement award. And there's a whole bundle of awards for products and service as well.

So if you know an individual or group out there who's beavering away on an innovative information indsutry project, don't keep it to yourself. They'll never be recognised unless someone nominates them for an award. It costs nothing to make a nomination, just a few sentences about who they are and what they're doing.

Seven Deadly Sins - How to choose an investment

While in Silicon Valley last week, I dropped in on one Jeff Clavier, a boutique venture capitalist who helps small companies get off the ground. We talked about what VCs look for in a prospective investment. He mentioned that a good investment should be a company that pandered to one of the seven deadly sins. (Being a Frenchman, whose name translates to 'keyboard', he probably didn't say 'pandered'.)

But then we were stuck, because neither of us could remember more than a few of the seven sins. The point was well made though, because products (or, in your case, services) which address a deadly sin are more likely to succeed than those which address the seven heavenly virtues.

The seven deadly sins are greed, envy, sloth, pride, wrath, gluttony and lust.

The seven heavenly virtues are faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence.

In today's obsession with corporate greasy-pole climbing and 'Return on Investment', I wonder how many information professionals stop to consider which of the sins or virtues their products and services are designed to achieve?

I'd like to think we're all on the side of virtue, but I suspect that Clavier's right. We're more likely to be helping users address their baser urges.
 

Knowledge Karma - Loomia and Yahoo! learn from users

I've just spent a week trawling round Silicon Valley, talking to a mix of developers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, industry observers and big cheeses from well established companies. The overall impression I was left with was that the digital world is waking up to the fact that there's more to life than pure algorithms. The human element is playing an increasingly important part.

Loomia is a start up which helps website owners drive traffic to the information of most relevance to the visitor. It works by studying and recording aspects of the user's behaviour. This information is stored anonymously but is provided to the website owner on receipt of a code. The user experience can then be fine tuned.

User behaviour ranges from which links are followed (those near the top of a list, for example, will be less meaningful than those lower down the list), to how long the user dwells  on the destination page, to what they do when they get there: do they add their own rating (of a restaurant, for example) or do they buy something?

Yahoo! Answers, which I had cause to use while away, relies on humans submitting answers to questions in return for points based on their popularity. (My question, if you're interested, was "why does the dial-up window keep appearing when I'm on broadband?" Maybe it was jetlag, but I'd forgotten where the setting was. The answer was profoundly obvious, nevertheless I was deeply grateful to the responder. It took eight minutes from activating my account, to getting five answers. The third did the trick.)

A lot of people are only too happy to share their knowledge, with little thought of return. They don't really do it for points at Yahoo! although they're probably pleased to get a high ranking and prominence.

Blogging, of course, is another way of sharing knowledge with others. The more information and relevant links that are given, the more valued the blog. This is early days for IWR, but I'm hoping we'll all find our 'blog voices' and make this a valuable and interesting stopping point for you on your internet travels.

Conference committee's chocolate connection

Planning is already well advanced for this year's Online Information conference, which runs alongside the Online Information show at Olympia in London. The call for speakers deadline hits this Friday 12 May, but if you have a hot topic to propose, I reckon conference organiser Lorna Candy might be persuaded to extend that deadline just a tad.

The organising committee, which met again yesterday, is led by conference chairman Martin White, whose wide-ranging knowledge of the industry never ceases to astound me. This year's themes are already starting to shape up, among them the impact of information on 21st century organisations, collaboration and communities, library developments (like how to put together a collection policy in a digital age), and the inevitable Web 2.0.

There's also a lot of emphasis on information discovery, enterprise search and knowledge management - all areas that will be of interest to show goers at the new "parallel" show alongside OI, Information Management Solutions (IMS 2006).

IMS 2006 brings together the various perpiheral shows from previous years (Content Management Europe, EDRM Europe) under one umbrella. Its visitor profile ranges across information managers, information infrastructure managers, IT managers and decision making units like finance, where information compliance issues are increasingly of concern.

Back at the conference committee, it was great to meet up again with Gwenda Sippings (who tells me she's just "shaken" herself free from her top job at HM Customs & Revenue, and is having some quality downtime before moving on to new pastures - somebody snap her up quick!) and Dr Hazel Hall, who reports she's getting a lot of value out of her secondment at TFPL.

Best chocolate of the day award, definitely went to Christiane Wolff - the Lindt Lemongrass and Vanilla slab, freshly flown in from Frankfurt, was a treat. What more could an editor ask for?