Network Neutrality - defeated for now

If you've not been following the 'network neutrality' (NN) debate, the next issue of IWR explains it in detail. As often happens with writing features, the story evolves even as it's being written.

Network neutrality is an American issue which is likely to impact the rest of the world. It's about trying to prevent the internet splitting into two tiers: a fast lane for people with deep pockets and a slow
lane for everybody else. The operators - cable companies and telcos - want information providers such as Google and YouTube to pay extra for the privilege of snappy delivery.

At the time the IWR article was written, the House of Representatives had already rejected an NN addendum to its larger telecommunications bill. On Wednesday, a Senate committee also rejected a similar amendment to its own bill. Both bills have been otherwise approved. Among other things, they will allow telcos to compete with cable companies for delivery of, for example, television.

This means that the telcos will need to fatten up their pipes to the consumer and they resent, as do the cable companies, giving internet companies what they see as a free ride down their wires/cables. They want to inspect content and charge accordingly. Supporters of NN see the internet more as the road system, allowing anyone on in any vehicle and carrying any cargo.

This is not the end of the story. When the bill reaches the floor of the Senate, it can be blocked or amendments can still be put forward.

Rain stops play and starts players blogging

The Wimbledon tennis championships have swung into action, and as is traditional, so has the rain. So what is a tennis player to do when they can't play in the most prestigious tournament in the world? Get blogging of course. 

Today's The Times newspaper reports that the new young generation of tennis stars, including Scot Andy Murray are all adopting the power of blogging to explain their performance at SW19 and to inform readers of everything from the quality of restaurants they are visiting, what's on their MP3 players and even details of dates!

Patricio Apey, Murray's manager, told The Times as rain stopped play on the first day that he was "going back to write his blog". Its not just the players who see the power of blogging, men's tennis governing body the ATP has recruited players to blog for it.

In an age of celebrity worship blogs from the stars themselves certainly adds a level of accessibility to the sport, which has been dogged by sexism stories regarding different pay rates, but as The Times' reporter states, sports stars are brands today and blogging enables the players to control the message around their brand as they can deny news stories and communicate directly with those most closely associated with their brand.

The value of podcasts inside organisations

Podcast wizard Alex Bellinger cheerfully admits that a lot of so-called podcasts are just a new way of distributing radio. He cites the Radio 4 Today programme, which had 475,000 downloads in May alone, and the podcast poster-child Ricky Gervais as examples. While great for podcast publicity, they somewhat pollute the concept.

Bellinger actually doubts that podcasting belongs in the social software category. Speaking at a recent Engagement Alliance conference, he pointed out that most podcast consumption is passive. Once, people used to sit round a radio and share the experience. Now it's positively antisocial, mostly done with earbuds.

But then he softens and says, "but many good podcasts involve their listeners", citing For Immediate Release as an example. He points out that podcasts have the potential to appeal to specialists, such as the academic librarians that his Audacious creative communications agency is working with.

I suggested that, inside organisations, podcasts could be listened to in groups and form the basis for discussion. Bellinger agreed, adding, "the beauty of podcasting is that it can capture discussion and debate, not just between people locally, but in vastly different locations, inside or outside the organisation."

To get staff involved, he suggests having a podcasting booth in the coffee lounge or dishing out cheap minidisc recorders.  He often records his own podcasts straight from his Skype phone calls.

"The challenge," he says, "is to push people to consider how podcasting can change the way they communicate, rather than just trying to replicate existing channels and control mechanisms."

The unstated implication of all this in quality terms is that 'good enough' is good enough, providing the content is of value to the listener.

The Economist Group - looking for acquisitions?

It's been a bumpy few years for The Economist Group as the internet impacted its traditional publishing operations, but things seem to be righting themselves now, as the results for the year to 31 March 2006 suggest.

The mood of optimism comes as turnover hit £218m in 2006 - an increase of 11% (£21m) over 2005, but still below the turnover figures enjoyed during earlier years in the decade. For the last four years turnover has been level-pegging in the £190-£200m range, so if this upturn can be sustained, changes within the group over recent years may start reaping benefits.

Profits were down on last year - £22m compared to £27m - but the previous figure was boosted by a one-off tax benefit. The overall trend in the last five years, as chairman Robert Wilson pointed out, is profits increasing, costs being cut back and shareholders enjoying higher dividends.

It's all so upbeat that there's even talk of more acquisitions along the lines of the January takeover of EuroFinance Conferences. Chief executive Helen Alexander said: "I would like to continue with further acquisitions of high-quality businesses that improve our market position". Adds Wilson: "We now intend to manage with a more or less cash-neutral policy, which may result in some debt if material acquisition opportunities arise."

The optimism comes after an extended period of restructuring and rationalisation, and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) bore its fair share of the pain involved. The merger of the country/industry intelligence business with the conference business may have had theoretical "synergies" from a management perspective - two sales teams effectively selling to the same customer base was clearly a wasteful duplication - but on the ground it was tough for all involved.

In the UK, a move of 300 staff from expensive offices in Regent Street to premises in Red Lion Square, Holborn was conducted last year, according to ceo Alexander "with the seamless professionalism I expect, but continue to be grateful for". Does anyone smell the whiff of staff unhappiness in that statement?

What I find truly significant is the ongoing strength of circulation growth at The Economist, which has doubled over the last 12 years and now stands at 1,096,154 (ABC, Jul-Dec 2005). A serious tiff with retailers WH Smith over stocking policies this year, where the title has been withdrawn from many of its stores, may dent those figures next year, but the title seems to have weathered the storm engulfing the wider publishing industry.

Why? Well, maybe the internet is having an unexpected benefit for business magazines. A statement from the Economist Group says the circulation growth demonstrates "its increasing relevance, despite, or even perhaps because of, the vast information resources available on the internet". I read this as saying there's simply so much noise on the net that older business readers are returning to traditional brands and older certainties. Younger readers may be continuing to enjoy the advantages the chaos of the web brings.

Staff turnover has been a major factor at the group too - there is a new publisher and editor at The Economist, and a new group Finance Director. The FT's owner, Pearson, continues to have a 50% non-controlling stake in the group. So with management strong, and profitability on the up, it should be a happy investor.

Engineering search

Engineering is the popular battle ground for search and online content producers at present with new services from Heriot-Watt University and Emerald. TechXtra from Heriot-Watt is without doubt an excellent site. With a special search for teaching resources, jobs, industry news and thesis all areas of engineering, academia and business are covered, making this the ideal niche search engine or portal for the sector. It just goes to show that information professionals do have a wide understanding of different user groups.

Thomson buys AFX News but plays down significance

Thomson Financial went out of its way last week to stop any over-zealous journalist or commentator from jumping to the wrong conclusions about its takeover of AFX News, the London-based European financial news service run by Agence France-Presse.

AFX News provides equity-focused business information, financial and economic news to the investment and fund management community. It will complement existing Thomson news properties - Thomson Merger News, Thomson Investment Management News and International Financing Review.

In what some might suggest as an effort to downplay the news, a Thomson spokesman cautioned that the AFX takeover "does not mean that The Thomson Corporation intends to build a general news business – and is not a huge investment in news by Thomson Financial".

Furthermore, he added, "Thomson Financial's approach to news is different from other real-time news wires. We are not trying to replicate a broad, general financial news offering." So no need to worry at Bloomberg or Reuters?

Thomson expects AFX News to be the basis of a European equivalent of Thomson Financial News, the online news service launched in the US in February 2005, which brings together Thomson Financial content with the Dow Jones' MarketWatch service. It already claims to be delivered to over "10,000 desktops".

When rival Reuters covered the story, however, the competition between the services was transparent. The writer nicely conflated two separate items: "Both Thomson and AFX compete with Reuters Group Plc. The news of the acquisition comes just days after Ken Thomson, the company's former chairman and its controlling shareholder, died at age 82. Thomson, also Canada's wealthiest man, passed away Monday morning after suffering an apparent heart attack."

Juicily, Reuters put a figure ($20m) on what the acquisition may have cost Thomson, which hadn't revealed the terms of the deal.

Bloomberg stuck succinctly to bare facts: "Thomson Corp. (TOC CN): The owner of the First Call financial data service agreed to buy AFX News from Agence France-Presse to add a European news service. The terms weren't disclosed. Thomson fell 40 cents, or 0.9 percent, to C$44.90."

We think the takeover will have far wider ramifications than that little footnote of a story suggests.

Bureau van Dijk announces changes of ownership

Generally when I get an email from a Bureau van Dijk (BvD) staffer with the subject line "Ownership", I expect to be party to juicy morsels about the company finally selling out and getting a long overdue change of ownership.

It is, after all, coming up to two years since venture capital firm Candover took a 60% stake in the Belgian-based company information provider in October 2004. That was sparked by 70-year-old founder and chairman Bernard van Ommeslaghe seeking a partial exit strategy.

So what exactly has happened at BvD - and for US readers who are confused, no we're not talking boxer briefs, either.

BvD has been engaged in some enhancements to company ownership information, rolling out a new data-set containing detailed information on companies' shareholders and subsidiaries, and the links between them. In other words, more data for compliance officers and financial directors who want to keep ahead of the game.

What makes this unusual is that many of these enhancements revolve around a user's ability to determine their own definition of a company's ultimate owner (UO).

You could choose to define a "controlling ownership" as a minimum of 25% of share ownership, or you could choose the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) definition of 50% ownership. (If that interests you, have a read of PriceWaterCooper's summary of IFRS definitions of "control, joint control and significant influence").

I was also taken by an outbreak of TLAs (three-letter acronyms) in BvD's report - it now distinguishes a DUO from a GUO. It has introduced the DUO (Domestic Ultimate Owner) category to distinguish it from a GUO (Global Ultimate Owner), which is a useful addition in an age where globalisation has led to complex cross-border investments and associations.

Marketing manager, Louise Green, said: "This data-set is specific to BvD, and crucial for many types of research and business development projects, including Know Your Customer, due diligence and procurement."

It certainly suggests a refinement of usability at BvD that reflects changing market requirements.

Wiley's financial strength shows industry health

At times the online information and publishing industry sounds beset with woe as it faces an ever increasing number of challenges. But the latest financial results from scientific heavyweight John Wiley & Sons refute this.

Wiley has broken the $1bn ceiling for revenue in the last financial year; this is an increase of eight per cent over the previous year. Wiley reports that all of its businesses added to this figure. $1bn attracts headlines, and will no doubt add fuel to the open access fire. William Pesce, president and CEO of Wiley puts the figure down to highly regarded brands, "must have content", and the ability to adept to customer's needs. The fact that users around the world have purchased this "must have content" shows there is still a strong demand for high quality information that has been through the respected channels of peer-review and publishing. When all around predict demise for the industry in the face of Wikipedia and other free resources, the bare facts of this financial statement show that a very sizeable number of important people in science, technology and business are prepared to pay for content.

Wiley Interscience, the company's online platform saw a 30% increase in visits in the last quarter and STM revenues rose by eight per cent.

What ever your opinion of how the costs of producing scientific information are, at the very least I believe the industry should take solace from these figure show a healthy demand for quality information.

Microsoft's GEAR marks the demise of training

At the 2006 Moving Learning conference Bob Mosher, Director of Strategy and Evangelism in Microsoft Learning, introduced the world to GEAR. Nope, it's not a product, more a strategy designed to transmogrify training into learning and to move it from the classroom to the workplace.

As an information professional, it could be the start of something big for you. An opportunity to extend and add more value to your information delivery activities.

GEAR, by the way, stands for Gather (people, probably virtually), Expand (their knowledge), Apply (it in the workplace) and Receive (feedback). It's a cyclic process which underpins a move from instructor-centric training to self-aided learning.

The Gather part is to explain the new learning processes. And the Expand part gives learners information on tap in the form of FAQs, search engines, eLearning and so on.

Every conference speaker argued for a move away from conventional training and towards various kinds of 'just in time' learning. One of them urged the use of mobile phones, Crackberries and iPods as natural delivery devices.

Charles Jennings, global head of learning at Reuters showed some information retention statistics from Kim Cameron, a University of Michigan professor:

Lecture	5%
Reading	10%
Audio-Visual	20%
Demonstration	30%
Discussion	50%
Doing it	75%
Teaching it	90%

If you compound this information with the fact that 70% to 80% of on-the-job information is drawn from the work environment, it makes conventional training look very poor value indeed.

SLA Conference in Baltimore a blogging success

The Special Librarians Association annual conference, this year in Baltimore - the city made famous by the song "Good Morning Baltimore" in Hairspray - comes to an end today on a high note.

SLA ceo Janice Lachance said attendance, at 5,551, was "a few hundred more" than last year in Toronto. Lachance, who has renewed her contract and will be continuing in post for three and a half years, has also launched a personal blog during the show.

The SLA is planning to aggressively enhance its international outreach over coming years, said Lachance, a fact which might worry established UK professional associations Cilip and Aslib.

Blogging seems to have been a major theme of the show. The SLA created its own multi-contributor conference blog (using Typepad technology, as the IWR Blog does) which covered lots of events from many angles, and gave good competition to Information Today, whose blog of the show was also useful for those who couldn't make it to the US.

The 5-strong ITI team on the Information Today Blog, led by Dick Kaser, VP of Content, did do all heavy-duty "walking the floors" blogging which focuses on the commercial aspects of the show.

One has to wonder, with so many blogs being launched these days, if the blogging phenomenon is passing its peak. Are we in danger of thousands of voices drowning each other out, and nobody listening? Certainly finding ways of evaluating blogs so that there are mechanisms for the very best to bubble to the top is surely the next phenomenon to emerge.

In this respect, we were glad to come across the PubSub list of Library Blogs, which ranks hundreds of blog sites for librarians. The top 10 listed when we looked were:

1 ResourceShelf 
2 Infothought
3 A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette
4 beSpacific
5 panlibus
6 Catalogablog
7 Unshelved
8 LISNews.com
9 Library Boy
10 The Laughing Librarian

This is a dynamic service, so expect that to change on a regular basis, and - one word of warning - as these lists are partly based on linkages, they don't necessarily accurately reflect quality or a peer review process. Now there's a thought - a blogging peer review system. Anyone up to do that?

Microsoft to lose blogging evangelist Scoble

Microsoft's blogger in chief, Robert Scoble, is to leave the company to be part of the management team for start-up media podcasting company, podtech.net.

Scoble's blog, Scobleizer, has been credited as a leading example of blogging technology being used by a big corporation to create business benefits.

Microsoft initially treated Scoble's trenchant criticisms of the company with alarm, but later came to see them as feedback that led to better products and services. Scoble would highlight areas that could be acted on before they became issues with larger groups of consumers.

It also had a PR side-effect, coming to paint a friendlier picture of Microsoft as more open and responsive.

Scoble denied that his departure was due to bad feeling with his immediate management team, rejected expense claims or that Microsoft wanted to clamp down on blogging.

"I'm not the only blogger at Microsoft," Scoble writes about his resignation. "There are about 3,000 of them here. They are not having the plug pulled on them."

Scoble has made a career out of promoting blogging as a corporate tool. The 41-year-old co-authored with Shel Israel a book, Naked Conversations, earlier this year.

It set-out the six "pillars of blogging" as: publishable, findable, social, viral, syndicable, and linkable. Read our review of the book.

Virus writers take aim at search and Google

Today's news that the Google brand name is being used to circulate a new virus threat to web users is the sad face of corporate success and the Wild West that is the internet, (read stiory here: Spoof Google email on the loose).

Google is now a target of virus writers in the same way as Microsoft has been in the past. Today's threat neatly rides on the wave of recent announcements of new services from Google and an unaware user could easily be tricked into believing that Google Pharmacy, the rogue site that contains Trojan software, is following hot on the heels of Book Search, Google News and Scholar.

Sadly Google may be about to find it is to become target number one for the vigilantes that write these technology time-bombs. The precarious position of Google over its strategy in China, its massive size and visibility place it right in the crosshairs of those in computer and information world that think it is their right to decide who or what is the prominent player on the internet. Sadly they have little regard for the poor end users and organisations that rely on this software to exist.  Which of course does bring into question how much we all rely on Google?  But as the power of Microsoft shows, few of us are prepared to commit the time and effort required to change to an alternative.

If virus writers are about to increase their attacks on the search market, information professionals and researchers are going to have to become highly alert to the risks their systems and organisations face. For corporate and academic information professionals this is likely to lead to a greater involvement with the IT departments to try and thwart these threats before they cross the firewall.

Thomson denies any truth in FT story

Thomson PR operatives around the globe moved quickly yesterday to deny a story in the Financial Times that stated the company was considering selling its education division.

The Toronto-based company demanded that the FT correct the online version of the story, which is available in full only through the FT.com subscription service. The story was headlined "Thomson considers education disposals" in yesterday's print edition, and is now headlined online "Thomson mulls moves into new sectors".

No correction or clarification was printed in today's London edition of the FT, although an expanded version of the printed article is freely available through the FT's affiliate, MSNBC.

A Thomson spokesperson told IWR the original news story was "incorrect and erroneous". At the briefing with ceo Richard Harrington, he claimed, "nothing was said, mentioned or implied" that Thomson wanted to sell the entire division.

The incident once again raises questions over policies about publishing online. If a news organisation gets something wrong, should they submit to pressure from reputation management operatives to replace the original article with corrected versions?

Alternatively, should a news organsiation have policies in place to formalise Corrections and Clarification procedures that link to the original story? And would those policies appease those whose job it is to bully news organisations into rewriting copy in ways they approve?

We'll keep you posted.

Thomson ceo Harrington looks for takeover cash

Journalists from the Financial Times and Reuters have been at briefings given by Thomson Corporation chief Richard Harrington, and both have come up with different angles on what he says.

The Financial Times majored on the fact that Harrington has put up a "for sale" sign on the Education publishing division, citing "inertia" and "a funding problem" in the educational system when it comes to adopting e-learning tools.

He said he wanted to wait a couple of years to see if the division could be transformed from a print-based organisation into an online-facing business, something which has been achieved with the company's three other divisions - legal and regulatory, financial services and STM.

Reuters accentuated the positive side of things - saying the company is in the early stages of exploring expansion into a new business line, probably beginning with a small or medium sized acquisition.

The education division accounted for $2.32bn of the group's total $8.7bn revenues last year. Disposing of all, or parts, of it could free up a lot of cash for acquisitions.

Harrington said that the industry sectors in which it is most interested in offering information services are: engineering, petrochemical, aerospace, automotive and the insurance industries.

FEEDS 2.0 - an intelligent RSS feed prioritiser

How would you like an RSS aggregator that watched, and learnt from, your behaviour? You can explicitly tell it your likes and dislikes by clicking a heart or a down arrow. Or it will just watch what feed titles you click on and make up its own mind. It then delivers future feeds prioritised to the likelihood of you being interested.

FEEDS 2.0 promises this. It was announced last month by GTP Solutions in Greece and is about to move from private to limited public beta testing. IWR put it through its paces last month and the signs are good. To get an insight, take a look at these images on Flickr. FEEDS 2.0 was given a positive review by the generally hard-nosed Michael Arrington in his TechCrunch blog - look at GTP's traffic spike measured by Alexa - a peak of three million page impressions. Phew.

The people behind FEEDS 2.0 are computer wizards. The ceo, Dr Nicholas Ampazis, is a neural computing specialist and an assistant professor at a Greek University. His company previously created an intelligent search engine called NOISIS (Neural Optimized Intelligent System Information Server) which reminds me a little of the way Autonomy works - understanding concepts and context regardless of the language or the format of the original material.

It would be nice to think of Dr Ampazis walking into a taverna and finding a backer, just like autonomy's Mike Lynch did when he walked into a Cambridge bar all those years ago.

Enterprise search market under the spotlight

CMS Watch has released the 3rd edition of its Enterprise Search Report, and it raises some interesting paradoxes. Not least that, despite the consolidation in the market (like Autonomy snapping up Verity), there are still more players piling in, and buyers continue to face a bewildering choice.

The big problem, as CMS Watch rightly points out, is that much of this technology is so difficult to evaluate. Where companies have the facilities to do proper evaluations, they don't necessarily like what they find.

"Google's search appliance has disrupted the market," says the analyst, adding: "but customer testing still often finds the appliance lacking in "tune-ability" and integration capabilities." Oh, dear.

New players are finding it difficult to get a hearing or test-run. CMS Watch says: "IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft continue to struggle to rationalize multiple search technologies and strategies. Oracle's "Secure Enterprise Search 10g" product may be the most straightforward offering of the three, but it has not yet seen extensive customer testing." That's not good news.

It also warns that Microsoft should watch its back over smaller suppliers developing effective search solutions atop SharePoint. It says: "Mondosoft, Coveo, dtSearch, and others are likely to continue offering value-added capabilities after the release of Microsoft's new search services in SharePoint 2007."

The report, edited by former IWR columnist Stephen Arnold, is available online from CMS Watch, which also offers an independent source of buyers' advice on content management, records management, enterprise portals and enterprise search technologies.

The power and dangers of blogging

Yesterday's posting was a lesson in the power and the dangers of blogging.  Through RSS technology readers from far and wide, who would normally never hear of your name or blog pick up content through keyword identification.

True enough my posting was harsh towards Mac users and if it caused offence, sorry. But the beauty of blogging is that bloggers get to rant, and as an ex-Mac user I had my rant. The democratic ideology of blogging enabled the Mac community to respond, all views are aired. I hope that if I bumped into these fellows out on the street (unlikely just about all of them were American), they'd come for a pint and we can agree to disagree on computers and talk about other issues of interest.

What this experiment did teach me was - you just have no clue as to how far a blog posting will travel until you get this sort of response - and its a valuable lesson. The IWR blog is not focussed on Apple at all, but the keyword Apple obviously has a global scope that's almost beyond imagination.

This got me thinking, Apple is a company that attracts a following few brands can hope to emulate, it borders on fanatical. I admire this though, and I wonder how much could be achieved if the energy of these flamers could be harnessed towards the real issues facing the world like climate change.

But the question I have is, how do we create keywords with the ability to travel to so many bloggers like the word Apple does?  If scientific, business or historical information hit every RSS reader and created the responses that Apple does, Lord only knows how valuable our collections and information services could be. Is being critical, over opinionated and occassionally rude a way of raising awareness?

Words have always illicited powerful responses, we are now entering a new era of powerful words backed by powerful technology.

Apple actions damage Podcasts

Creative Commons and blogging campaigner Cory Doctorow has been bashing Apple this week at the Red Hat Summit for forcing users into corner (see news story).  Doctorow's keynote presentation focused on how iPod users lose any investment they have made in MP3 content if they ditch the iPod and move over to another provider such as Creative.

Apple is potentially damaging the growth of MP3 as a content medium. It may have made digital audio content fashionable with its iPod device, but if it divides the market into segments the medium will fail to flourish.  If any company should know this, its Apple.

Apple made personal computers a reality, only to lock out software developers and hand a massive advantage to Bill Gates and Microsoft.  Apple is now a minority computer for a minority instead of the de facto standard it could have been.

But here we see Apple making the same mistakes again, iPod may be the better standard of technology for accessing MP3 technology at the moment, but if Apple were a mature company they would realise that they cannot remain at the top day in day out and it will be beneficial to them and all users if there are common standards that all users of the MP3 media can use with ease, no matter the technology.

Apple's behaviour is a concern to content producers, owners and information professionals looking to increase access to their information using MP3.  Although, if history follows its previous path, Apple will slip into oblivion again for acting this way.