Amnesty International to release Irrepressible.info APIs

IWR Blog can exclusively reveal that Amnesty International is planning to make the APIs of its Irrepressible.info database available, in order to allow website owners to integrate links to sites that are currently being censored by governments around the world.

Irrepressible.info was launched in May 2006 to mark the 45th anniversary of Amnesty International. It aims to highlight the role of multinational companies that are colluding with governments in restricting people’s right to freedom of expression and information on the net.

It cites Cisco and Sun Microsystems as major examples of IT infrastructure companies who have collaborated with Chinese authorities in building filtering and monitoring facilities. Also in the frame, for complying with demands to censor their services in China, are Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The Irrepressible.info database is highlighted on the homepage, giving details and links to a range of sites that have been banned in various countries, including China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Currently it can be incorporated onto a website via a Javascript link, but a spokesperson said: "the APIs will allow people to use that information in a more dynamic way".

If more people incorporate these links into their sites, he added, "we can help broadcast more widely censored content and make it more difficult for the censors".

In conjunction with The Observer, irrepressible has been collecting online pledges (over 40,000 and rising) which will be presented to a UN meeting on the future of the internet in November this year.

The site is also supported by the Open Net Initiative, which develops projects such as the Internet Filtering Map – an interactive database of global censorship. This map includes details of government censorship in many Western countries, including politically inspired interference in Canada, Australia, France and the US.

Smart whiteboards, H2O and communities of practice

Earlier this week, a Canadian company called Smart Technologies revealed its latest interactive whiteboards. They are already very popular in educational circles.

But this technology is not just for schools and universities, it is useful in meeting rooms and learning environments within other organisations. They work just as if they are a touch-screen computer but, in some respects, better. They can be free-standing or mounted, use existing projection equipment or contain their own, and they can be coupled to laptop computers or special consoles. They also range in size up to 94" diagonal.

Coloured pens (bits of plastic really) and an eraser sit in holders. Remove a pen and you change the colour. You could use wooden dowels if you wanted. Or you could write on the screen with your finger.

What you do is up to you: draw, write, show a movie, visit a webste, run a program. It really is just like a computer, except it's a shared experience. You can annotate what's going on on the screen and save the annotations to your computer or to a USB drive.

There's more, of course. But, coincidentally, I stumbled across H2O Playlists at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Were you to watch the explanatory "Go with the flow" video, you'd think educators would be the main beneficiaries. In fact, anyone with an open, collaborative, sharing kind of attitude to their work would benefit.

The Playlists are lists of links to useful resources. Molly Krause has published her list relating to the philosophy of H2O. You can link, share, print and send the lists. The aim is collaboration within communities of practice.

It seems that Berkman's H2O and Smart's interactive whiteboards were just made for each other.

And possibly for you?

T&F latest to offer Open Access

Taylor & Francis is the latest publishing company to start offering its authors an open access (OA) option. iOpenAccess, as the new service is dubbed, certainly has a name that will attract the iPod generation, but at present remains a pilot.

iOpenAccess is across 175 Taylor & Francis journals in its chemistry, mathematics and physics portfolios, as well as a behavioural science journal from the Psychological Press.  Medical and bioscience journals from the Informa Healthcare brand are also included in the scheme.

"We are introducing iOpenAccess only after the widest possible consultation with the editor, author and funding communities," said Dr David Green, journals publishing director at Taylor & Francis. "We are doing so in a manner which will ensure the continuing viability and quality of major international journals with whose publishing stewardship we are entrusted."

Releasing details of how iOpenAccess will work, Taylor & Francis said authors will be asked to grant a publishing licence or assign copyright. The article will then be released onto the internet for free using the Creative Commons Licence scheme favoured by the likes of the BBC. Taylor & Francis also guarantees authors no embargo restrictions on posting their work to an institutional repository and that it will review the subscription rates for the titles under the scheme.

Co-founder launches a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia

Larry Sanger, co-founder with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, has launched a new project that will build on Wikipedia's knowledge base with added "expert guidance".

The Citizendium Project, "a citizens' compendium of everything", is described as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia - meaning it will start as a mirror of the Wikipedia site and allow anyone to contribute changes to articles, but combine "public participation with gentle expert guidance". The ultimate aim is for Citizendium to "become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects".

Sanger is not new to projects that challenge the populist way in which Wikipedia is edited - an issue which led to his departure from Wikipedia in 2002.

Since then, Sanger has been the driving force behind Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE), which itself is now part of the larger Digital Universe project. The EoE invites contributions from "scholars, professionals, educators and other experts" to contribute or edit topics, but the new Citizendium project will be less elitist.

Sanger was employed by Wales' company Bomis at the beginning of this decade to work on the Nupedia project, a freely available online encyclopedia written by experts that eventually morphed into Wikipedia.

Sanger was the only ever paid editor on Wikipedia - for 14 months until his resignation in March 2002 - and there has been much bad blood spilled in articles on Wikipedia and in his blog about his dissenting views on the project's editorial modus operandi.

According to the article on Sanger himself, the Wikipedia project "put 'difficult people, trolls, and their enablers' into too much prominence; these problems, [Sanger] maintained, were a feature of the project's 'anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise'."

Controversy over the editing culture among Wikipedians is increasingly being aired on the internet. One site which is starting to gain currency is Wikitruth.info - which uses Wikipedia's own software to track the antics of Wikipedians.

Contributions to this site are provocative, rambling and "edgy" ("Follow the money trail to Jimbo's piggybank" is a good example), and clearly nerds-on-nerds territory. But it's jolly educational!

Socialtext addresses wiki incomprehension issues

Socialtext provides 'business-like' wiki/blog software and hosting. Unfortunately, it has been somewhat inelegant and, to the uninitiated, downright confusing.

Now, the company has released a beta of Socialtext 2.0 which addresses a number of shortcomings of the previous version. It also makes some of the rather obscure features more visible and more relevant.

Ross Mayfield, the boss, explains his new baby in a screencast demo. Whether you're brand new to this kind of software or already experienced, you'll find he explains things pretty well.

At the superficial level, Socialtext 2.0 beta just looks nicer: big buttons, cleaner layout and the display areas just make more sense. You don't feel you're entering a secret world any more. The Home page provides all manner of navigation links so, no matter how deep in the wiki you go, you can always climb out and reorientate  yourself.

A whiteboard acts as a pooling area for users of the workspace. Notpad is for your own notes, but others can see them. Blogging is easy, and others can edit the blogs and have the same version history as the wiki. This is good for team-focused blogs.

Any page can be tagged with words of the editor's choosing, although tag lists will pop up to help with consistency. Pages can be searched for and listed by name, date, tag, whatever. And you can see at a glance which pages have been changed frequently - this is usually a sign of a mature page. Incoming links are also counted and it's easy to get a list of the linking pages.

Wiki Web Services are APIs which make integration with other systems easy and there's even a mobile version called miki.

With this release, Socialtext has abandoned its geeky air and made itself much more acceptable to novice and experienced users alike.

Trailfire brings Vannevar Bush's 1946 dreams to life

A long time ago, in 1946, the Atlantic Monthly carried a feature by Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". This inspirational article foresaw a world in which our information sources were all linked and on tap at all times. It was a marvellous piece of thinking and many, many, software developers were moved to implement some, at least, of the functionality. If a product contains hyperlinks then you could probably follow the inspiration trail all the way back to 1946.

Now 'trails', as it happens, is one of those Bush ideas that has never caught on in the mass market. The idea is that you can capture a sequence of activities, save it and share it with others. Of course, educational programs and workflow applications already do something like this, but they are too heavyweight for ordinary users.

Now, thanks to a free (for non-commercial use) service from Trailfire, you can save your trails as you navigate the web. You don't have to capture every page you visit but you could get people to follow your thoughts by saving the URL of each page of interest and any annotations (collectively called a 'mark' in the TrailFire vernacular) you might wish to make. These notes can be text, restricted html or multimedia. The whole sequence is held as a named trail with a URL that you can publish on your blog or website.

It's a new, and very useful, dimension to web navigation.

Here's one I prepared earlier. Just click on 'David's activities' to trundle around my various web presences. Or not.

Go-Go-Google Gadget wins

Talis has announced the winners of its Mashing up the library 2006 competition. The library automation vendor has awarded the first prize to Go-Go-Google Gadget and the second prize to an entry that puts library systems within a computer game.

John Blyberg of Ann Arbor District Library in the US has won £2000 for his Go-Go-Google Gadget mashup which allows library information to be integrated onto a Google homepage. "This is an excellent example of taking information previously locked inside the library catalogue and making it available to patrons in other contexts where they may spend more time than they do in their catalogue," said Paul Miller, a judge on the panel and Talis technology evangelist.

Second prize went to the Alliance Library Systems in East Peoria, again in the US for its innovative idea Second Life Library which puts library information inside the Second Life virtual world. Talis describe this as a "reaching new audiences in ways exciting and relevant to them as they live their lives".

As Miller predicted in IWR, the US took the spoils and is leading the move to develop mashups. A full list of entries is available from the competition site.

Historic perspectives in Google's News Archive

Google has launched another compelling search option on its fast diversifying website. Google News Archive Search gives access to selected news archives that allow researchers to view historic events through contemporary reports.

The service includes links to newspaper and magazine archives (such as those of The Guardian and Time magazine) which make the majority of historic articles free to view, alongside links to pay-per-click reports from the US regional press (such as The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times) and key reference and news aggregators (including Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and Highbeam Research).

Anurag Acharya, described as a "Distinguished Engineer" at Google, announced the new service on the Google Blog, saying: "This new feature can help you explore history through archives of news and other information sources. You can search for events, people and ideas, and see how they have been described over time."

Surprisingly, one of the major partners in this enterprise is Time magazine, a division of Google's search rival, AOL Time Warner. Time offers an online digital archive that features its iconic covers - all of them since 1923 - and most of its archived content, all of it freely accessible within a framework that displays current advertising.

Another striking innovation is a Show Timeline option, which categorises results according to their publication dates. Search on "Winston Churchill", for instance, and you'll get a chronological decade-by-decade outline of results, admittedly most of them contemporary reports from Time magazine.

It may be sketchy at most at this stage, and will only become truly invaluable to researchers when more digitised archives become available, but it clearly adds a new dimension to Google search results. According to one report, Google may have plans to integrate this feature, alongside book search results, in the main results page of standard search queries. Alongside initiatives to "weight" results towards increasingly influential social computing sites like Wikipedia, Google is attempting to make more relevant material available on the first results page of any given search.

Google is looking for ways to hold on to the lead it has gained over rivals Yahoo and MSN in the US. Two other players with networks of search sites - Ask and AOL Time Warner - are also starting to see a little growth again having been impacted by the Google juggernaut.

The latest monthly survey of US search engine market share by Comscore shows Google losing ground month on month (43.7% in July, down from 44.7% in June), while enjoying a significant 7.2% year-on-year increase.

For Google's rivals the midsummer month-on-month results suggest they may have reached the end of their downward trajectory - Yahoo sites climbed slightly from 28.5% to 28.8% (compared to 30.5% in July 05), while number 3 player Microsoft saw its share flatline at 12.8% (compared to 15.5% in July 05).

wikis, blogs and ... email? Yup.

Rod Boothby works for one of the 'big four' consultancies. But, more interesting than that, he authors a blog called Innovation Creators. It's aimed at people like you. People who have deep organisational responsibilities, yet need to keep themselves attuned to new opportunities for improving the business processes for which they are responsible.

Horror stories keep appearing about trouble-making bloggers or contributors to public wikis who have no sense of responsibility. The Los Angeles Times asked its readers to contribute to an editorial on Iraq. So, not surprisingly, they did. And it had to be closed.

Our very own David Milliband is evidently not one to learn from others' mistakes. (He's a government minister, if you're not from around these parts.) He set up a wiki page to evolve some kind of environmental contract with the populace. Unfortunately for him, some of the populace saw this as an opportunity to have a lot of fun at his expense. The page is closed while defra decides what to do next.

But such irresponsibility is unlikely to be repeated inside an organisation. Some management and IT are very uneasy. It's not surprising, when their only exposure has been the silly stuff. But staff would have to log in as themselves, so the potential for mischief-making is close to zero.

The benefits in organisational knowledge retention and effective communication, collaboration and cooperation are huge. I strongly recommend that you head over Rod Boothby's blog to learn from his real-life experiences.

And if your staff are uneasy about editing blogs and wikis, tell them they can do it by email.

Autonomy searching for meaning

Cambridge based Autonomy is looking to add meaning to enterprise search.  Founder Mike Lynch discusses Meaning Based Computing in this interview with IWR sister title IT Week.

Now IWR has a great relationship with Autonomy and Lynch, but on first impressions, Meaning Based Computing sounded like a large software vendor looking to put a new spin on existing software, something some vendors make a real speciality of.  Is Autonomy doing the same? Reading further into the article, we can see what Autonomy is trying to achieve, computers at present don't understand the meaning of the content within documents and files.

Anything that improves the search experience is of interest to IWR; and Autonomy has a good track record at improving search, take a look at Blinkx, which uses its technology. We just hope Autonomy isn't going to become a vendor that invents acronyms in order to remain newsworthy? Over to you Mike?

Gloves are off in battle

Archivists, librarians and information professionals are donning virtual boxing gloves in a battle over whether users of archives should use, err, gloves. Randy Silverman, an archive librarian at the University of Utah has controversially written a paper calling for the practise of donning white gloves to read archives and rare books to be scrapped.

The Guardian newspaper reports that our very own British Library, an institution where white gloves are conspicuous by their absence is of the same opinion.

Along with academic Dr Cathy Baker the two call for an end to the practise, preferring hand washing before handling historic works. Their paper describes the gloves as reducing loss of feeling, which leads to further damage to the works. 

Guardian journalist Jackie Dent carried out some exhaustive research by visiting the BL and practising with and without white gloves on the rare work Paul's Epistles and adding further damage to the rare work.

Archives and rare books have never been so interesting with Google digitisation plans and spats over a pair of gloves, who said a library was a quiet place.

Yahoo! jumps on the social search bandwagon

Internet search player Yahoo! has joined Google in the Social Search space with its Yahoo Answers service that allows logged on members to pose and answer each others questions.  Whereas Google is playing it softly softly with a beta roll-out, Yahoo plans to make a lot of noise about Answers with a massive advertising budget, which is its largest advertising spend in the UK for years.

The service has a range of categories that slot nicely into the information industry, including arts & humanities, business & finance, education & reference, health, news, politics & government and science & mathematics. 

IWR took a close look and there's a vibrant community posing and answering questions. Needless to say in a social computing environment there's a lot more chit chat and opinion going back and forth. Whether users get the answer they are looking for is really something only those posing a question can answer. What Yahoo Answers does show is there is an engaged community out there looking for answers to everything from casual sex to town councils being measured on pollution levels. For those of us in the information community, a new method of communications has just opened up.

The question is, how do you measure the value from taking part? Links to Amazon and Google Books perhaps?

Answers please?

Google needs Sony's Reader, or similar

It's all very well Google putting books online but what about the poor readers? Would you want to print one out? Of course not. Would you want to read it on a laptop or PC screen? I certainly wouldn't.

Anchoring myself to the desk to read a book or watching the battery life on my laptop ebb away are not my idea of fun. And PDAs are just too darned small to enjoy reading Acrobat books.

So what's the answer? An electronic book reader, of course. If you can find one. The word on the street is that they have been either awful to use or impossible to buy outside of Japan.
Sony launched one on its home market and tied it to 60-day rentals of electronic books. It was called the LIBRIé and, perhaps because of the business model, it stayed in Japan.

However, in January this year, Sony announced that it would be shipping an improved version, called the Sony Reader to the American market in March. Well, it's not actually appeared in the shops yet, but Sony's website describes it in some detail. Apparently shipments are due 'in the fall', which must mean soon.

The Reader looks good. It uses E-Ink's electronic ink which means that backlighting isn't needed and it can be viewed in the same lighting conditions as a book. The screen measures six inches (diagonally). The battery lasts for thousands of page turns. Up to 7,500 actually, but it depends what else you're doing. It has a built in MP3 player and, unlike its Japanese predecessor, it comes with software to convert PDFs, web pages and JPEGs to its native BBeB format. (That stands for BroadBand eBook - the format used in the LIBRIé to protect authors' digital rights. But that's another story.)

If you want to be tipped off, when it's available (in America) you can leave your email address here.

And, if you don't like Sony, keep an eye out for other E-ink licencees.