The World’s best ideas

Reports from today’s Guardian that a recent poll run by online magazine Sp!ked, hail the web, the microscope, random search, and placing university research and teaching under one roof as among some of the planet's most important innovations.

The suggestions from the study’s 100 participants, six of which are Nobel Laureates, included the rocket, wireless radio and a method for copying DNA, were based on the field in which the contributors worked, the paper revealed. Sir Tim Hunt, lead scientist for Cancer Research UK and a 2001 joint Nobel prize winner chose a method for DNA manipulation saying “Recombinant DNA technology has made the biggest difference to the way my kind of biologist works today” adding “we couldn’t have got anywhere without it”

Steve Fuller, a sociologist at the University of Warwick who chose the idea of teaching and research under one roof explained his choice saying “That has done the most to allow knowledge to be pursued with impunity, while maximising its impact in society”

Meanwhile Matt Ridley a science writer who has worked for The Economist and The Daily Telegraph as scientific correspondent was an advocate for “random search” through using online search engines like Google to find unknown information for a user, he said “Random search has revolutionised the checking of facts, the discovering of new information, the gleaning of leads. If my profession is writing truthfully but interestingly about the world then this could be the best innovation one could wish for.”

Second Life and the Library

Here's an interesting event for librarians: Virtual World Librarianship - Your Second Life (My thanks to the Shifted Librarian for the heads-up on this.)

If you're already up to speed on the usual social media stuff: blogs, wikis, rss, tagging etcetera, you might just be ready to learn more about Second Life, a virtual world of buildings and landscapes and avatars. Some of the avatars are weird, but don't be put off. A lot of them look pretty much like their owners.

Second Life even contains an information island where all manner of libraries have created a presence there, thanks to the Talis' sponsorship of the Cybrary City area.

Anyway, to get back to the Second Life course, you can guess where it runs, can't you? Yep in the Info Island in Second Life itself. It is presented by the Illinois Alliance Library System and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. You'll need to tune in between 1:30 and 3:30 pm, Illinois time (6:30 to 8:30?), on May 25, June 1, 8, 15, July 6 and 13. It will cost you $200.

These are the sessions:

Introduction to Libraries in Virtual Worlds
Second Life 101
Collections, Resources, and Exhibits in Virtual Environment
Reference and Information Services in Virtual Worlds
Managing and Working in a Virtual Library or Department
Skills Needed by 21st Century Librarians in Virtual Worlds

The system requirements for Second Life are listed on this page. Basically, you need a reliable broadband connection and a decent graphics card. Without that, you're just going to get irritated.

Discussions and assignments will surround the course.

Fill in the registration form or talk to Marianne Steadley +1 217 244 2751, if you have any questions.

And, if you do decide to join in, why not comment on this blog post about your experiences? I expect a lot of information professionals would be really curious to know whether Second Life can be relevant to their work.

Information industry must join the Wikipedia community

Every time I use Wikipedia I discover a new widget or facet to it that I really enjoy. I enjoy it because these facets make my user experience better.

In juxtaposition to this I have been talking to publishers about the changing shape of the market and how they do feel threatened by Wikipedia. To combat this, publishers are, rightly, publishing promotional material to educate students and users to skip the fast food Wiki diet and tuck into some healthy peer-reviewed material from the library.

All well and good, but as our attendance to recent conferences regarding greener business practices demonstrated, telling people to turn the telly off standby just doesn't work. Instead we have to develop integrated processes that subtly change their behaviour by meeting them where they want and making their existing behaviour greener.

I can't help feeling that our own community needs to do something similar. IWR doesn't want to rubbish the teaching of good information literacy, but we can't help feeling that this education and an improvement in the information should take place within Wikipedia.

Now, before you all shoot me down, let me explain. Wikipedia is a community, not just of those that put time and effort into editing it, but also the users. Therefore the best place to meet your perspective users, introduce them to your content and advise them on better information gathering practices is at Wikipedia. Information professionals and information providers should be playing a considerable part in improving the content on Wikipedia; you can cite their own content and generate leads and users from there.

Wikipedia is in many ways a platform, it has a host of information within it, and it seamlessly leads users to other sources within and beyond Wikipedia, so therefore the information industry should accept and embrace Wikipedia. After all it would be a waste of time telling anyone not to use Google as the web search engine of choice today, Google is a platform and it has become a part of our landscape. Wikipedia has the same potential, IWR knows publishing houses in the business area that are updating entries for areas they are specialists in and have gained around 200 extra visitors a month from Wikipedia alone and the subsequent revenue.

Want to share your web 2.0 stories?

Affiliated with IWR and Online Information, the Blogs and Social Media Forum will be returning to London on 5 June. In the run-up to the event, Conference Chairman, Adrian Dale and team are currently looking for speakers with interesting web 2.0 experiences and don’t mind sharing them with their peers.

As information professionals at the cutting edge know, web 2.0 marks the transcendence between the widespread use of old technology and the adoption and utilization of the new. Through your experiences and involvement at work, whether good or bad, Adrian wants to hear your thoughts and share any advice with colleagues on how, or how not to do it.

If any of the following ring your bell or maybe touch a nerve, it could be just the thing the organisers are looking for…

• Have you've been involved in a leading-edge web 2.0 project which has made an impact?   
• Has your university changed its practices to embrace new ways of teaching?
• Has your library been able to use some of the new tools to involve a wider community?   
• Has traditional "search" had its day in your organisation, replaced by "socially mediated retrieval"?
• Has your organisation evolved new ethics and behaviours to cope with the change?
• Have you found the winning business model?

It doesn’t matter if you are from a large or small organisation, work in the public sector or academia, so long as you are prepared to tell a global audience from 43 countries how its done, send your proposals here or call +44 (0)20 7316 9649

PowerPoint having a hard time?

This week, British newspapers caught up with a story from Australia on what's wrong with PowerPoint. Emeritus Professor John Sweller of the University of New South Wales, points out that the human brain can't process an incoming text stream at the same time as its verbalisation. The result is 'death by PowerPoint'. We disengage.

Professor Sweller has probably known about this for a long time, because he discovered cognitive load in the 1980's, but he was presenting at the Cognitive Load Theory conference at the end of March and a press release was pushed out entitled "Help! My brain is overloaded!" It mentioned PowerPoint almost as a footnote. But that was enough to start the hares running.

Also this week Google's chairman and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, couldn't resist mentioning the expected launch of a presentation web service sometime this summer as part of the free Google Docs and Spreadsheets suite. This is the result of the acquisition of Tonic Systems (Don't go looking, except in caches - Google has wiped the website.)

Schmidt suggests that this presentation application does not compete with Microsoft. He presents it as a casual sharing kind of product that "is a better fit to how people use Web 2.0".

It certainly won't have all the functionality of PowerPoint, but then who uses it all anyway?

Someone once divided web visitors into three groups: one percent create content, nine percent enrich content and 90 percent consume content. Right now, PowerPoint targets the first one percent. It looks very much as if Google is targeting the next nine percent.

If Google only takes a 'mashup' approach - grab stuff, tweak it, republish it - it will gain fans. If it goes further and provides creation tools, then it could seriously impact Microsoft's traditional business. And we might get out of the rut of ghastly corporate presentations as the more inventive members of the general public show us how they'd like things to be done.

Information Professionals should pull their socks up if they want some recognition

Considering the glorious weather and overlap with this year’s London Book Fair, the Library Information Show enjoyed busy crowds on both the exhibition floor as well as seminar theatres on its opening day.

One particular seminar IWR popped in to see was a popular session from speaker Lesley Robinson, of Lesley Robinson Corporate Services. Her career background has spanned both the public and private spheres of the information professional where it seems, she is on a mission to help her peers promote their profession in the workplace. The long awaited seminar was originally scheduled for the 2006 LiS event but Robinson was forced to pull out of speaking due to torn ligaments suffered from taking part in the London Marathon days earlier, so judging from the standing room only in the theatre we were all eager from twelve months of waiting to hear what she had to say. Entitled, “The Corporate Need for the Information Professional, the presentation confirmed what we already know, but are failing to get genuinely recognised, is that often the rest of an organisation might not even be aware of the real value of information professionals to a business, rather than being perceived as mere administrators.

Robinson addressed how the changes in business practices and information delivery have altered the role of the info pros, into lean and able knowledge forces but that the perception in a business hasn’t altered much from that of a dowdy librarian drowning under a sea of documentation.

Robinson explained how the job role and requirements have changed over time from that of searcher and gatherer to trainer and advisor on information - essentially a central cog in the businesses operational wheel. The core theme that kept rearing its head was not so much the value of info professionals, but their lack of positive press where they work; this in part she argues is down to how they present themselves.

Unfortunately, it is also manifested with an unprofessional appearance (such as a lack of appropriate business wear) and not making the effort to promote what their departments do, failing to demand a voice in the planning of projects rather than reacting towards peoples panicked needs at the end of them and ultimately, living up to the stereotypical shy and socially evasive librarian. Robinson was quite right to ask, “Do you look like your colleagues, like a professional?” The risk of not taking action and keeping your head below the parapet is to end up perceived as superfluous, non-essential and isolated.

She finished up with three pieces of advice, for the under-appreciated information professional; change your mentality, think more broadly and network widely across the organisation; a change it seems will need to come from you. 

UCL’s Super e-books study reveals potential at London Book Fair

Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons and Thomson took the lions share of visitors and space in the academic sector of this years London Book Fair, the Oxford University Press (OUP) tried to be conspicuous with its (not quite) 99 red balloons, whilst New Era publications (scientologist founder L. Ron Hubbard’s publishers sat on the fringes of the sector ominously busy with traffic. Fortunately IWR wasn’t there to deal with

Hollywood

cults, and more to see if the myth of a successful e-book business model might emerge.

In fact there were two prominent e-book centric seminars held on day one, indicating the amount of interest being generated at the moment in the business and academic publishing worlds. The first was held by Wiley entitled The e-book Challenge – Aligning Customers and Publishers, whilst the second hosted by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers, and chaired by Elsevier’s Vice President Chris Gibson, saw a packed room wanting to learn more on the experiences of Building e-book Collections, especially from key speaker, David Nicholas, Director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London. Nicholas, who came to share his experiences of a recent UCL study; ‘Super book’ e-books in action, which monitored over 5 years the usage of digital content and thereafter e-book practices from the university’s so called virtual scholars.

First up though Elsevier’s Gibson hammered home that “corners have now been turned in the e-book market, after several false dawns” and Nicholas seemed to confirm this, citing that the study of thousands of the University’s virtual scholars who had taken part in the study showed the potential for a “tipping point in e-book usage” – going as far as to say “next year it will go massive”

The study saw support from both Wiley and Emerald who supplied the university with three thousand e-book and such was the high usage by the virtual students that according to Nicholas of the two thousand respondents, the main core of e-book users tended to be independents, rely on Google and publishers sites for their search and commented they had had a negative experience with the UCL library in the past.

Generational differences were also highlighted in the study, showing that undergraduates were more likely to read direct from the screen than lecturers who would print out material, perhaps showing more of an ease with pure online practices among the younger academics. ne interesting anecdote that Nicholas used to illustrate e-book potential was when one lecturer at UCL included an e-book in a recommended reading list, this then went on to account for 25% of all the course material usage by their students.

Similarly impressed Nicholas informed us that based on the study, JISC have taken up the results of the Super book survey and are planning to drop in e-books to every UK University.  But more than anything, he warned that more evidence based and desk research and planning were needed to truly see the potential of e-books and journals in academia. “The virtual scholar loves choice and an e-journal platform will have a younger audience, but it is going to be a more volatile and unpredictable model than we have seen traditionally”

World domination

According to those in the know, Google's growth is continuing just fine, with the search engine chosen for 64 per cent of all searches in the US in the four weeks to 31st March this year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask loitered behind with 22,9 and three percent each, according to this release from Hitwise. This time last year, Google was at a little over 58 per cent. That's fairly impressive stuff.
Of course, the other engines are not taking this lying down, least of all Ask.com, which decided to sign off on a fairly boneheaded viral marketing stunt that put pain in campaign.
Luckily, it's not all PR. It looks as if Ask will be dropping its old algorithm and picking up on a new social search one at some point fairly soon, one which, apparently, works  well.
This is great news if the idea of having a number of strong competitors in a market is something you like. Will it tilt that three per cent dramatically towards 64 per cent, though? Most likely not immediately. Google's original launch was a bit of an oddity; all search engines before then had been much of a muchness, and everyone seemed to have their favourites. Google's algorithm stood out head and shoulders above the others, which is why people started using it. Another reason may have been the clean interface, but let's leave that aside for now.
The problem any new search tool has at the moment in garnering publicity and punters is assuring those punters that their search is significantly better than the others. Ask's new algorithm (which the company has at least admitted is in development) would need to be very, very good indeed to get people to switch to it in the same way that grassroots popularity gave Google it's original edge.
There's one other thing that may or may not be influential, of course. Google is in the search bar of every browser you download. Of course other engines are offered, but non technical users tend to just stick with the default setting. It's led to some very odd things indeed - not least a significant number of novice PC users putting web addresses into the search bar, and not the address bar. I'd not believe if I didn't see it at least once a week in the letters mailbox of the magazine I work for. If Google is seen as the norm, as the default infrastructure, then firms like Ask, Yahoo and the rest - all good engines - will have a much bigger fight than they expect.

Illinois paving the way for library nannying?

A bit of a storm is brewing in Illinois over House Bill 1727. If passed, it would mandate that all public access computers be filtered. This would apply to library staff computers as well.

A letter from the librarians at Orland Park Public Library is doing the rounds, urging resistance from fellow librarians. To quote from the letter: "...even libraries
that already offer filtering or will, in good faith, try to comply with
this law will be subject to lawsuits, fines, and criminal prosecution.
The restrictions set forth on librarians to sign oaths and suffer
criminal prosecution for perjury are disturbing." It goes on, "Giving patrons
the right to sue us for what they perceive to be obscene is
unreasonable."

Disturbing indeed. Even if the librarians try and do the right thing (whatever that is), they can still get nailed because their idea of right may differ from someone else's. And it's the patrons themselves who can do the complaining.

This sounds like one of those laws that's been proposed by the legal profession because they can see fat fees paid for out of the (bottomless) public purse. Their fees would dwarf the proposed $100 daily fine for non-compliance.

Here's another goodie: if someone under 21 wants the filtering switched off, to do research perhaps, they would have to be accompanied by someone over 21. As the letter says, "We ask eighteen-year-olds to vote and serve in Iraq for
their country but won't allow them the freedom to search the Internet." Quite.

What's this got to do with you? Well, where America leads, our legislators often follow. Better to be thinking about the implications now, so that any debate can be properly informed by the people who understand the issues. ie you.

The people people

A short post on John Batelle's blog this morning caught my eye. No, not the sad news about Kurt Vonnegut, but the link to a preview of Spock on TechCrunch.
There's been plenty of coverage of the phenomenon of blind daters Googling their prospective dates, and it's not unusual to search for someone's name before you meet them in a work context. But I'm eager to see if tools like this work outside of the world of Hello magazine. After all, it's pretty easy to get information on well known personalities, and to a certain extent the correct search techniques can light upon much of the information displayed in the screen shots on TechCrunch, although it won't be presented nearly as neatly, or as cleverly. The real test will be finding out information about average joes like you or I. Sure, if you have an unusual name, then it's more likely that your details will stand out. looking at Wink, an earlier engine in a similar vein, which relies on social networking sites such as Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn, would suggest that a search for a fairly unusual name will find the person you're looking for. Search for a Jones or a Smith and things get a bit more sticky.
On top of that is context and local data; The keeper of the Queen's Parks in Scotland might sound like a jumped-up parkie, but in fact he (or she) is a significant figure.
With $7m in round A financing from two VC firms, I'm sure the team at Spock have faced far tougher questions that this. With a beta launch next week, it won't take long to find out.

Yet another search engine

As search engines go, Exalead is a bit stealthy at the moment, but will be launching in the UK later this summer. The company has been going since about 2000, if you believe this Wikipedia entry. I've been playing around with it, and notwithstanding the limitations (or otherwise) technology behind it, it has a number of features that are quite appealing.
(Actually, before we leave the subject of technology, read up on Quearo, an attempt to index multimedia content that Exalead is involved in).
Anyway, to get back to the main topic; there are two things that are quite interesting about Exalead. Firstly, results are displayed as thumbnails of the pages that are thrown up. This is pretty handy if you are a more visual person, as you can see the overall 'shape' of a page and recognise it quicker than the link text.
Secondly, it's possible to filter out results. Most search engines are very good at getting lots of results, and some of them are good at ordering results according to how relevant they think they are. However, Exalead looks up subcategories and allows you to remove them.
For example, say I want to book a sailing holiday, but I don't want to fly too far and I know pretty much what I want. I type in 'sailing holidays in europe' into Exalead, and the usual suspects are thrown up - lots and lots of results, of which a few look interesting.
Click on the button marked 'More choices' in the box called 'Refine search' on the right hand side of the page, however, and I can start eliminating results I don't want. It would be safe to say that a journalist can't afford a crewed charter, or a luxury charter, and a dinghy would be a little too small, so all of these can be removed. Remember the search engine has already identified these things as subcategories. It's possible for me to search by what I don't want - effectively, the search engine actively helps to narrow the search.
This is all a very complicated way of saying that Exalead has potential. Sure, it wants the user to do most of the work. This won't be convenient to many. But the really important searches - the ones where users are looking for a single, high value item of information - could well be where Exalead is a strong contender. I don't expect this technique to be limited to one search engine for long, of course.

Watching the publishers

There's a very interesting discussion going on over at Search Engine Watch about Google's latest toy - Pay Per Action. We're certainly going to be following this very closely here at IWR Towers, not least because of what PPA represents. In short, Google - and other providers of search and web advertising platforms - are going to make it easier for advertisers to slice and dice audiences. In plain English, that means that advertisers will pay publishers for very specific actions taken by readers of a web site. For example, an advertiser could specify that a reader would have to click on the advertising banner on a web page, navigate through the advertiser's site and buy something before the publisher is paid. At present, Google PPA is in Beta testing, so we won't know much more for a while, but the discussion over at SEW is very interesting reading.
PPA isn't a new thing per se, but it is worth considering it in the light of  Wired's interview with Eric Schmidt,  in which the Google CEO talks about his company's near-single source of income and its place as an advertising engine.

An Easter project for you?

From August to November last year, the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) ran Learning 2.0, a 23-step online self-discovery programme that encouraged the exploration of web 2.0 tools and new technologies.

It was a terrific success in the sense that, of the 362 library staff who embarked on the programme, 222 saw it through to the end. Furthermore, at least seventeen other libraries have taken up the idea for themselves.

Helene Blowers, PLCMC's Public Services Technology Director, masterminded the activities and has blogged extensively about them. If you need to get up to speed or would like your staff to understand what's going on in the new web world, this could be a terrific starting point.

Read some of the feedback too. It's not all complementary but it will help you understand people's attitudes before you have to deal with them in real life. Some people persevered merely because of the free MP3 player or a slight chance of winning a Toshiba laptop. (Clearly, they didn't put much value on their time.) If you're interested in knowing what's going on in the Web 2.0 world, even if you think it's nonsense, it's better to get involved than to snipe from the sidelines. Who knows, you might find yourself changing your mind.

Here are the things you'll actually work with during the 23 steps: blogging, photo & image manipulation, mashups, RSS & newsreaders, LibraryThing (a booklovers' community), Roll your own search, tagging & folksonomies, web 2.0, library 2.0, wikis, online applications & tools, podcasts, video & downloadable audio and NetLibrary (eBooks). I guess there wasn't time for instant messaging, VoIP and virtual reality.

If you or your staff are strangers to this stuff, it's a great way to get going.

Perhaps Easter is a great time to start? If not, enjoy the break.

Update 6 April: Helene Blowers tells me that technical
restrictions among the staff were the principal reasons for not
including IM, VoIP and virtual reality. Thanks Helene. I should have realised.

IWR is looking green

Environmental issues are top of the agenda, so much so that even the Conservative Party has noticed them from deep within Notting Hill. To some of us, the affect of the environment is blindingly obvious, it is after all, well all around us. But business and politics have, until recently chosen to ignore the environment.

Now though the effects of climate change are beginning to affect businesses. Nothing gets attention more than a cost. Insurance companies must be beginning to wonder about how many Boscastle floods, or rogue typhoons in London and Birmingham their profit margins can absorb.

The good news is reaction is beginning to take place, but its not an easy issue to understand. Within the green agenda are many debates, these range from oil company sponsored "science" which denies many of the evidence based claims about climate change, right through to environmentalists campaigning against wind farms (sounds strange doesn't it) because they can damage bird migration routes.

When issues are too complex there is a danger that businesses will avoid them until it is forced upon them, which is often too late. Information, as we know, is the answer to these difficult issues, the trouble is, what information do you turn to in order to help your organisation go green?  The May issue of IWR tries to help by giving some pointers.

Fast swallow RetrievalWare, but Convera is still standing

Fast Search & Transfer has paid $23 million to acquire Convera RetrievalWare, the government search technology division developed by search rival Convera. In an interesting development, which signals a consolidation of technology, although not the number of vendors, Norway's Fast takes over what many to consider the most significant part of Convera, but Convera remains standing and has licensed a web advertising technology from Fast.

By consuming "selected assets of the Convera Corporation" Fast is aiming at the lucrative government market. John M Lervik, CEO of Fast said the acquisition "will enable us to deepen our relationships in the government sector".

To calm the nerves of information and IT professionals signed up to Convera RetrievalWare Fast promised to provide global support for the application and its users.

At the same time as selling off its family silver, Convera announced that it has licensed Fast Ad Momentum a private label application that enables online publishers to provide contextual (search based) advertising.