A taste of the new web from Library House

This week, Library House ran another of its excellent conferences at the BFI IMAX cinema in Waterloo. This time the theme was 'Web Essentials'.

Since it was aimed at getting entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and related support companies together, a lot of the conference content was off to one side of IWR readers' interests. However, with around forty companies presenting their web products and services, some were bound to hit the mark.

Here are a few that might appeal to you at a personal or business level:

Garlik: how much of your personal information is spread around the web? And what can you do about it? That's the hook for this subscription service.

Quintura hopes it has a 'Google-beater' with its 'cloud' based approach to search. Slap in what you're looking for and a cloud of related terms appears to the left and the results to the right. Click on cloud items to refine the search. Companies can bid to attach their mini-logos to cloud words.

Click2Map lets you take a Google map and add stuff to it without programming. A kind of 'mashup for the rest of us'. It's a good idea but it's not ready for primetime. And it's French government backed. Hmmm.

ParkatmyHouse.com rewards you for selling your drive or parking spaces for short or long periods. Prospects tell the service where they're going (a football match, an underground station...) and it will find somewhere for them to park. Plans are afoot for SleepatmyHouse.com and others...

Ever recommended someone for a job? How about getting paid for it? Zubka will get you three or four thousand pounds for something you used to do for nothing.

Although there was general agreement that the mobile market is still difficult, a number of organisations are addressing the opportunities now. MakeMyShow LiveConductor connects people on the move with applications and RSS feeds.

Anywr keeps your contact and calendar information for you so you can access it from any WAP enabled phone. Apparently a phone is stolen in the UK every seven seconds. Makes you think...

Yuuguu is aimed at people on the road. Wherever you are, you can hook up to colleagues and share (and control, if you want) each other's computer screens. Uses national rate numbers to create conference connection in parallel.

Huddle looks to be a(nother) promising collaboration system. Getting praise in high places. Scales from small groups to enterprise.

A few quick mentions: Trexy and Trampoline have been covered in IWR before; AlertMe home security - dinky: take a look; and Wonga - great name, great punchline: "too much month at the end of your money". Instant loans, of course.

Given that this is only a tiny glimpse of the Library House event, you can imagine what an interesting and invigorating day it was.

Facebook

It's been a very odd couple of months. Since Facebook removed the requirement for academic email addresses for those who wanted to join the service, the site has undergone exponential growth. I don't know what the students have to say about the inevitable influx of mid-30s media luvvies and hipsters, but by the looks of it, an awful lot of people have poured into the site.

Without really intending to, a lot of people have ended up spending far too much time finding old friends and joining daft groups on this, the latest social networking site. I feel I can say this with authority, as I seem to end up checking the site several times a day - usually against my better judgement.

Publishers archive available and on exhibition

Private letters, manuscripts and business papers from the archives of one of the Victorian era’s most influential publishing empires went on public display in Edinburgh today, writes Laura Smith.

The collection of papers from the family-owned publishers John Murray, which boasted Charles Darwin, Jane Austen and Lord Byron among its authors, was launched at the National Library of Scotland by Michael Palin.

John Murray, a descendant of the first John Murray who set up the company in 1768, sold the collection of 150,000 documents to the library for £31m earlier this year. He is the seventh generation of Murrays to run the publishing firm.

The exhibition uses interactive technology to showcase 11 main characters from the archive, including legends like Darwin and Byron and less well-known but significant figures. Members of the public will be able to see the letter in which Darwin pitched the idea for his Origin of Species.

Among the lesser-known authors to feature is Maria Rundell, whose best-selling book on cookery, medicinal remedies and household management caused a publishing sensation in the early 1800s and became a bible for Britain’s 19th century bourgeoisie. Mary Somerville, who was known as the ‘Queen of Science’ and was one of Murray’s most successful scientific writers, also features.

Martyn Wade, National Library of Scotland librarian, told the BBC: “It is wonderful to see the results of several years’ hard work from a large number of very talented and committed people coming to fruition in the form of this exhibition.” Palin described the collection as a “goldmine”.

The library used a combination of lottery money, funding from the Scottish Executive and its own fundraising to buy the John Murray Archive from 1768 to 1920. John Murray is now owned by Hodder Headline publishers.

Link to John Murray Archive:
http://www.nls.uk/jma/index.html

Macmillan's Charkin shows how nothing under the information sun changes

Richard Charkin, chief executive of publishing giants Macmillan is a regular blogger and in between discussing the extremely odd sport of cricket, he does deliver some nuggets of golden insight into the information industry. Today, perhaps its weather related as even this cricket hater can see its not the day of willow on leather, is one of those days when he delivers just than insight.

On the 22 June 1957 Nature, part of the Macmillan stable published the below analysis of the effect a new technology known as television is having on published information:

"Far from causing a decline in reading, as was once predicted, it is now becoming evident that television has led to a greatly increased sale of books dealing with topics which have proved popular on the screen. This is perhaps most evident in archaeology, but it is becoming noticeable in other fields too. The growing sport of undersea swimming has reinforced the demand for books about sea life, the publication of which has received a further fillip from the film and television successes of Hans Hass and Jacques Cousteau. We cannot blame the publishers for trying to satisfy this demand, but we can blame them for publishing books seemingly written in haste merely to profit from this fashion.”

Charkin rightly points out, "The messages are clear and still relevant. New technology does not necessarily kill old technology and can in fact enhance it." Perhaps  the information sector is jumping too quickly to blame Web 2.0 for the changing shape of information. I shall put these questions to Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amatuer, a polemic on how Web 2.0 is destroying our cultural and economic foundation, tomorrow.

Open source community fear Mac users will be shut out of BBC

Users of Apple Macintosh computers and open source operating systems may be prevented from using BBC information and content once the public broadcaster's iPlayer is launched later this year. The Open Source Consortium (OSC) is threatening to take its complaint to the European Commission.

OSC believes that by developing the iPlayer with computing giants Microsoft the BBC is forcing people to use Bill Gates' operating system. The iPlayer will allow searchers to download and watch BBC content on their own computers for up to 30 days after it was first broadcast. 

A statement from the BBC in response to the OSC complaint said, "The BBC aims to make its content as widely available as possible and has always taken a platform agnostic approach to its internet services". OSC though believes the iPlayer will only work on computers that use the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The BBC has opted to work with Microsoft because of the digital rights management (DRM) technology it has to offer which allows BBC information to be downloaded, but cannot be copied to a DVD and will automatically delete after 30 days.

OSC has taken its complaint to the BBC Trust, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Ofcom, the telecoms and broadcasting  regulator. It said its next step is to take the complaint to Europe.

Microsoft is also a key partner for the British Library.

A sign of things to come from East Anglia

Local newspaper the Eastern Daily Press has been told by the newly formed Ministry of Justice that it is seeking more time to respond to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request from the East Anglian newspaper.  If the amendments proposed to the FoI go through, it is likely this sort of obfuscation will become, once again, commonplace.

Newspaper the Eastern Daily Press has requested documents using the FoI to discover what improvements have been made to the management of offenders after an earlier investigation by the newspaper discovered that offenders were removing electronic tags. By removing the tags offenders cannot be monitored by the police.

In a response to the newspaper, the Ministry of Justice has asked for more time to decide whether it is in the public interest to release the papers and figures.  Janet Preston of the National Offender Management Scheme's open government unit at the Ministry of Justice said in a reply to the paper, "Although the Freedom of Information Act carries a presumption in favour of disclosure, it provides exemptions which may be used to withhold information in specified circumstances."

Central government departments have to respond to FoI requests within 20 days, but can make requests for an extension to 40 workings days.

In proposals made by the government back in November to reform FoI, including adding the time it takes to consider a request to the overall cost to an individual request. This in turn is likely to put requesters off, especially individuals and local newspapers. The government has been re-considering its proposed reforms and will announce in three months time what changes will be made to the Freedom of Information Act.

FoI submissions on amendments close today

The government's Freedom of Information (FoI) Act amendments consultation period closes for submissions today. According to Martin Rosenbaum's BBC FoI blog they now have three months to review the arguments put to it and then announce its response. Gordon Brown will, of course be Prime Minister by this time.

Rosenbaum details that the BBC has argued against, no surprises there really, further restrictions, which would damage its ability to report affectively on the government. Its submission states:

Amending the regulations to restrict access to information has inevitable and important disadvantages – it would prevent valuable FOI disclosures which are in the public interest and it would risk undermining the principles of FOI. This course should only be pursued if there is an even more important need to reduce the administrative burden of FOI. We do not believe that exists. There will always be some inappropriate and burdensome FOI requests, but they do not reach the level which requires a change to the regulations.

Major news organisations like the BBC would be muzzled by the amendments if they came into force because FoI requests would be grouped together and limited, by which organisation they come from. Therefore if BBC Radio 4's Today programme had lodged a series of request and so had a BBC local news programme, they would be grouped together, with one possibly losing out. The upshot of this is that the local news programme may be investigating something of upmost importance to a local community could be kept under wraps because a national news room makes a high number of requests.

Second Life revisited, with Eduserv

If you're thinking about using Second Life to meet people, you might be interested in the Eduserv Foundation's recent experience.

It decided to hold a discussion in Second Life as a follow up to its 'Virtual worlds, real learning' symposium held there earlier in the year.

Art Fosset (his Second Life name) had been working hard on a meeting management scheme involving chairs that turn from red, to amber to green in response to a delegate's wish to speak. Participants indicate their desire to contribute by raising their virtual hands.

The idea is probably a good one in certain contexts, but a meeting of thirty to forty interested and engaged adults probably wasn't one of them. The pace was leaden. Realising things weren't going to plan, Fosset disabled the digital chairman after 19 minutes and the remaining 65 minutes went at a fair old lick.

To give an idea of Second Life discussion speeds, during the chaired session each typed word averaged 1.9 seconds. When the brakes came off they averaged 0.8 seconds. Interestingly, the average word count per contribution dropped from 16.5 to 11.

I'm sure that Fosset will do a thorough analysis of the whys and wherefores but it was, without question, an interesting experiment.

As far as content was concerned, the conversation roamed around the appropriateness of Second Life to teaching and learning. If you're interested, you can read the full transcript online.

People came from IBM, from Nature, from Eduserv, of course, from universities, from Linden Lab (creator of Second Life) and even a British Embassy. The profiles of some were, irritatingly, blank which made weighing their contributions difficult.

Even though the conversation was slow by face to face standards, when you take into account the enormous costs, time and inconvenience of getting such an interesting group together, the result was definitely worthwhile. Without question, some of the participants will maintain their connections outside of Second Life.

Anti social media

And so to the Groucho Club, one time home of the media in-crowd, where dear old Yahoo! is holding a round table debate on social media. Various notables attended, and somehow they also managed to let a few print journalists in, possibly because we looked like we needed feeding. Not sure yet. Anyway, aside from the rather tasty salt beef sandwiches, the debate was a good one, even if it did stray from time to time into social networking, which everyone is more familiar with.

The debate brought up some interesting angles; not least the difference between Yahoo's own Flickr service and YouTube. While Flickr steers clear of unsavoury content (and that's not just pornography, you know), the likes of YouTube has been pretty open. Looking at the videos marked as being popular or well viewed on YouTube can be a little eyewatering at times, whereas Flickr's popular shots are generally fantastic examples of photography. Flickr's 100 most interesting was compared to the rather eponymous karate monkey video (no, not this Karate Monkey), which has been around since before YouTube and is nonetheless still one of the less pleasant work-safe videos out there.

Is Nature Preceding the bandwagon?

Nature Precedings, the new online service that allows scientists to publish unpublished manuscripts, conference papers and presentations onto a central repository has been warmly welcomed by The Cluetrain Manifesto author David Weinberger, but some information professionals disagree.

Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature describes Precedings as a place to reveal papers before they are reviewed and published in journals, which he describes in an open email to the scientific information community as "relatively slow and expensive".

He describes Precedings as a "complement" to journals. He believes the problem with pre-prints and conference papers is that they are not "easy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution – or funder specific) and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system)". With Precedings Nature aims to offer a central global repository where material is easily discovered and citable.

"This is very cool," Weinberger says on his blog. "From CC to  DOI, it hits all the right notes." Because the service is from Nature, Weinberger believes the launch is a "big deal".

But Monica McCormick of North Carolina State University Library commenting disagrees, "why are you so enthusiastic… there are a large and growing number of university-based repositories". She believes that these repositories are easy to find and can be cited. "Nature is jumping on a bandwagon built by university libraries and scholars, and disingenuously claiming that their service is better. They have their undoubtedly high reputation to attract attention to their efforts, but how is Precedings genuinely distinct from hundreds of other digital pre-print repositories?

But Weinberger disagrees, "When one of the premier journals des this, it signals a new level of acceptance." 

FT parents bidding for Dow Jones, claims The Telegraph

Broadsheet newspaper The Daily Telegraph has claimed in an article that Pearson, the corporation which owns the Financial Times, is involved in an "desperate attempt" to buy US business information group Dow Jones. If successful the bid will scupper the plans of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

According to the Telegraph, Pearson has been looking for a partner to counter the £2.5bn bid from the Aussie known as Dirty Digger. Unnamed analysts tell the Telegraph that a combined Pearson and Dow Jones group, which owns news aggregator service Factiva, would be a "formidable force in business journalism". One describes the Dow Jones newswires as another useful arm to the FT. Not only would a combination include two of the world's most famous business newspapers, the FT and Wall Street Journal, as well as Factiva, but would also include leading magazine and market analysis group The Economist.  Pearson owns 50% of The Economist group.

There are global benefits from a link up between Dow Jones and Pearson. The latter has a strong presence in the US with its education division, but the FT has not fared well there, no doubt because of the power of the Wall Street Journal. Equally the Wall Street Journal has not done well in Europe.

According to the Telegraph Pearson is in deep talks with General Electric to construct a joint bid. General Electric owns the CNBC business channel in the US, which competes with Murdoch's Fox business channel. CNBC is supplied by Dow Jones and has close relationships.

There is widespread concern about Murdoch buying the Dow Jones group, the Bancroft family – a majority stakeholder - is concerned about Murdoch's famed reputation for meddling with editorial independence to push his own right wing agenda. The information and media industry is also deeply concerned about Murdoch owning another major slice of the information real estate.

Murdoch has been preparing his bid by wooing the Bancroft family and got shot of his share of weak Australian news group Fairfax to release more funds.

If Pearson and a partner are to be successful, they will need to beat the $60 a share  offer that Murdoch's News Corporation has placed on the table.

It's OK to be scared

Recently I was lucky enough to be part of a discussion panel organised by the City Information Group (CIG). The discussion centred on the future role of research and information professionals in the face of new networking technology, all dubbed Web 2.0, and how this technology will affect the working lives of information professionals.

My  hat  goes off to the information professionals at the event who put their hands in  the air and admitted they didn't fully understand the technology and the issues it presented to their working lives. It's a brave move in a busy room full of your peers. But it is OK to admit you don't understand the full complexity of the Web 2.0 plot. I left the conference feeling that almost everyone, apart from my colleagues Euan Semple and David Tebbutt, is a little shaky on some areas of Web 2.0. I too feel out of touch with RSS and FaceBook.

The problem with Web 2.0 is that there are so many different iterations of this technology, blogging, wiki encyclopaedia, virtual worlds created by users, social computing networks and image systems for sharing videos and photographs.  Is it any wonder that information professionals are, despite their deep natural understanding for information issues, lost in a virtual Sargosso Sea. 

At first I was worried that the attendees didn't fully understand this technology, but as the evening progressed I was re-invigorated to learn that on the whole, information professionals do want to learn and engage with this technology. And that is good news, because if the information community does not, it will lose out, because the next generation of information users will interact with information in a way so radically different from the way we do.

The first step along the rocky road to Web 2.0 is admitting what your level of understanding is, and I have nothing but admiration for those information professionals that admitted to a packed room that they were not part of this next generation, because by doing so, the information community can step back and take a look at what is required to fully embrace the technology and the all important information professionals.

Facebook as a backchannel

Facebook has been attracting a lot of attention recently. Once everyone you know - okay, those you deal with online - has asked why you're not there, you join. Then you join a couple of groups. Then you look at who's in those groups and you find people you already know, so you ask them to confirm your friendship. (Tip: don't accept people you've had nothing to do with as friends, it gets silly and unmanageable.) And then you're off on another mad, time-wasting, social computing distraction.

Or are you? If you're reasonably disciplined and you ignore a lot of the fluff (including the ads), Facebook could actually prove quite useful. The American Library Association has a presence. Over 800 members. All interested in keeping in touch with each other and their world. They can comment out in the open or send private messages to each other.

Searching for 'information professionals' or 'library' doesn't bring relevant stuff straight to the top of the heap. Goodness knows what the algorithms are but they look as if they could benefit from more effort, like allowing quotes to group words together. It occurred to me that a kind of 'backchannel' for Information World Review might be interesting. It would be a chance for contributors and readers to discover each other and exchange views and information. It escapes the strictures of the blog and the readers letters page.

It could, of course, end up becoming a nightmare, in which case I'll close it. But as long as we refrain from abuse and don't try to sell, it might end up quite fun. Pop over here if you're interested. It only started a few minutes ago, so come back from time to time. You can enrol yourself, there's no approval process at the moment.

See you there?

Librarians respond to global e-book survey with some interesting results

A recent survey commissioned by ebrary who operate in the library and publishing sectors, has found users of e-books don’t rely on Google to search for content. They received responses from 552 individual libraries, the majority of which were academic. The survey revealed that of these, 88% said they own and subscribe to e-books, while 45% confirmed they have access to a library of more than 10,000 e-books. The various themes examined included the usage of e-books, purchase drivers and inhibitors, digitisation and distribution platforms.

The results confirmed what many librarians may have suspected in that they and their colleagues are often the drivers when it comes to pushing users towards e-books, whether that’s through recommendations or the libraries cataloguing system.

One of the key findings suggested “Respondents ranked Google and other search engines as the least common ways that patrons find e-books". It went on to say "Google and other search engines were also indicated among the least prevalent factors that drive e-book usage, while the library’s catalogue and professor and staff recommendations were indicated as most prevalent”. This also confirmed that the primary path to e-books for students and faculty members is via OPAC, the Online Public Access Catalog used throughout libraries world-wide.

Other findings of the study show:

• 78% of respondents described usage of e-books at their libraries as fair to excellent.
• 81% of respondents indicated that integration of e-books with other library resources and information on the web is “very” important.
• The number of respondents who chose subscription and purchase as their models of choice for acquiring digital content was almost equal.
• 56% of respondents are digitising their own content or actively considering it, and 81% indicated that they will digitise their materials in-house.
• Price, subject areas, and access models were indicated as the most important factors when subscribing to or purchasing e-books.

The study also examined the frequency of use for e-books, how often they were chosen as an information resource over their traditional paper counterparts. The results indicated that they were under-utilised. On average e-books made up 15% of a collection but were only used 11% of the time. The study’s interpreters believe that this could be in part due to frustrations of students having to use different procedures when accessing print or digital formats. “A lack of understanding of the strength of the research nature of the e-book collection” is also cited for the rather weak take-up.

Less surprising was that cost and quality of content were cited by the librarians as two of the most important factors they consider when purchasing electronic titles.

Interpretation of the results was conducted by Allen McKiel, Director of Libraries, Northeastern State University.

Now 25 per cent less invasive

We blogged here a while back about Google's woes with the EU Commission. In short, the EU's a bit worried that Google is retaining too much data on its users. Google, it appears, has now backed down a little, and chopped six months off its data retention plan, reducing the period it can keep details of your searches, behaviour and other things from two years to 18 months.
Privacy International released a fairly excoriating report earlier this week, taking to task a number of firms, chief among them good old Google, ranked lower even than the Beast of Redmond, which, you might think, is now a fluffy bunny in comparison. We'd agree if we hadn't seen the videocast Steve Ballmer sent over two weeks ago to the London unveiling of the HTC Touch, but there you go.
Anyway, back to the Privacy International report, which labelled Google a threat to privacy - see the executive summary here for more information on this if you don't feel like wading through the report.

Publishers warm up to climate change

Climate change and biofuels are closely connected and currently in the midst of a great deal of debate. Two new information resources from Nature and Biomed Central may just clarify some of the facts. A recent investigation at IWR demonstrated that businesses' looking for good information on climate change are faced with scant goods at present.

Nature Reports Climate Change is a new website from the Nature Publishing Group. It launched its Reports range last year focusing  on Avian Flu following the wide interest in the issue and its widespread news coverage. Nature Reports aim to provide free access to the "science behind the news", the company states. The site will cover economic, political and social implications of climate change. Nature claim that the information is accessible to all levels of readers including scientists, students and journalists.

BioMed Central  is to launch a new open access online journal Biotechnology for Biofuels. The journal aimed at government, scientific research and private enterprises  that are increasingly looking towards Biofuels as an answer to climate change and energy security issues.  Of particular interest to the journal will be research in to creating the fuel from cellulosic biomass.

Pragmatism and the semantic web

Paul Miller at Talis mentioned a Tim Berners-Lee video in which he tries to explain, in plain English, the semantic web to ZDNet's Executive Editor David Berlind.
He chose the term 'data bus' to describe the end result. Computers can dip into the data bus and drag out whatever information they need, providing it's in there, and manipulate it how they see fit.
The data gets on the bus by being encoded using the RDF standard data format. And it can be sucked out using a query language called SPARQL, among other things.
(These are all my words, by the way, not Sir Tim's. But I hope I'm reflecting a new mood of pragmatism that Miller was relieved to note when Berners-Lee was talking at last month's www2007 conference in Banff. )
Changing existing data formats would prove a nightmare within and between organisations. They would have to trickle the changes to the furthest reaches of their organisations and their partners. A better approach for existing data is to 'wrap' it inside RDF. And this is how the great migration to the semantic web is going to happen.
It will start with data which benefits its owners from being open. It will be sucked up by computers belonging to people who believe they can deliver value by linking disparate information together.
Think of mashups. They link, say, mapping information with building information and, maybe, deeper level stuff about who's in the building and what they are doing there. Okay, I made that last bit up, but it's feasible. The main issue is that the mashup writer has to explicitly link up to the APIs for what they want to surface. These might be proprietary and, in any event, once a mashup is done, it does only that job.
Apply the same thinking to the semantic web: the data is in standard formats (think XML) and it can be grabbed and manipulated by software. Not only that, but relationship information and alternative terms can be embedded and defined.
David Tebbutt Likes IWR, for example. A subject, predicate and object. Such encoding, derived from one of my reading lists or my vote in StumbleUpon could be extracted and aggregated with others to draw new conclusions. Expect to see provenance and/or trust attributes as well.
The semantic web project is under way. Companies like Talis are already working hard to make sure that their own products and services exploit these standards to go way beyond the narrow world of libraries.
The W3C stuff makes for dry reading, but we all owe it to ourselves to become familiar with the opportunities presented by the sematic web.

Big Brother inevitability of Google digitisation

There's something inevitable about libraries joining the Google Book Search library digitisation programme. Not so long ago the announcements were grasped with keen interest, now they excite as much interest as yet another series of Big Brother with, oh how shocking racism breaking out!

Of course, there is a colossal gulf of difference between the sad navel gazing of Big Brother and its assorted misfit viewers and contestants and the digitisation of 12 research libraries. Yesterday's announcement by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation is without doubt important to the organisations involved and the users.

But as each institution joins the Google project the tipping point between Google becoming the standard interface to the vast bulk of research information comes ever closer. And with each announcement we accept it as the norm. Recent deals have improved though, whether through a greater sympathy for the information community by Google, or, and more likely increased deal making savvy by the collection owners.  This recent deal, which will add 10 million copies of material to Google will include books in and out of copyright and the statements are very clear from the off, those titles still in copyright will be protected. The prickly issue of how publishers know whether their title is held by a library and will be digitised has still not been resolved though.

"This library digitisation agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education," said Lawrence Dumas, provost of

Northwestern

University

. I can't help feeling it’s a case of the major university libraries are part of this Google juggernaut, it cannot be beaten so institutions feel that they might as well join it.

CIG Web 2.0 discussion asks if corporate research is being threatened?

The evolving role of the corporate research centre and the impact of technology is under discussion next week at a City Information Group event where the editor of IWR will be asking Web 2.0 guru Euan Semple and Alacra MD Donald Roll.

Under discussion will be ideas such as the Self-Serve model, mobile access, the big box model and Web 3.0. There will be a chance to pose your own questions and to discuss whether new technology is improving corporate research, eroding the role and responsibilities of the information professional; and is it improving business information?

Details of the event are:

Date: Wednesday 12th June 2007
Time: Register from 6pm onwards, starting promptly at 6.30pm
Venue: Balls Brothers at the Minster (downstairs)

Minster Court

Mincing Lane

London

EC3R 7PP

Cost: CiG members £20. Non-members £30

Subscription agents Prenax are sponsoring the food and drink.

New interface from Ask

No, no, not that Morph. This Morph. I've been stuck in front of a load of page proofs in the office this morning, so missed Ask's presentation downstairs in IWR towers' TV studio, but apparently the bods have been in to tell us all about it. (Actually, Vodafone were just in to show off their new mobile portal, too, but more that later).

First thing that strikes me? Ooh, you can change the background image. Well, until you actually enter a search term.
Ask has done a good job of creating context around a search (see the
left hand column - it's very easy to refine searches and branch off
into interesting areas) - and it's now presenting all kinds of extra
information and links in the right hand column, as well. There's some
pretty interesting little bits and pieces in there. 

Futurology – predictions for social media and enterprise 2.0

In a wide ranging conversation Forum host Euan Semple asks the panellist what their assumptions and predictions are for the future of Web 2.0.

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer of Sun Microsystems begins with the idea that a something starts out as a wild idea and then becomes less contentious as it is discussed through comments, and wiki tools, you get the feeling that he sees this as the concrete that will ensure the foundations of Web 2.0 are strong.

Phipps describes Atom as the thinking man's RSS and he thinks forums, blogs and wikis will have Atom feeds. Semple adds how you have lots of little things that no one pays any attention to within an organisation, but then it builds up. Phipps responds that all of Sun's tools have tagging tools that do just this.

Nick Ward, media analyst with Panmure Gordon & Co, takes on the debate about where will Web 2.0 go as a business. Phipps finds it difficult to believe the profits of these companies will be difficult realise. So far for these companies to be floated on the stock market would be difficult and points to the fact that Last.fm and Friends Reunited were bought by large existing vendors, CBS and ITV respectively.

Thomson-Reuters deal is a sign of businesses having to restructure.  The city is sceptical are worried whether the ad supported model for the likes of Myspace really has legs to it. I simply think the whole issue of the business model for these and the loyalty towards general social media sites will struggle and it’s the more specialist ones that will triumph. There are a lot of B2B businesses that operate through jargon and barriers and they will have a great deal to lose through transparency from Web 2.0, law firms and broker firms are amongst those that could be threatened.

People want the name of a very big bank like UBS in on a deal so that if it goes wrong they can say, "well we had the best people in the world on this," but I would argue there are a few years while the barriers to remain up.

Semple says he would pay to be part of high quality networks, the ad revenue can go, Ward reminds him that subs revenue model is very slow to develop.

Marc Monseau, PR person for drug giants Johnson & Johnson thinks there has to be some guidance, Phipps adds that Sun bloggers all have to go through some training. "I see that as being one of the advantages, you then have a well informed workforce and that has benefits," Monseau said. Ward believes because it is public, it can make people more sensible, it is self regulating. Semple reminds everyone that it is easy to consider Web 2.0 as geeky for teenagers, yet there is an audit trail, which is a corporate thing.

People are using Facebook to create and manage their own identity and it means they cannot be treated as demographics anymore. Phipps agrees, all of the internet's evils is because it doesn't have strong identity mechanisms and is looking forward to strong identity, which he believes will damage spam and other areas.

Sun has a lot of tools being developed for identity management. Ward adds that mass culture is no longer needed to make a profit, discussing the long tail. Instead all of us watch and read block-busters and absorb all its marketing, we can all indulge our individual tastes and there will be greater cultural diversity. He thinks it is already happening. Phipps responds that the long tail is also about monopolising niches, but Ward doesn't believe that its all niche businesses pandering to Rupert Murdoch, because it will be easier to make and distribute products and make a profit from them.

Adriana Lukas believes it is all about focussing on the individual and the organisation will follow.

Its critical that fear shouldn't prevail

Critical success factors for making social media work
The task for the speakers this afternoon was to examine what crucial factors should be considered by an organisation looking for a successful social media implementation. The panel moderated by Adriana Lukas, founder of Big Blog Company saw contributions from Chris Shaw, global practice director, Factiva insight, Dow Jones Enterprise media, the world renowned news and financial information outfit, Suraj Kika, CEO Jadu, an enterprise content management software house specialising in local government implementations, Claire Wozencroft, business development manager at C2B2, social media and web-portal experts, accompanying them was Remco Verheul the CTO of NewsGator, a leader in RSS technology.
A dedicated panel debate ensued, it started with Lukas stating that social computing can often mean different things to different people, both in terms of the results as well as the expectations, as the session drew on it was apparent that the rest of the panel could vouch for this with their own experiences.
“From a technical point of view it is better to look at current Internet technology and see how it can be translated into use for companies”. Said Lukas “My interest is selling to me as the user, how does it help, do my job better, connect with others?” she asked “What needs to also be taken into account isn’t just the user in the equation, as after all people have actually pointed out to me earlier, that business leaders are also trying to run a business, how does that factor in to the equation?”
Sharing his clients fears, and not afraid to point out that a Dow Jones customer will often be a corporate behemoth. Chris Shaw said, “ Our customers are corporates and they are sometimes terrified of secrets and opinions bleeding out of the building. We try to allow them to measure the type and flow of content, so they at least know what is going on with their user-base”
Echoing this sense of fear that businesses can suffer from, Claire Wozencroft had this to add, “The key thing to us is power – control to our clients – to say who can edit and manage them, that the staff onboard understand and learn the processes.” But before the situation sounds all negative Wozencroft was quick to point out that sometimes it was the staff who can often provide ideas to problems, organisations need interest and willing.
Suraj Kika has also noted the “fear factor” is prevalent in his companies specialist client base, local authorities and government. It is, as he pointed out “the factor that will determine if users, use – or not”. He gave an example of the culture in local government that doesn’t exactly nurture the idea that staff should be publishing content, saying, “We are trying to help users overcome their fear of publishing content internally.” He gave an example of how some local government departments insist on staff having sign off before sending a letter out.
Thereafter the topics moved to discuss the social aspects of each other’s respective technologies, as well as their preferred methods of communication. Wozencroft waxed lyrical about how much of a convert she has become, although it wasn’t as a permanent replacement to face to face meetings, she said “Although I’ve never been into social networking sites, I have been into traditional networking, like a social butterfly. However using the C2B2 technology has made it easier to communicate with colleagues, when on the road and working from home. The point is this is a huge change for me, previously I never would have used or relied on it, it won’t replace one to one, but will change the business landscape.

Social Bookmarking gives a health check for BUPA

Keely Flint, Lead Information Architect for BUPA, kicked off her case study talking about the private health giant's corporate culture as somewhat “cerebral”. In her task to bring improvements to internal communication processes and as part of her role, Social Bookmarking software, it emerged, was to become a key tool.
Flint told us how she spent months looking at the company culture, all around the organisation in fact and it became clear that the channels needed internally just weren’t there.
Identifying how important the right information is in internal communications, especially in large corporations, Flint took us through the main factors or “Three enablers” that she argued must be there. These included:
1. Visibility
2. Accessibility
3. Mobility
All three, proved essential in her implementation.
Elaborating, Flint explained that large organisations have a tendency for `silo`or isolated team cultures. Information doesn’t travel very far as it relies on distribution via a peer-to-peer and hierarchical network. The delivery of this information typically gets passed around via email and meetings. Anyone who has ever experienced working in a large-scale corporate environment compared to a small scale SME can probably identify with that sentiment. Ultimately, Flint argued, the larger the organisation, the more it is disadvantaged.
So where does social book-marking software come into all this? Flint explained to the audience that it allows users to tag and retain the information/research they have used and at a later time, share that knowledge around the organisation, or simply allow access to it. That can be multi format such as images, text video etc.
Benefits were outlined as follows:
1) Users can collect links and distribute that information quickly and effectively
2) Create a knowledge asset from tagging research and information used
3) Uncover expertise in the organisation – by finding people and their hidden skills
Flint explained how BUPA then also wanted to analyse the information that was collected and see who was using what and how. But she warned us that there are huge obstacles in taking on an initiative such as this, it is not easy.
The problem for large organisations is that its tough to “just try things” being difficult to justify these and give a measured RoI to the powers that be. This is because social networking can be quite unquantifiable and subjective when trying to measure success or even failure.
There was a need to get buy-in from people users and managers alike. Then there was of course the need for organisational control – who has the key to the filing cabinets? So to speak. Flint explained it was necessary to remember that social networking by its nature is a messy process and not a controlled process seen traditionally in such companies.
Main lessons of the last 6 months:
1. It takes a long time for people to aggregate and add content; there is a merit for people populating it with things of interest.
2. Don’t go down the governance route. If its not easy it won’t be used.
3. If people can’t see benefits they won’t use it and you can’t force them.
4. Finally an organisation needs to market the idea and reasons to the potential user-base.

Ben Edwards, publisher Economist.com discusses social media on Economist.com

As a weekly print publication with a readership that is global, and yet could easily be considered non-web friendly, there are serious challenges

"Looking at some of the social media ideas we are considering for our readers. Social media is something you develop with your customers," Edwards said.

"I used to be a journalist for 14 years, and went to join IBM to work in the area of social media. One of the things I noticed when I rejoined the Economist was the speed at which social media is being adopted, especially over the last 6 months.

"USA Today, has really switched on all the social functionality that Myspace or Facebook utilises. Our traditional interaction with our readers is called the Letter to the editor. It is an ancient medium, there are 24 letters; they carry the name and the address of the letter writer as that is the convention.

"We now publish all letters online, we get around 1000 a month using a blog technology and readers can comment on each others letters. We will add some discovery tools so that we can develop a community of letter writers. We are taking the traditional way that our readers communicate with us and broadening it online.

"I want to create an experience that reflects back to our readers and for the Economist the letter is a good place to start. A letter is a more considered form of content than a comment. It has to reflect what people expect from a brand.

"Our blogs use a separate content management system from the normal one, this creates ghettos of content. We are now using a technology called Pluck, it will deploy social media to any of your systems and is platform agnostic. These include discovery tools, comments, recommendations like a Digg, and profiling.

"On USA Today, the content that has the most recommendations has the highest place on the site. The community of the site are creating the front page look."

Economist one-year roadmap is based on two thoughts:

1: Interaction with our content

2: Reader interaction with reader

Edwards also plans to launch an external blog for development, "it’s a further way for me to open up to our existing customers and ask for feedback and that is another instance of the power of the blog."

Blogging and social media forum 2007

IWR Blog is at the Blogs and Social Media Forum 2 today, a conference organised by Incisive Media, which IWR is part of.

The conference will be discussing a wide range of blogging and social media issues including its impact on the media, advertising, content generation, business issues and social networking.

Amongst the organisations discussing the technology and its impact are broadcasters the BBC, content management specialists Jadu and private healthcare provider Bupa.

The BBC open up the debate early on in a conversation panel discussing how social media is affecting how people perceive it as an organisation, hosted by social media expert and former BBC employee Euan Semple. "Back in the 90s we bough H2G2, a version of Wikipedia, we've done blogging in areas like the Highlands of Scotland, but that approach of having to come to .co.uk will not apply any more," Jem Stone, a BBC executive producer New Media and Technology admits.

"The BBC should be using the web as a canvas, not just BBC.co.uk.  The BBC doesn't need to be on the internet, it has to become part of the internet and that is now coming to be. We need to integrate, we need to be on del.ic.ious. We ask people to submit to the BBC. We will reflect this, we ask people to share with us."

"What we need to get better at is monitoring the conversations, we need to do that better and we need to reflect that better on the BBC.co.uk site and we have tools that start that."

"What we are very bad at is engaging with those conversations in those spaces, and it is hard work. The perception of the BBC, it is interesting to note that Semple's perception of the BBC online is from the bloggers he knows, that is not necessarily accurate."

"Internally we need to shift the perception of what the BBC is doing. You need to have your staff and colleagues out there in these spaces." Semple adds, this is affecting all sorts of organisations.

Murdoch inches closer to Dow Jones deal

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is closing in on a deal to buy the Dow Jones media and financial information group according to the weekend's news reports. News aggregation service Factiva is part of the Dow Jones group following last year's acquisition of the remaining half from Reuters.

At the centre of Murdoch's bid is the Wall Street Journal newspaper, which "Dirty Digger" as Murdoch is affectionately known, covets. The Financial Times believes Australian Murdoch will raise his bid for the group to the expected $5bn. A series of alternative bidders may also surface, including Thomson-Reuters rival Bloomberg, General Electric, Yahoo and even the FT's parent company Pearson.

A potential stumbling block for Murdoch has been his reputation for meddling in editorial matters. The Bancroft family, which holds 64% of the voting power at Dow Jones has now agreed to meet with Murdoch to discuss these issues and it is reported that Murdoch is minded to offer the family a seat on the News Corp board, his news empire.

The Wall Street Journal is revered for its editorial independence and there is great concern that ownership by Murdoch will erode this.

Unlike News Corp, the Dow Jones group has been very successful at the transition from print to online information delivery, with the Wall Street Journal charging online users, just as it does offline. Murdoch's online attempts have so far not been as successful and he could benefit from an infusion of Wall Street ideas.