Will they or won’t they?

Keen to keep us all guessing, News Corp are now reported by the Wall Street Journal to be looking more likely to buy their parent company; the Dow Jones Media Group.

Late yesterday, share prices in Dow Jones, who own online news service Factiva, as well as the WSJ, fell, after a News Corp spokesperson confirmed that a buy out was now “highly unlikely”.

Despite offering $60-per-share for the organisation, Murdoch met resistance from members of the controlling shareholders, the Bancroft family. Less than a third of the family wanted the sale at the price offered which was enough to potentially scupper a deal. It seemed it was also the catalyst to ending the buy-out talks.

Since then, there are reports emerging that an arrangement has been made for certain costs to be covered that may sway key members in the vote. The BBC are reporting that “discussions were hinging on a proposal for the Dow Jones board to create a fund to cover the Bancroft’s' expenditure on corporate advisory fees, thought to be about $30m”.

When visiting Poland in June Murdoch told journalists  that he wanted the deal done in three weeks “or not at all”. Over a month later it looks like he has now waited long enough.

The controversial deal has also led to fears over the future editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Murdoch has something of a reputation for a ‘hands-on’ approach to the editorial process in his other media outlets; these include The Sun, News of the World and Fox News and sparked initial worries of WSJ’s future independence among staff members when the announcement was made in May. WSJ journalists held protests in the lobby of their New York offices last month to voice their objections in selling to the tycoon. Murdoch has however promised to allow the WSJ to keep its editorial voice if News Corp were successful in their bid.

Meanwhile, the BBC also say that an alternate bid is being headed by MySpace founder, Brad Greenspan, who has support from five investor groups to see off the media mogul’s offer.
Educational publisher, and FT owner, Pearson, who were reported to have expressed an interest in the group, have remained tight lipped over that aspect of the deal today. Chief Executive Dame Marjorie Scardino preferred to play down talk that Murdoch may now set his sites on the FT “I don’t think that’s what he’s after… We’re not a mass market consumer paper and that’s what News Corp is used to running”.

***Update: It has emerged overnight that News Corp have been successful in their $5.6bn (£2.7bn) bid for the Dow Jones Media group. There is an interesting Q&A from the BBC on some of the more fundamental aspects of the deal.

Documentum gets real with D6 release

Documentum might well set a trend for the next generation of ECM with the announcement of its version 6 release today.

Due to be generally available in about a month, D6 is a platform play that, as the firm’s Karin Ondricek explained to me last week, decouples the ECM applications themselves from the underlying managment services and goes hunting for developer support and faster setup.

Documentum says it wants to play nice with SOA environments so it has given web services a hearty hug and stripped out tags, metadata and other code that would prevent it working closely with other programs, even those that it competes with.

It is also opening up development through an IDE that uses the Eclipse open-source development tools, and promising faster deployment and ease of use through preconfigured options.

Of course, these are not charitable gestures or the result of some spontaneous embrace of community feeling. The Eclipse IDE apart, there is no broader open-source offering, although it would surprise me if that strategy had not been tabled in discussions. It’s just realpolitik; a sensible admission that proprietary thinking is dying on its feet, in ECM at least.

Internally, it must have taken a deep swallow but perhaps the most significant change is that Documentum is openly saying it wants to be the back end to Micrsoft’s SharePoint Server. For the remaining eRoom customers this might not be great news in terms of future development of that product but for Documentum it makes sense. Even if some of the world is going to move to Microsoft for the simplicity of SharePoint’s content management, there is still a valid argument in bigger shops for a combination of SharePoint simplicity with some more scalable, grown-up ECM at the back end.

Ovum’s Mike Davis says “the 800lb gorilla [has] shaved off the fur and got a six-pack.” Stand by for more slimming down and auto-emasculation among ECM giants.

BBC, commercial bias and buck-passing

The BBC iPlayer download service for recent programmes started its public trials today. First, note that it is intended for home users only. Presumably this is because you download it with an integral peer-to-peer file sharing program supplied by Verisign. And companies are unlikely to swallow that.

By downloading and agreeing to the terms which, incidentally, do nothing to protect you and everything to protect the BBC, you agree to allow your computer to be used as a distribution point for any BBC files that you have downloaded. If your ISP imposes monthly upload limits then you may find yourself getting a surprise as the Beeb serves stuff from your machine rather than one of its own.

Then there's the Digital Rights Management angle. Sure, the Beeb wants to protect its own and others' rights in downloaded material. Perfectly understandable. But it means that it has chosen to restrict its service to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows XP. Commercial bias or what?

Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology, said "Developing a version for Apple Macs and Microsoft Vista is absolutely on our critical path." A sizeable minority would also like to know what its plans are for the Firefox browser. And, for that matter, Linux.

He also said, "Our vision is for BBC iPlayer to become a universal service available not just over the internet, but also on cable and other TV platforms, and eventually on mobiles and smart handheld devices."

So maybe jumping into bed with Microsoft is more of an affair than a marriage. But, no doubt, they'll need to stay good friends.

Registering and downloading is fairly straightforward although you have to have two sign-ins, one for the beta software and the other for downloading programmes. The download is 4.28MB and it expands to 6.28MB inside your machine.

Grabbing a film is easy enough and the download is smooth (I tried at around 7:30am - later in the morning is not, apparently, the best time for doing this.) A 30-minute programme, World Business Report, was 108MB. I didn't time it (went off to do other things) but it seemed to be about a meg every two seconds.

On screen, it shows in a smallish window (about 400 x 200 pixels) but it can be expanded to full screen for distance viewing. As ever with this kind of thing, the quality doesn't improve with size.

Bottom line? The peer-to-peer angle is downplayed, yet it would seem to be a show-stopper for many. The Windows Internet Explorer/XP only, with no time-scale for Mac or other platforms, is troubling. It seems that 'getting a stake in the ground' was more important than worrying about where the stake was being planted. However, the quality of the stake, in the form of the iPlayer software and content access, is very slick and seems to work well.

Lots of cash spent, and no case yet

If you ever had any doubt as to the cost of funding an ID card, then this article from IWR's sister title Computing, may help dispel the last few nagging doubts that a national ID card might actually be worth the investment. So far, £53m has been spent on consultancy alone. Not only that, it appears that the goalposts have moved from the ID Card system as a standalone identity card to a more complex ID management scheme that ties in to a lot of other stuff. Forget about mission creep, this is beginning to sound like the sort of ungodly collaboration between IT consultant jobmakers and sneaky pols that John Pilger should shake a very large stick at.

Is Second Life the right tool for Further and Higher Education?

I recently came across a survey on Second Life usage in UK Further and Higher Education (FE/HE). The research was commissioned by Eduserv, a not for profit IT service company and reveals some interesting examples of how the virtual world is being used as a learning tool. The study examined the scale of use* and asked how much time and resources were being committed, crucially were these efforts a success or did they fizzle out?

IWR technology expert David Tebbutt wrote a very informative article on Second Life back in our March issue, he discussed how companies such as IBM and Cisco think its worth having a strong presence there, as well as study sponsors Eduserv. Clearly they believe there are legs in the technology.

The findings revealed that there were “disappointingly few examples of actual use in teaching and learning” despite the research team uncovering “a great deal of discussion and speculation concerning its potential”.

Whilst this may not seem especially surprising, given that Second Life is relatively new and vulnerable to accusations of being a 2.0 gimmick, the study cites Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, as being supportive of the platform for use as an educational and learning tool. There is a dedicated wiki and discounts are available for HE and FE institutes wishing to set up shop in the virtual world. Furthermore, the anecdotal-led research flagged up some interesting ways that Second Life could be used as a unique teaching aid. I think some of these ideas offer an insight into why Second Life has the potential to become far more significant to information professionals and academics alike, although not without some refinement and despite current lacklustre take-up.

Elmwood college in Fife who tool part in the study outlined how certain members of their staff are already considering ways to make the most of a virtual world with plans mentioned of golf course design, sports event management and even as a marketing exercise where students using the Second Life economy “could make this a more interesting exercise than a paper-based, theoretical approach”

One academic, cited by the study as Dr Peter Miller told the researchers “I am currently developing a series of visualisation tools that I intend to use in cell and molecular biology lectures and make available in-world for informal student use from September 2007 onwards”. Dr Miller goes on to explain how students will then have the ability to build protein structures and “animate the regulatory networks in gene expression” in the virtual world.

The Open University, being a distance-based learning operation has understandably been quick off the mark to get involved with Second Life. It owns three islands and has experience there, running several tutorial-based courses on its CetlMent Island. The study also cites examples of specific courses provided in Second Life such as Leeds Metropolitan University for architecture students, with its “Designing in Virtual Worlds’ course. Meanwhile, staff at Newcastle and Nottingham Trent University, are looking at ways their business studies students can exploit the technology using the Second Life economy.

However, there were examples flagged up that aren’t so encouraging; one unnamed respondent cited how he tried to conduct an online SL induction lesson from home with his post-grad students in the classroom. “This was a disaster” he said, as he was unable to control the attention of the class. Notably the next day an alternate group of students attended the same class but this time in the “real world”, it was a success. “We achieved more in 30 minutes than we had in three hours the previous night. It made me realise the importance of a blended approach to inductions into Second Life” he says.

What is interesting is that even if Second Life isn’t ready to be taken on by all or even be up for consideration, I think these examples give a glimpse of its potential to be much more to academia in the coming years if not necessarily months.

With ever faster connection speeds and high definition graphics its real power lies not just in the 3-D visualisation of material, but if (when?) an effective way to engage with our peers and colleagues can be found that is superior to a “standard” online interface or real world experience. Or is the benefit of Second Life more about the experience of knowledge sharing? and dare I say an element of play that adds a whole new dimension to the learning experience?

The study concludes that there are over 40 UK universities and colleges that have a presence on Second Life, although not all are publicly available as they are in development. There is also talk of several institutes looking at Second Life as revenue generator for marketing to both future and past students. Most notably the research indicates that “many academics are developing Second Life with a view to provide facilities for the 2007-08 academic year.”

With that in mind, the examples above raise certain questions for me:

1) Are IWR readers using Second Life and if so how?
2) Is Second Life a mere fad or at least irrelevant for academia?
3) Does Second Life need to evolve or develop considerably before it could be of any realistic use to you?
4) Are early adopters actually pioneers and will end up stealing a march on those of us who haven’t yet signed up?
5) Is this the right time to join up?

As ever, I’m always interested to hear what any of you think about this.

*The study was originally going to be international, however researchers ended up focussing on UK FE and HE institutions as it emerged they were using the application more than expected and thus provided enough information for the purposes of the study.

ECM consolidation isn’t done

Enterprise

content management is sometimes cited as a “mature” field of business software in that its leaders include very large companies such as IBM, EMC, Oracle and Microsoft.

In fact, this is a sector with plenty of consolidation still to go.

Some reasons why:

First, Microsoft has still to pounce. It has built from scratch a seat at the content management table through SharePoint, a product that grows like topsy through organisations that don’t even know it’s there a lot of the time. But Microsoft could use some experience in the "enterprise" aspect of enterprise content management and the remaining independents in ECM are in Big Green's usual price bracket for acquisitions.

Second, the big players won’t necessarily limit themselves to one-off entries. IBM bought FileNet, EMC bought Documentum and Oracle bought Stellent but that doesn’t mean their jobs are done. The desire for scale, customer base and additional licence revenue to buoy share prices will mean that more deals on top of earlier strategic moves are possible.

Third, Open Text may be feeling lonely. As the remaining unmarried ECM firm, the company must be thinking long and hard about its future and other companies will be thinking the same way.

Fourth, some companies haven’t made the ECM move. SAP, at least when Shai Agassi was there, was expected to make an ECM splash but has still not moved. An ECM deal would make sense given the German firm’s dominance of business applications.

More ECM M&A? Certainly.

Semantic search with Hakia, CognitionSearch and Powerset

The latest GuideWire Report takes a look at personalisation and discovery: the next big thing in our web experiences. We've already seen glimpses of it in things like Stumbleupon, which got itself bought by eBay.

The report goes on to examine the landscape for personalisation in some detail, concluding that hundreds of technologies are vying for attention at the moment. The market needs to shake out and recommendation and discovery will become as natural a part of our web experience as search.

Before tackling the new stuff, the report said "The search game has been commandeered by semantics and natural language, a burgeoning sector that merits its own analysis. The user intent on finding information online will turn to Powerset, Hakia, CognitionSearch, and others to find needles hiding in the Web’s haystack."

Hakia, CognitionSearch and Powerset. Who? The implication is that these are mainstream services to which we turn naturally. But, according to their websites, they are all beta or even pre-beta. Mind you, to call CognitionSearch a beta is a bit of a swizz because Cognition, the company, is well established in search circles. However, these innovations do give us an insight of the sort of thing that's coming down the track.

In terms of Google-like usability right now, Hakia is head and shoulders above the others. It works but it often doesn't seem to exhibit much more understanding of the question than Google does. A search for "What happened to Caxton Software?" delivered a good first result from Cardbox (a product Caxton published in 1982). In Google it was the second result. Hakia just about beat Google on the question "Why did Tony Blair resign?" But it did, rather cleverly, throw in a recommendation to read a 2004 Guardian leader suggesting that Tony Blair, rather than Greg Dyke, should have resigned following the Hutton report. So maybe Hakia does have brains and would be worth keeping an eye on.

Powerset is currently just website words and a YouTube movie, although it has a demo which it will be showing on July 24th in San Francisco if you happen to be passing. The product is scheduled for public testing in September.

CognitionSearch seems to be working its way through specific categories en route to a more general facility. At the moment it lists Case Studies, Government, Health, Political Blogs and Wikis as its active categories. Social Networks is there as a teaser, but greyed out at present. Within each category, it offers document sets although, under Wikis, it offers just one - Wikipedia.

Each of these companies, and many more, are looking for the holy grail of search - a way to deliver relevance without putting too great a burden on the everyday user.

Business models and sustainability. How do we maintain and develop e-content?

Catherine Draycott, chair of British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) and the Wellcome Trust discusses how difficult it can be for image libraries within an organisation, including museums because there is often a need to generate a profit. She wants the industry and BAPLA to consider new models where there is an exchange between the academic community and the image provider, whether it is partnership or digitisation benefits or other ways of sharing revenue.

Wellcome now makes its images available under Creative Commons and a large percentage of the royalties goes to the creators. They have gone to the attribution model, because it is in line with the Wellcome's OA policies and the policy applies to the images on the Wellcome trust. If the images are for teaching, academic research and non-commercial publication the fee is waived.

Intelligent Television a documentary company that looks to make educational material more widely available, chief exec Peter Kaufman begins talking about screen based visual material, which is what a TV producer considers and so do information professionals. Gartner believe that paid search is a $15bn industry. The JISC digitisation strategy doesn't talk about free  and open access and focuses on business models and public private partnership and Peter Kaufman thinks that is a practical approach.

In the Q&A Draycott describes an idea of using the same metric as PR companies use to quantify the value of media coverage compared to the cost of an advertisement, to the re-use of images from an image library and how that may be useful for archive holders, especially as they are subsidising commercial organisations by providing the images.

Living with Google Book Search digitisation

Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections (Associate Director), Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Michael Keller, University Librarian, Stanford University

Sharing the platform the pair were talking about the Google digitisation experience. Ovenden said, "Our involvement is a focus on 19th century printed materials. We have taken the copyright very seriously and studiously avoided material that will cause us difficulty.
"The project has been industrial scale, the Google project is on a different planetary level to the JISC project. Organising the move of hundreds of thousands of books from 40 locations and returning them in a matter of days.
"You can already see millions of our pages on the Google Book Search interface and the expectations are moving incredibly fast. We refer to the project as "The Beast" and it has to be kept fed and is already having a dramatic effect on scholars and we are learning how little we know about our collections and it reminds us that we need to get back to our shelves and we have learnt that books are in much worse condition than we realised and has been used more than we realised. Also discovering a lot of titles that have not been catalogued because people didn't think it would be used. We are about to start integrating this content into new services with text mining, marking up texts and sharing."

Keller describes Stanford's involvement: "We had a lot more complications due to the legal wrangles. Have a copyright determinator. There are intricacies of the law which means there is a lot of content that is in the public domain, but you wouldn't know that from reading the law.
"We have discovered 8000 books that need conservation from the Google project. Stanford's expectations are that it is an indexing project, this will then lead to results. Indexing and searching are highly valued by 85% of our readers and make a real difference and will be using the scans for preservation.
"We will now be indexing our works in new ways and we will be indexing by ideas to create linkages that you would not expect. Citation linking is very valuable and very important. New kinds of searching such as associated searching will create a vector expression that can be used to compare a selected text to pre-computed expressions of other texts. We will be able to use the OCR texts as the test bed for new research using our books, to develop new search algorithms, to trace all manner of subjects, this seems to us to be a major benefit from our liberal interpretation of US copyright law.
"The indexing and presentation information will lift all information boats everywhere, even with the Google paradox."
Ovenden, it's good to see JISC investing in other 19th Century projects. Its important to remember is a search project, one visitor to Bodlian described Google Book Search another way of using the index.

Online information could be the education utility of the future

Chris Batt, chief exec of MLA has a hard hitting presentation.

Libraries contain the raw material of the future, Batt says, and describes knowledge as being about learning, cultural identity, social development, and it has to be available to everyone.

"Understanding builds empowerment and cohesion and Batt considers this his aspiration. Our mission is to help people to take learning journeys, whether it’s the time of the next bus out of

Cardiff

or genetics. Being motivated will encourage people to carry on learning.

The only successful technology are the ones that are invisible, no one worries about how the TV or telephone works. Batt points out that presentation is the most important thing to the user and he shows and criticises examples of an archive page and the 24 Hour Museum page, both of which he states do not demonstrate to the user what they can do there.

Museums, libraries and archives have collections and customers, there role is to be the connections between the two. Collections are cared for by cultural heritage, education and research and they are passionate about it. Batt believes users though "don't give a toss" about whether these things are cultural heritage, education or research, they just want stuff they need.

Public Catalogues Foundation, could be a fantastic digital resource, it’s a collection of images of the publicly owned oil paintings in Great Britiain, county by country in the

UK

.

Batt ends on the statement, compared with fighting a war, the costs are minute and the benefits infinite. He believes the strategic e-Content

Alliance

is very important. Content in a networked environment is more important than institutes. An image of a little girl at a library hit home as Batt reminds every one that what they do now is important for her future. He wants knowledge as a utility, as trusted and as accessible and invisible as pure running water.

A common information environment

Malcolm Read, executive secretary of JISC starts the conference proper with a witty and opinionated discussion on content.

"There is a lot of content out that needs joining up with what we do. JISC is working with MLA, want to work across and environment of content that is useful across education, health and culture. The driver behind this is an economy of scale, but also to improve access.

The NHS is a very good example of an organisation of its workers also involved in higher education, depending on where they are will depend on what information they can gain access to and you can imagine the frustrations of this and we want to break this down. Set up the strategic content alliance, that includes, BBC, Becta, BL, MLA, National e-Science, Centre and the NHS."

JISC Digitisation Conference

IWR is in the Welsh capital Cardiff for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digitisation Conference, which has been opened by Carwyn Jones of the Welsh Assembly.

The event is the launch pad for the digitisation strategy from the education group; and will also show case the work that has already been carried out and to analyse the role of JISC as the conduit to academic digitisation and what lessons the organisation  and academia have learnt so far.

Based at the St David's Hotel on the regenerated Cardiff Bay area, this gleaming white tower is an example of the new Wales and the new Cardiff, a country at the forefront of technology and the cultural landscape, whether its the location for Dr Who or ground breaking broadband and content strategies.

The conference has launched a blog for the event and is asking attendees and members of the information community to contribute to the debate.

The event has attracted leading members of the information community from universities in Manchester and Oxford as well as the Open University.

Actually, it's time to be more serious about social networking

I read Dan's post (below, hopefully, but here's a link just in case this post has wandered off on its own) and thought I'd take issue. Sorry, Dan. Actually, I'm not disagreeing with Dan - after all, he is right on the money. I'm not too sure I want the IWR readers and contributors group on Facebook to know exactly how many chocolate chip muffins I ate this afternoon - that's something for my friends to know,  although possibly not the colleagues over the desk from me who wondered where the last one went.

But I also think that the line between work and social life is blurred, especially in more recent times. I talk about personal things with my workmates and contacts, and knowing about each other as people always helps to smooth things along. However, the sorts of information people share on Facebook - as Dan has pointed out - are increasingly becoming more intimate.

Yet, my first reaction to reading the post below was: isn't Facebook for professionals actually called LinkedIn? I know it doesn't get much love, and I'm one of thousands who has rather neglected their profile on that site, but frankly, it's there for friends and business contacts that I want to stay in contact with professionally. Facebook is something you share with an inner business circle, because you want to find out how everyone did at Glastonbury, or see the latest pictures of an old workmates' kids.

Then again, there is a reason why LinkedIn isn't necessarily the Facebook Pro of which we seek.

It’s time for a more serious Facebook

I found an interesting little library-centric widget for use with Facebook today, courtesy of the InfoTangle blog. Springshare, who are the creators of the LibGuides application say it’s the first library application made for the site. It works by letting the librarians among you utilise the LibGuides Web 2.0 publishing system. Springshare say “The system helps librarians publish and share information online, while highlighting and promoting library resources and services to the community.” 

If your institute or organisation has a Facebook presence then this is worth taking a look at as you can access LibGuides content and marry it to your institute’s home LibGuides system. It’s a great example of Library 2.0 potential.

Despite the very real privacy issues connected with joining Facebook, as we have discussed recently on the blog there has also come to light news that Oxford dons have been using Facebook to “spy” on their students. Apparently the young scholars have been posting images of their rowdy behaviour following exam success and initiations on the site. Complaints from members of the public to the institutes, led eagle-eyed university authorities to Facebook where all the evidence was there to see. Those involved now face disciplinary action.

Whilst the Oxford administrators did nothing worse than view publicly available photos to catch out the high-jinks enjoying perpetrators, it seems to a touch sneaky, not really “cricket” and arguably going against the spirit of what Facebook is for. Then again, should one choose to engage in antisocial behaviour and then boast about it on a public forum what else can you expect? The point is this state of affairs highlights that what one might wish to share with a network of friends; you certainly wouldn’t with colleagues or peers. Therein lays the problem.

Facebook has the potential to be a powerful professional networking medium. In fact it was originally developed for academic use, formal or otherwise, it has since then snowballed into a so-called middleclass, Myspace rival. You could argue that Facebook could now be considered a little too risky to use for professional or formal purposes. There is a lot of personal information flying around out there.

I don’t want to condemn Facebook, I like and use it, but I want a clear division between the personal and the professional. Right now, it seems Facebook has swung a little too far to the former making the latter an impossibility for me. This doesn’t mean that such a useful and powerful tool should be condemned to a fate of Friends Reunited 2.0. The LibGuides widget I mentioned above is a good example of a great Library 2.0 application.

Of course you can modify security settings but after a while I’ve found these become so restrictive as to render Facebook as a bit pointless. There is no comeback or protection to what a third party can publish about you, to start with, think old school or holiday photos and anecdotes. Whilst that’s fun to share with friends its not the kind of information you want made available in the same arena as your working persona.

With this in mind it seems to me that the time is ripe for a type of “Facebook Professional” to emerge, its remit should function in much the same way; as a tool to promote one’s professional interests, achievements, learn, seek advice and of course network. It could act as a platform for evolving your C.V. act as an organic career biography, think of the recruitment possibilities. The crucial difference being is that everyone that joins adheres to a more formal and business-like protocol, inviting a peer to an “e-coffee” (alternate suggestions to that are welcome) might be more appropriate than poking a potential new boss, and certainly more professional.

Autonomy’s Zantaz buy is worth a second look

Autonomy’s recent agreement to buy Zantaz will look a smarter and smarter move with every crashing wave of corporate governance rules and regulations, and these waves have no end in site.

While a lot of merger and acquisition activity is in pursuit of scale or take out a noisome competitor, Autonomy-Zantaz is interesting because it points to a more strategic, customer-focused direction. By joining together what is still essentially an enterprise search company with a firm that specialises in the discovery process for legal or governance activity, Autonomy is connecting two closely related processes and extending its own role in finding and using information hidden deep in organisation’s virtual vaults.

Spotting the invisible nexus between companies competing in what appear to be different software categories needs a rare eye. EMC is arguably the company with the best sight here, spotting the value of a document management software company, Documentum, and a virtualisation software company, VMware, to bolster what was a storage hardware pure-play.

ECM is itself a category created by the conflation of document management, imaging, workflow, web content management and other elements. Consolidation in the sector isn’t over yet and while most recent deals have been about acquiring customers and patching ill-executed former strategies –- hello Oracle! –- others may take a more ambitious direction. Mike Davis at Ovum has in the past suggested that business intelligence firms could be interested in adding ECM capabilities, for example, although this was a possibility dismissed by Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

Perhaps someone out there will see value in ECM tools in providing a mass template for some form of business process outsourcing, for example in governance for vertical markets.

Manpower, IBM and Second Life

According to Manpower Inc, we're going to run short of skills in the West. We'll have to find them where we can, which means further virtualisation of the workplace.

To plant its own stake in the ground, it opened Manpower Island in Second Life (SL) yesterday and got the ball rolling with a conference entitled "The World of Virtual Work".

We all turfed up expecting the usual presentations and discussions based on frantic typing. It came as an unwelcome shock to many that the conference would use audio and that audience participation could only be by typing messages to the PR company's gatekeeper.

In other words, it was not the sort of social event you'd expect (or fear) in SL. The audience was there largely to be spoonfed and it was up to the moderator, Daniel Terdiman from CNET, to try and stimulate the panellists into saying something interesting.

Of course, like all SL presences, Manpower's is partly experimental. It wants to be there - just like IBM and Cisco a while back - in part to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't. No doubt the conference was part of this experimentation.

A most interesting speaker, IBM's Colin Parris, had watched the internet move from a side-show to centre stage and he's sure the same will happen in virtual worlds. But more quickly. Where there's business value, it will happen. He pointed out that many companies prefer to work in private virtual worlds (or rooms) rather than the public SL. This parallels the internet/intranet divide.

He also drew attention to the diverse and mobile workforce (an issue in itself) and the location of the problems that need to be solved. If the people and issues can be gathered in a virtual world, then they can each be located anywhere yet still get together to understand the issues and collaborate quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.

Metaversed recorded the proceedings if you're interested in the broader debate. Or you can get the  webcast from Manpower itself, after you've registered.

New contender for Dow Jones

News service Reuters reports that Rupert Murdoch has a serious rival for to buy out US newspaper and information group Dow Jones. Ron Buckle is a US based supermarket magnate and is believed to have had meetings with Dow Jones "to explore options".

Neither Burkle nor Dow Jones made themselves available to Reuters for comment, but it claims that he has already looked into a structure which would include employee stock options. Despite strong interest from Australian born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones is looking for other bidders to appease Leslie Hill, a director of Dow Jones and member of the Bancroft family, which controls 64 per cent of the company's votes.

There is concern that if Murdoch gains control of Dow Jones its titles like the Wall Street Journal will lose their reputation for independence, which in turn could result in lower readership and revenues.
Dow Jones completed a buyout of news aggregator Factiva from Reuters last year.

How advertising works

Well, what a cracking week. The internet has been going crazy over this blog posting from a Google employee, offering to sell pharmaceutical companies ad space opposite Google searches for Sicko, a Michael Moore film taking aim at America's healthcare system. Cory Doctorow's take on the original posting at BoingBoing (see the full list of posts so far here) is fairly typical of the response the the post has generated.

To paraphrase the whole scandal, it appears that Lauren Turner, the Google employee in question, suggested publicly that Sicko portrayed health insurers and pharma companies in the US of being marketing- and advertising-driven organisations rather than companies dedicated to making people healthy. She then suggested that the aforementioned organisations buy advertising to market their way out of the problem.

Nat Torkington at O'Reilly has a great write up (thanks to BoingBoing for pointing to this one as well, by the way). I'm going to wade in as well (with considerably less authority, of course).

Are you happy with your Library Automation software?

Is Library Automation software meeting your needs?  It's a question that should be asked of all software, but of late we have been increasingly concerned about this issue. 

IWR is considering a major survey, we want to hear your success stories and your failures.  We also want to know just what the experience of acquiring this critical piece of information management software was like. Then we want to know what it was like to live with?

So, if we put a survey together, would you take the time respond?  Those interested could get the ball rolling by commenting to this blog posting. The more support we have for the idea, the more likely it is to happen.

Over to you.

Vendors offer free change of (search) engine

You would have to have had a long stretch in prison -– like a few former tech CEOs come to think of it -– to have missed the fact that search has emerged as a major software battleground over the last several years.

The vast majority of the buzz has been generated in the internet search consumer sector of course with early leaders such as Alta Vista (still going!) and Inktomi (later acquired by Yahoo) eventually being overhauled by the all-conquering Google. That story is engagingly told in John Battelle’s The Search, a book to be highly recommended for those still secretly puzzled about the inexorable rise of the G-men.

But the ability to search across the enterprise and value-chain partners is also becoming recognised as critical, hence the rise of free tools such as Google Desktop Search at the low end, and, further upscale, the release of the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini that have been quiet contributors to the firm’s sky-high revenues recently.

Slowly, some firms in the content management space are making their own moves.

Uncharacteristically perhaps, IBM has probably been the loudest and happiest to take risks. Its OmniFind Yahoo Edition is a free tool that can search and retrieve from a broad array of data sources and has a capacity of half a million documents. As the name suggests, it also uses a Yahoo front-end to make search a friendly, consumer-like experience rather than enforcing yet another arcane, proprietary front-end.

The early numbers suggest IBM is appealing to a broad constituency of firms and not just small ones. If you’re looking for the first time, or even for the nth time, at how you find those pesky files, it might be worth a try.

Microsoft is also at it, with plans to release a search appliance that promises a fast way to deploy its SharePoint Server, and of course, open-source products offer a risk-free way to trial services.

The surprise is that Open Text is rather quiet here, given how much it likes to remind us of its roots in search software.

Whether viewed as a software or hardware proposition, search is very hot and, for suppliers, a fast track into selling more wares further down the river. Look for more freebies, loss leaders and other tactics to lure you into changing the way you search.

Flippin' 'eck

Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and the man who coined the Enterprise 2.0 term, has been advocating a 'flip test' for assessing the likely impact of new technologies.

He got the idea from Professor Stanley Crouch. Presumably the same Stanley Crouch that writes columns for nydailynews.com and is occasionally controversial and is somewhat into jazz.

McAfee offers an example taken from a conference he was involved in. One of his fellow panellists said, "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.'  It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries.  You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply.  Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?"

It's an interesting approach isn't it? Can the flip test be applied whenever assessing any new technology? Hey, never mind these OPACs, how about index cards? All you have to do is come into the library - lots of socialisation (as long as it's done quietly). Access to loads of books but, often, the one you want isn't there...

Now apply it to blogging, news readers, wikis, Twitters, Facebook and so on. If a later one in that list existed, would an earlier one have made a mark?

Facebook is a strange hybrid. It largely ignores some existing technologies like RSS, yet it seems to be gaining popularity. (Like hundreds of thousands of new users per day.) It offers public places to hang out with like-minded individuals, while providing private spaces and the ability to exchange private messages as well. A kind of one-stop shop for most social things we do online.

It also offers a way to spill large chunks of your identity onto the web or into the possession of the organisation which run this essentially private domain.

Peer pressure is intense. I steadfastly refuse to 'be friends' with people I don't actually know (or like), despite the guilt that goes with hurting their feelings. Of course, I'm probably not hurting them at all, because they are just handing over their entire address books to the service and giving it permission to send out these obligation-laden 'be my friend' emails.

Perhaps we all need to take stock of where these new technologies are leading us. And the 'flip test' offered by professors Crouch and McAfee strikes me as one darned useful tool for our armouries.

Hat tip to Paul Miller for sparking off this train of thought.

Keeping secrets

One of the most entertaining things about the recent launch of Apple's iPhone has been watching what the hackers have been making of it. My personal favourite so far has involved a jeweller's loupe, used to turn the iPhone's camera into a rudimentary microscope.

There's no doubt the iPhone is selling like hot cakes, but the least attractive thing about it, as with the purchase of the most shiny and expensive new mobiles, is the contract. The handset might be free (or in the case of more fancy phones, hundreds of pounds) but the call plan you have to buy with the phone will recoup the price of the handset and more.

Quite naturally, people want to be able to use the other bits of the iPhone without paying the phone company - in the case of the US, Cingular. Apple and Cingular/AT&T have locked the iPhone to the network - you can't go t a different provider and sign up to their network. This is something the US Copyright Office and regulators over on this side of the pond think is a bad thing. Even better, it's not illegal to unlock phones.

Flood risk information could be revealed by Environment Agency, reveals Guardian

Daily newspaper The Guardian is still pursuing its worthy campaign Free our Data, which highlights how much information the government creates and then either never makes available to information professionals and consumers or does so at restrictively high prices.

Today's issue of the newspaper rather timely reveals how the Environment Agency forced an online information provider to remove flood information from its service which the company had gained from the Environment Agency. It did this as large parts of Yorkshire look more like Bangladesh as climate change wrought terrible rain and flooding on the region.

OnOneMap.com uses Google maps to offer a mash-up service that over lays information onto the maps such as properties for sale and let, the location of schools, supermarkets and mobile phones. To improve its service further, OnOneMap carried out a data scrape of the Environment Agency and collated together a layer of flood information, which, with no surprise created massive interest.

Just days before the heavens opened and flooded large parts of the UK, the Environment Agency demanded that the data be removed because of an infringement of "database copyright".

Guardian journalist Charles Arthur describes the need for this service and its use public information as an opportunity to save public money as there is a reduced need to use emergency services if houses in high flood risk areas are, effectively abandoned, especially when this information has been left out of the new Home Information Packs.

It’s a compelling story and The Guardian should be saluted for continuing this campaign, read the full story here:

British Library Toolkit means any library can join the digitising party

The British Library announced yesterday they will be making the license available for their Turning The Pages software toolkit. The 3D software has been redeveloped by Armadillo Systems and has already allowed Britain’s national library to publish fully interactive copies online of famous treasures such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks and Mercator’s Atlas of Europe.

This means that like the BL’s offering other libraries can now show their virtual books at different angles, allow users to zoom and rotate copies and even compare works. The Armadillo Systems tool-kit will allow users to add their high-resolution digital copies of works and post them online as virtual 3d reproductions. To fully utilise the toolkit, Windows Vista is a must. Adding audio commentary, annotations and even determining the kind of paper and how the page turns are options. As far as Web 2.0 widgets go, viewers can also comment on the source material.

The good news for libraries and archives that want a piece of the action but don’t have the budget is that there will be a competition run by the BL and Armadillo to offer toolkits to a set of winners. What’s more, their freshly digitised content will be accessible on the British Libraries site for 3 years giving libraries that are less established the chance to digitise their most precious books not to mention some decent exposure for the institute concerned.

Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services at the British Library has this to say; “Turning The Pages toolkit has allowed us to create high-quality digital replicas of some of the most valuable books in the World and make them available to anyone with access to the Internet. With the launch of Turning The Pages 2.0, other libraries, archives and museums can now use our software to do the same”

The enhancement to the software follows Microsoft’s initial launch of new operating system Vista, in which they fully digitised Bill Gates’ copy of Da Vinci’s codex notebook. It accompanied the BL’s to highlight how the software can be utilised to create highly interactive digital copies of printed works.   

Alfresco offers way out of ECM M&A gridlock

I suppose that if you asked anybody
following the space to provide one word to describe enterprise content
management in recent times, ‘consolidation’ and ‘rationalisation’
wouldn’t be to far off the top suggestions, closely followed by our old friends
across the software business, ‘mergers’ and ‘acquisitions’.

The conventional wisdom is that these deals
have the effect of deadening the market and creating a situation where the rich
keep on getting richer and the poor get poorer. Unable to compete against huge
budgets, startups cannot win share and wither on the proverbial -- or so the theory goes. It’s certainly
true that with the current near-frozen IPO market, it’s very tough for smaller
players to go head to head with the established players.

The old advice of ‘get big, get niche or get
out’ still has relevance and, of course, several former ECM giants such as
FileNet, Documentum and Stellent have combined the first and last of these,
opting to get big and get out of the market as independents to become scions of
the industry giants.

Others are defending niches but some,
praise the Lord, have far bigger aspirations. The old advice was written before
open-source software development was considered as a serious platform for a
business model and it’s only open-source that can prevent the ECM sector becoming a
plaything of acquisition-crazed behemoths.

Perhaps the most interesting of these new
competitors is a company I met up with for the first time recently, Alfresco. A true
open-source company that uses the GPL licence, Alfresco has plenty of
credentials to suggest it could stick around to make things interesting.

Its management and development team is a
dream ticket. The CEO is John Powell, who formerly worked at proprietary software firms including
Oracle, and Business Objects, where he rose to become COO. The CTO is John
Newton, who co-founded Documentum. The engineering team is based on former
coders from Documentum and Interwoven, providing a balance of documentum
management and web content management skills. And Alfresco even has a mix
of geographical know-how as Powell is a Brit and Newton, an American, has spent
plenty of time over on this side of the pond.

Powell’s contention is an interesting one.
He suggests that while combinations such as EMC-Documentum have created wealth
and marketing power, the stream of deal-making to add in other capabilities has
resulted in more time being spent on integration than core R&D. By starting
with a blank screen, corralling the goodwill of veteran developers and taking
advantage of the latest tools, he suggests that Alfresco can challenge the big
guys by the old trick of building a better mousetrap.

There are plenty of people in thrall to the
behemoths and citing risk aversion as an excuse for pricey, underperforming
projects, but Linux arrived in enterprises through the back door, filling
niches as it went along, despite those firms being nominally Windows shops. As new projects kick off, there’s no reason why
Alfresco can’t plough a similar furrow and become a significant challenge to the status quo.