Facebook again

Last week's round of investment in Facebook is enough to make any Dot Com veteran quake in their boots. It's not that Facebook isn't good - it's stunningly good. It's not that this particular dance involving Microsoft and a fresh young company hasn't been danced before, either - just take a look at High stakes, no prisoners for a good idea of some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that undoubtedly went on.

In short, Microsoft invested $240m, and two unnamed hedge funds plumped up another $500m, valuing Facebook at $15bn. It's a stunning number, something we haven't seen in a long time. Rightly, it scares the living daylights out of many people, myself included. It brings back memories of years past, when  things were valued on the basis of hype, on the basis of an ever-lifting market, on the basis of a new technology trouncing the status quo and ushering a new dawn of techno-wonderous utopia. But enough about the telegraph.

However, there's another way of looking at the investment, particularly from Microsoft's angle, that makes a little more sense. Remember Microsoft's recent moves into advertising? Chucking $6bn at aQuantive is a far bigger investment than a piddling $240m at Facebook. Any lay person might assume that Microsoft valued aQuantive more highly in terms of business use than Facebook; after all, it's punting  over 24 times the money on aQuantive than it is on Facebook. Of course, it's not that simple, but it's an interesting thought.

Techdirt has itself a very juicy idea of what Microsoft is up to - and it's all about aQuantive and Facebook's advertising plans. In short, the investment in Facebook is a place holder, something that makes a marketing statement about Microsoft's intentions in online advertising. I can't wait to see all of this play out.

Who do they think they are?

Today’s Guardian reports that family historians (both professional and amateur) have raised concerns over the lack access being given to paper-based archives. The report says, “There will never again be public access to the paper records.”

The problem is that the schedule for putting the paper material under lock and key and the go-live date for a replacement online version is; surprise, surprise, out of sync. It seems there has been a gap in the timetable of digitising the original material and providing members of the public access to legible resources.

As the paper records are no longer there, anyone conducting genealogical research will instead have to make-do with microfiche until the online system is completed.

According to the Guardian report, the researchers have concerns about both the legibility of material held in microfiche, and the daunting task of having to search through it. They resent being forced to use old and clunky technology until the new digitised system is up and running. “Not even God himself is going to be able to find most of this stuff” said one amateur researcher.

Sarah Williams, Editor of BBC TV show spin-off magazine, Who Do You Think You Are? said; “The sweetener was that the paper records would be replaced by a superior digital version. But to loose one before the other is ready is a highly questionable decision”

A spokesperson for the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for the General Records Office says, “When our project to create a massive online index of 250 million births, marriages and deaths is complete, it will dramatically improve public access to information of interest to family historians.” They went on to say, “The present target is to have the online index available by mid-2009”

Until that present target is either met (or moves) then some researchers may want to polish up their microfiche skills, they are going to need them for a while yet.

Cosying up to Microsoft in a crowded bed

Anybody who has been watching the TV adapatation of Fanny Hill recently will recognise that  hopping between beds can be the fastest way to win friends and influence people. In enterprise software, that truth has long been recognised, hence Open Text's announcement that it is cosying up to Microsoft by opening up a development office in Redmond,  home, of course, to the world's largest software company.

In a statement, Open Text said: "Our relationship with Microsoft is founded on customers' need for
complementary ECM solutions that blend the strengths of Microsoft and
Open Text, bringing the power of Microsoft's productivity tools and
ubiquitous presence on the desktop, together with our ECM solutions and
vertical-market expertise."

Quite so, but the problem for Open Text is that everybody has the same idea and Microsoft's bed is very crowded these days. Everybody wants to gain a lever from Microsoft's ubiquity by integrating its software with key programs and by copying its look and feel. This has been Software Marketing & Development 101 ever since companies such as Corel and Micrografx saw there was business to be had in building applications for Windows.

A secondary driver is the fact that Microsoft is eating the lunch of ECM companies, thanks to the remarkable success of SharePoint. Firms like Documentum are reduced to hoping that firms use SharePoint at the front-end and their "grown-up" products at the back end. This, they hope, is the new realpolitik, although even this compomise might be delusional.

In ECM, you can't spit without hitting a company that claims to be in cahoots with Steve Ballmer's men. Many claim to have "special" relationships, for example in developing for certain vertical industries. It's no secret that these companies care about Microsoft more than Microsoft cares about them. The only time that will change will be the day Microsoft decides it needs to buy one of these companies. Then, at last, there really will be a special bedfellow.

A chance to help Mariella

Dear Mariella,

Enjoyed the repeat of your Open Book programme today. I'd sneaked away from the computer for a bit and up you popped on the radio. It was interesting to get your take on the world of social computing. Like many people who aren't involved, your incomprehension was quite a treat. Afterwards I wondered if you were doing it on purpose to wind up two of your guests,  Victoria Barnsley, boss of Harper Collins,and David Freeman, founder of Meet The Author.

Since I write for information professionals who are interested in both books and technology, I thought it might be interesting to get a conversation going on the value, or otherwise, of the internet to book authors.

Of course, this blog post could just languish, like most do, or it might trigger some interesting feedback. That's the nature of the web. People take a look at stuff and, in moments, decide whether to linger or move on.

The note below is to put my readers in the picture. Feel free to join in.

All the best,

David

The programme involved two websites: Authonomy, from Harper Collins, which will give authors a place to upload 10,000 of their words so that visitors can decide whether it's any good; while Meet The Author plays recordings of authors talking about their work.

Mariella suggested to Victoria that Authonomy was "just a cynical way to get the general public to do the work for you" and "ultimately it's a way of you getting your paws onto new work and creating a degree of ownership  over it before you've had to commit to it financially in any way." Ouch.

The answer is, of course, that people have a chance to make an impression and get picked up for consideration by Harper Collins or, indeed, any other agent or publisher who happens by.

Mariella found it hard to believe that that Harper Collins would not be "upset" if another publisher snitched talent from the Authonomy site. Victoria suggested that this would prove that the site was a huge success. Mariella retorted with, "but isn't it just like a talent show for authors. Like something you'd expect to see on ITV?" She threw the same accusation at David Freeman.

Not surprisingly, both speakers more or less agreed with her. Victoria noted that tens of thousands of authors might get read who otherwise would have been ignored. David suggested that if publishers and agents liked the author's pitch, they might ask to see their work.

In the end, good writing is essential to being published. But these two sites offer much needed visibility and promotion for unknown authors, a way to emerge from the fog that surrounds agents and commissioning editors.

But in publishing, as in the rest of life, the democracy inherent in the internet is a bit hard to get to grips with. It may be a little threatening to people in conventional positions of power.

Would anyone care to comment?

PS I just checked out the 'Meet The Author' site and it operates on vanity publishing lines rather than YouTube. Authors pay for the privilege. I suspect this will not be the case with Authonomy.

Bibliographic benchmark for digital works is implemented by gang of four

The British Library, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia and Library and Archives Canada will synchronise their practices, in applying the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) classification system. Designed specifically for organising and retrieving library materials in a digitised age, the RDA system replaces the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.

It is expected the transition process will be put into practice at the close of 2009, during the run up to this period, any training, documentation or national application decisions made will be shared with the other three partner institutions.

The new joint initiative means good news for librarians, cataloguers and researchers; the system’s key features are a big increase of flexibility in cataloguing new media information. Such features of RDA mean that as it’s an online resource, the presentation of information will help cataloguers be far more flexible in their description of digital content, including compatibility with existing online catalogue material.

By utilising the RDA framework, any information added will abide by its own set of independent regulations, meaning that how that data is displayed elsewhere can be different. This ensures that there is flexibility in presenting records in a variety of online platforms. Ultimately, this should mean data generated into the system will be more malleable to up-and-coming database technologies as well as the viewing platform.

Nuxeo - ECM's best kept secret?

With all the excitement over mega-mergers and corporate governance mandates, some of the smaller companies in enterprise content management probably haven't had their fair share of publicity in the past few years. That's certainly true of Nuxeo, which remains one of the best-kept secrets in ECM.

Why so quiet? Well, Nuxeo has its roots in France and, in part, you can blame the media (OK, people like me) obsession with north American companies and the ups and downs of firms with huge revenue streams. In part, it's also probably because Nuxeo's platform is built on open source and open-source outfits tend to do things by stealth. Anyhow, whether it likes it or not, Nuxeo is due some attention.

The company has just released an update to its core Java-based ECM, adding a couple of features such as new search capabilities and stronger data import/export, but the real story about Nuxeo is its customer base that  reads like a Who's Who?  of French business and government.  The company has a London office and is striving to go beyond its local market -- it's worth getting to know.

Facebook the facilitator

Jackie Cooper PR runs an 'anonymous' (not any more) blog called The Pirate Geek. A couple of days ago, it posted a paeon to personal contact, honesty and the demise of the cult.

I arrived there from Edelman Analyst Relations man Johnny Bentwood's Technobabble 2.0 personal blog. Cheers Johnny. (Although, for the record, I should mention that Edelman owns JCPR.)

Anyway, this all happened shortly after BIMA's 'Great Facebook Debate' which I tipped you off about earlier this year (more on that in November's column) in which a bunch of knowledgeable people on stage, and an even bigger bunch of knowledgeable people in the audience, debated the merits and otherwise of Facebook.

Facebook, for those unfamiliar with it, is a place to hang out, link up with friends, see what they're up to, find and join groups of like-minded souls, do silly things like 'poke' and 'super-poke'. Shame about the translation - think 'nudge' and you'll be close. Groups can be closed or open, public or not. And a ton of plug-ins allow you to do other things. Think 'long tail'. The majority are pointless to the majority of users. Vampire bite anyone? Gift of a toilet roll? Some are useful too.

You may be astonished to learn that businesses are taking to Facebook in droves. Whether they're enlightened or mad remains to be seen. But the BBC (is that a business?) and BT (that definitely is) have thousands of users.

Because Facebook was honed in the hothouse of the university (it started in Harvard) its focus was on facilitating relationships and friendships. It's mind-numbingly easy to use, compared with, say, a wiki. It is intensely social. But it's not just about online communication. In the end, it's a facilitation mechanism for personal contact with the people you really want to be with, whether they're at work or out there in the real world.

In the workplace, especially, the consummation of stimulating online hookups has to be physical meetings because that's where the real relationships form and the real work gets done.

Forecast the library of the future

On my travels this week I had the pleasure of visiting Sheila Webber, Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield. Apart from discussing her two passions of information literacy and learning in Second Life (of which there will be more to come). I had the opportunity for a whistle-stop tour of their new Information Commons building. It’s impressive; light, airy and spacious, even though it’s packed full with learning resources. Significantly, a large amount of room is given over to hardware and apparently there is even a shower for scholars should brains start to overheat. The students, quite rightly, look like they are in their element.

All this ties in nicely with a recently launched initiative called The Really Modern Library. IWR columnist David Tebbutt touched on this briefly last month, in case you haven’t heard about it, the joint project is being developed between the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) and the Digital Library Federation. There are a series of meetings being held throughout October, in LA, London and New York. The team behind this are currently asking for ideas and comments on their blog.

Initially, the scheme hopes to open up the debate on mass digitisation of analogue works. This the project leaders believe, means addressing the tricky task of maintaining the preservation of analogue material but also respectfully utilising its potential in a digital universe.

By considering the prospective challenges and opportunities for imagining the library of the future, the project organisers want to nurture innovation and creativity. Up for consideration will be ideas on new interfaces, designs and models of library delivery and management of information. Such ideas could range from how networked collections will be accessed and used, to developing new tools and ways of approaching analogue work in a digitised world.

Ultimately how that will benefit libraries, publishers, academia and the arts is central to the debate.

The if:book blog goes into much greater detail. They want ideas from a broad range of professions adding good suggestions to the mix. As librarians, information professionals and the like, I’m sure you will have some pretty good thoughts of your own that you know should be heard. The blog is accessible here.

Cause and effect

This post comes courtesy of Metafilter. I could bash on about how, if I'm looking for something  interesting or  controversial when aimlessly browsing I go to Metafilter and not a search engine. I could draw a comparison between the effectiveness of Metafilter as a search engine for really cool stuff and the primacy of a certain search engine. Or how Metafilter does the job right first time most of the time, while the likes of BoingBoing et al show merely occasional flashes of brilliance when compared to the massively parallel user model of Mefi. But I won't, because they're all a bit tenuous, to be honest.
Instead, I'd like to point you toward a posting on Metafilter; if Google were optimised for Google. Click through the page, and it's possible to see how search engines have changed the physical appearance of the web. We're all aware to a certain extent of how external influences change the design and layout of sites, but I was stunned to see the sheer volume of cruft, crap and extra verbiage added to the page in the name of SEO.

Blackwell's boss resigns

René Olivieri, chief operating officer at Wiley-Blackwell, the academic book and journals publisher has resigned, reports The Bookseller.

Olivieri was ceo of Blackwell when the company merged with Wiley in a surprise move last November. Since the merger Olivieri has been heading up the transition team as chief operating officer, a role he has held since May.

He has had a long and illustrious career at the Oxford based publisher, starting out as a publisher in the 1980s, before becoming an editorial direct, deputy md, and managing director. The Bookseller reports he became ceo of Blackwell Science in 2000 and stepped into the role of Blackwell Publishing ceo a year later.

Time for Oracle to show its hand in ECM

Oracle's enterprise content management has been a long time a-coming but, with the Stellent acquisiiton done and a new release of Universal Records Management under the famous red logo, the pieces are finally falling into place.

I'm still a little puzzled over where Orac;e's organic efforts have ended up. The company was leaking plenty of information about a  move into ECM well before the Stellent announcement with the project originally dubbed Tsunami, but never made a big splash into the sector. The acquisition of Stellent was something of a surprise given how much work Oracle had done internally, and also because of the releatively small scale of the purchase.

Now, it's time for Oracle to front up in ECM and do a better job than it has done so far in explaining where it sits against the likes of EMC-Documentum, IBM-FileNet and Open Text. So far, the talk has been of baking in ECM into Oracle's Fusion middleware. Sage heads will doubtless nod along but to me this is as clear as gravy. Sure, it makes sense that Oracle's ECM tools hook up with other programs from the vendor but information managers need a better perspective on how Oracle will support the product on platforms that are rivals to Oracle in other sectors.

They also need to hear about product development plans, service and support, Oracle's view on emerging standards, and all the other components that make the ECM world go round.

For some time now, Oracle  has spent more time acquiring than explaining. Its desire for scale is understandable at a time when supplier rationalisation is on many IT departments' agendas but the remarkable merger-and-acquisition rip the firm has pursued needs to be backed up with a little more beef.

This is particulalry the case with ECM and not just because this is virgin turf for Larry Ellison's company. Some watchers will have you belive that the sector is just another bunch of code to be folded into the enterprise software broth. It's not. Those who work most closely with ECM tools are often not techies but people with long experience of archiving and librarian skills. These are people who value a close relationship with the supplier more closely than users of most other elements.

They don't need hand-holding or puppy love as some vendors seem to think, but they do want to feel they have the attention of their supplier. Oracle needs to recognise that if it is seriously seeking to conquer another enterprise kingdom.

Touchgraph link visualisation

Jon Collins, a Freeform Dynamics colleague, kindly introduced me to Touchgraph, a beautiful and practical way to discover the patterns hidden inside data sets. The data can be in local or remote databases, spreadsheets, XML files and other formats.

To give a taste of the functionality, Touchgraph has provided a number of useful and free services. You can rummage Amazon books, music and movies or present the results of a Google search. To illustrate the principles, I asked it to find the links between my top 50 Facebook friends:

The size, shape and colour provide an at-a-glance interpretation of clusters, relationships and relative importance. The detail appears in a table on the left of the screen (not shown here) and you are provided with a number of selection, filtering and editing tools.

In the picture above, I selected Gapingvoid's Hugh Macleod to see what mutual 'friends' we have. My own set of friends is quite limited because I reject most requests for 'friendship'. Anyway, back to the picture. The green London and San Francisco blobs are networks. You just click on one to see who belongs to it.

A Google search is probably more interesting, not to mention less narcissistic. After deleting the obvious rubbish hits, you can see the patterns hidden in your search results. It's like clustering on steroids.

Here are the results for a Google search for '"online information conference" 2007'. (Plug. Plug.)

The isolated pink cluster is 'marketing opportunities' and the isolated mauve cluster is 'committee members'. I threw out a couple of irrelevant clusters - you're bound to get them with Google.

Enjoy. See you at the conference?

Specialist publishers ride high at Frankfurt Book Fair

At a major international publishing event like the Frankfurt Book Fair the bright lights of trade publishing and all its household star names could easily drown out the academic and scientific publishers. But this has not been the case.

Talk at the event, in all circles, is about books and technology, in particular search and eBook readers. On both subjects the specialist publishers are leading the way and the trade publishers salute them.

Amazon and Sony were expected to steal the show with their eBook
readers, they are instead conspiquous in their absence, but that has
not stopped publishers and technology providers from talking about the
devices and their potential.

I was particularly interested in a conversation I had with sceintific,
technical and medical publishers WIley where they hinted that they and
other specialists may get involved in driving the adoption of eBook readers.
Could we see the eBook reader adopt a similar model to the mobile phone
where users sign up to a subscription service, content of a particular
kind in this case, and in return they get a sleek and sexy device? Its
certainly worked for the mobile industry, which now resembled the car
world with its emphasis on styling and marketing.

But such a move could also be a blind alley, as one expert said to me,
these devices don't support the interlinking and interactivity that
content users are currently enjoying with the web.

During the fair Google, Ingram Digital Group and Amazon have all used the scientific and academic publishers as case study beacons for just what can be done with books on the web.

Geographically the Far East is the leading adopter as its markets radically develop according to Mark Carden, Ingram senior vp.

Perhaps Amazon spread rumours of a possible launch to see if there was real interest, well if the level of conversation we've heard is anything to go by, the eBook reader is in demand.

MySpace and Google to follow Facebook Apps

It looks like they're all at it now. Techcrunch reports that MySpace will launch an application platform similar to Facebook Apps later this week. Techcrunch also broke the story that Google plans to do the same thing late last month.

I feel a little ambivalent about this, and it's partly because it's quite difficult to use an application on Facebook casually; to use it, you are prompted to invite your friends. If someone posts a video, you have to add the application too; you can't just watch it. And then there's the blasted invites to become a Jedi, Sith, Vampire, Werewolf, Mortgage adviser or similar. I might be exaggerating here, of course - Scrablous and Red Bull Roshambull are both cunning applications that have used up many working hours here at IWR towers.

There's clearly potential in applications on these sites, and opening up Google, MySpace et al is good for business and good for creativity. However, there does need to be a balance between utility to the operating sites and utility to the end user. I'm not sure about you, but I'm definitely getting a feeling that people are fed up with being swamped with apps, and fed up of spamming their friends with invites in the process. Of course, I may be (and usually am) wrong, but a successful launch by one or both of these behemoths could mean a dilution of the market - something that may cause a few problems for social networking services, which rather rely on a critical mass of users - you join because your friends join, after all. What are your thoughts? Let's have 'em.

Wiley boss side steps PRISM questions

Peter Wiley the chairman of international scientific publishing giants Wiley declined to discuss the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) anti-OA campaign today. Wiley, a former journalist and a published author, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair and celebrating the company's 200th anniversary.

With an extension of the hand Chairman Wiley handed the issue to Stephen Smith, Senior VP for Europe and International Development. "Our general view of OA is, it's another business model," said Smith.

Both men were keen to point out, rightly, that publishing is an expensive business and agreed that greater clarity about the role and importance of peer review and the publishing process would benefit the sector right now. Something critics have said PRISM is preventing.

"OA fees are going up," Wiley said, expressing concern that the new sector is unsustainable, in his only comment on the subject.

Wiley would be drawn on authors understanding of the publishing process, saying that in academic and trade (novels etc sold in bookshop) there is a "lack of realism about the publishing process".

But as they celebrate their 200th birthday, Wiley doesn't look or sound like a threatened beast.

PRISM is the Association of American Publisher's controversial lobbying group that is claiming that open access (OA) publishing is a threat to peer review.

When will SAP make its ECM move?

Two recent moves make it highly likely that SAP will be come the latest enterprise software giant to join the enterprise content management sector.

First, SAP itself said it would spend 4.8 billion euros to acquire Business Objects, a leader in another area of software that is seeing rapid change, that of business intelligence. The size of the deal shows that the German giant is prepared to revise its previous strategy of only making "tuck-in" deals that supplement existing capabilities.

Second, its old sparring partner Oracle announced Universal Records Management 10g Release 3, an upgrade that, as Mike Davis of Ovum notes, marks a milestone in the company's growing interest in content management generally, and records management specifically.

For both SAP and Oracle, growth will come from  winning larger shares of customers' budgets, and that means extending capabilities. The pair are engaged in a tit-for-tat struggle to win the hearts and minds of buyers. Moving into ECM is a blindingly obvious next step for SAP and it probably does not have the luxury of time to develop its own capabilities.

So expect SAP to make a move to acquire a company in the space -- and don't bet against it being a long-term partner such as Open Text.

Frankfurt book fair: a meaty occasion

Tomorrow, the Frankfurt Book Fair opens its doors and naturally IWR will be in attendance. Our eyes will remain beady while an ear will be kept to the ground for the latest news and developments.

Last years show managed to pull in over 280,000 visitors and featured nearly 7,300 exhibitors, haling from 113 countries.

As the exhibition is generally considered one of the publishing world’s premier get-togethers, IWR editor Mark Chillingworth will be attending for the duration of the four-day event. Coverage will focus on eBook readers, Book Search and Scholarly Publishing. 

If you aren’t able to make the event, visit us over the course of the week and stay informed. The IWR website will be updated daily with the latest news and announcements relevant to information professionals and scholars alike.

The IWR Professional of the Year

Are you an outstanding information professional? Do you know one, or does a member of your team deserve the highest accolade?

If the answer is yes, then nominate yourself or your colleague for the IWR Information Professional of the Year Award 2007. The award, which has been presented by this title for the last seven years, offers recognition for the individual who has made the most outstanding contribution to the
profession in the last 12 months.

Your nomination could be for a colleague who has demonstrated best practice, led a project or developed a new information resource for your organisation, and its users and clients. Past winners have demonstrated how an information division can collaborate with a myriad of departments across the company or even between different companies and organisations.

The winner of the 2007 IWR Information Professional of the Year Award will find themselves in excellent company. Past winners include Rachel Kolsky of global insurance group AIG; Neil Infield, now at the British Library; and Roddy McLeod at Heriot-Watt University.

IWR will select the winner after close consultation with a panel of previous winners. The trophy will be presented at the Online Information Conference on 4 December 2007 and, as part of the award, the lucky winner will pick up a free delegate place to this year’s conference.

To enter yourself or a member of your team for this prestigious award, email the editor of IWR, Mark Chillingworth – mark.chillingworth@incisivemedia.com – detailing the achievements of your nominee.

De-geeked Grazr for information sharing

Grazr has always been a great way to organise and present information. Now, with release 2.0, it has moved into the collaboration space and, it has to be said, made building and sharing information models a whole lot easier.

Grazr offers a free hosted service, which means you will need to consider what kind of information you're going to put out there. But it is well worth experimenting with, if only to experience a snappy new way of gathering, organising and sharing information.

You can pop any web content or RSS feed straight into a kind of outline - that's links to web pages or specific images or sections of text. You just drag and drop between two concurrently open browser windows. It's a fast way to grab research material on the fly. You can, of course, add in your own text as well. And navigating the results is fast and easy.

(Perhaps I should mention that I publish a program which does something very similar but nowhere near as elegantly so, I promise you, this is good stuff.)

Your saved model shows up as a widget which you can drop into web pages, blog posts, wikis or share as a web link through email or whatever.

Take a look at this Camtasia demo of Grazr 2.0 in action. I found the voice grating and the subject matter boring, but the content is good and it is a quick way to see the potential of this new version of Grazr.

Athens is still open for business

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to visit Eduserv at their DSP seminar. It was a chance to see what kind of future, the identity management and charitable organisation have planned for their Athens authentication system.

Ever since higher education purse-holder JISC announced they will be backing Open Source platform Shibboleth, the long term future of Athens has been looking a touch shaky. This is despite its near monopoly in serving 97% of UK Higher Education institutes with their information authorisation needs.

With this in mind Eduserv look like they have chosen to swim rather than sink so the main sell of the day pretty much centred on OpenAthens SP and MyAthens. There was a lot of talk about Federated Access Management or rather utilising software in a federated model in order to deal with a variety of standards emerging. Some of these standards comprise of Shibboleth, OpenID, Cardspace from Microsoft as well as existing Athens technology.

Eduserv say the variety of these standards have emerged because the concept of online identity has pointedly changed in the last few years. With the adoption of certain web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networking tools came a reordering of old attitudes. Threats to secure identity from Phishing and ID theft also played a role in how a user relates to and uses their online identity.

When the current agreement with JISC ends, it seems the role for Athens post summer 2008, will have Eduserv banking on smaller organisations and institutes to use OpenAthens. This is because they won’t have the time, finances or necessary expertise to develop Shibboleth; instead they believe they’ll outsource their needs and use OpenAthens. The software will talk to any of these platforms meaning smaller institutions won’t have to be hampered sharing information with the bigger more established Shibboleth adopters. It allows integration and therefore room for both.

Other sensible ideas were mooted, such as a price freeze and that existing users of the platform should expect certain changes to licensing agreements in the longer term.

There were plenty of plans detailing what Eduserv were going to do next, how they saw Identity Management in a wider international context and most importantly, the direction they were going to take Athens in.

Truly addressing why JISC made the decision to back Shibboleth over Athens and the lessons learnt would have boosted delegate confidence even more, although I don’t think Eduserv were feeling so self-assured as to want to tackle that particular elephant in the room.

For more details and access to the various power point presentations visit the Eduserv site here

Are ECM standards necessary?

The news that the BSI is to pursue standardisation in enterprise content management (ECM) brings to mind the old joke that standards are such a good idea, and that´s why there are so many of them for the same thing.
OK, so it´s not the greatest joke in the world but it underlines the ancient problem that conflicting standards, and poorly adopted standards, can create as many problems as they seek to solve. There are already solid standards for document management in particular, and for some poor souls whose job it is to ride the waves of compliance rules and regulations, it can very often seem that there are far too many.
On the other hand, ECM vendors have often been guilty of lock-in tactics either through complexities of licensing, the imposed difficulties of learning and unlearning some programs, or through an unwillingness to abide by the basic underpinnings provided by markup languages and other core systems.
Anything that makes it easier to swap between ECMs is surely a victory for the purchaser. However, it requires aleap of faith to imagine that vendors with plenty to lose will suddenly adhere to a flat-earth principle that lets all rivals be created equal. What may happen is that smaller vendors, including open-source ones, adopt standards in the hope of unseating veteran incumbents. That, it can generally be agreed, is A Good Thing but experience tells me not to imagine many buyers wanting to spend too much time tracking the minutiae of which vendors are operating on a level playing field and whuch are playing fast and loose.

Microsoft and social networking

Lovely post from Rob Scoble on what Microsoft thinks of the new spate of web apps out there. I would say I'm gobsmacked, if we hadn't seen this before; Microsoft doesn't hire idiots, it hires very intelligent people. As such, I find what Steve Ballmer (yes, Steve 'Dance monkeyboy!' Ballmer) has to say about the success of Facebook rather odd. I've made a similar, albeit slightly different point in the past, so it might be worth going back to that to clarify why I'm a bit shocked.

Ballmer says that a lot of social networking sites are faddish, flashes in the pan, and that they fall out of fashion quickly. I'd partially agree here - Scoble argues that LinkedIn and Facebook are his Rolodexes now, but their currency depends on the network effect - how often people update their profiles. I bet quite a lot of my business contacts on LinkedIn (In fact several I can think of right now) updated their information a couple of jobs ago. Plaxo is hopefully going to make a big deal of its plan to be the Switzerland of social networking - a way of managing your data online. But I still think that social networking sites are superseded by new and innovative feature sets - in the latest case, Facebook's ability to add home brewed applications at will.

Information professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere - Sheila Webber

Information literacy expert Sheila Webber takes time out from the blogosphere and her Second
Life incarnation to extol the delights of blogging

Q Who are you?
A Sheila Webber, 54, senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A My Information Literacy blog is at http://information-literacy.blogspot.com and my Second Life blog is at http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com

Q Describe your blog?
A The Information Literacy (IL) blog highlights IL resources (such as tutorials, articles and portals), IL related developments and upcoming events worldwide, and carries conference reports. It’s primarily an information blog. The personal touch comes from the photographs of flowers and landscapes I put it – I mention them because some people have said that they look at the blog for those rather than the IL!
The Second Life (SL) blog is a diary of my avatar in SL, Sheila Yoshikawa. It started as a Bridget Jones-type blog, with a learning diary angle.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A I started in April 2003, with Stuart Boon as co-blogger, using Moveable Type software that was already available on a server in my department. Unfortunately, after we’d been blogging regularly for two years this server got hacked, an event that coincided with the only person who knew the setup moving elsewhere. We made a new start on Blogger in 2005.

Q What started you blogging?
A Initially, it was to publicise an IL project but I soon realised I was a natural blogger. I like writing short pieces and people seemed to find them useful. If anyone is interested, I wrote a piece about why I blog at http://inquiry-in-im.group.shef.ac.uk/team2007/02/20/learning-about-myperspectives-on-blogging

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A I don’t do much commenting, probably because the IL blog is not really a social networking blog. When people want to comment on my blog, or tell me about an IL item, they also tend to email me rather than comment on the blog. I think that I, and the blog readers, want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. It’s a bit different on the SL blog, where I mention more social and personal things (perhaps strangely, considering it is about SL rather than my first life!), so there tend to be more social chitchat-type comments from SL friends.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?
A I hope that the blog helps show that we in the department are participating actively in the information world. Since I have readers worldwide it helps bring the department to their attention. I also like to think that it may attract potential students who are interested in information literacy.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A Apart from the trips abroad,getting in contact with people via the blog. Also it’s nice when a stranger comes up to me at a conference and says they like the blog or my photos.

Q Which blogs do you read for fun?
A I don’t look at that many blogs outside work interests. There are blogs about fashion in Second Life (aggregated at http://fashionplanet.worldofsl.com) that are useful because the search function within SL itself is rubbish.

Which bloggers do you watch and link to?
Moira Bent
http://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/moira.bent
Michael Lorenzen
www.information-literacy.net
ALFIN blog in Spain
http://alfin.blogspirit.com
Jill Walker Rettberg
http://jilltxt.net
Brian Kelly
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com