Countdown to 2007: 5

As we count down to the new year, we get the ball rolling with some topics for discussion in 2007…

5: Too many UK professional organisations?

Belt tightening has been ongoing at Cilip and Aslib for some years now, with both organisations having had to cut back staffing or cut overheads. Cilip's subgroups had a pre-Christmas decapitation of allowances. On Aslib's website, no new press release has been posted since October 2005; the Aslib/Managing Information Forum has been closed down "due to the irresponsible postings of some users"; and after mass resignations from sub-group ASSIGN in 2005, it still lists incorrect contact details. The European chapter of the SLA, meanwhile, has appeared to thrive – mainly because it’s a relatively "virtual" network of likeminded professionals with little in the way of overheads to worry about. Can the UK's IP community really continue to support three major organisations in 2007? Or does the profession need a single strong voice in these challenging times?

A Christmas Present from FAST

Last weekend a new blog burst on the scene. No ordinary blog though. This one is truly useful for anyone who is interested in how organisational cultures are adjusting to the new realities brought about by social computing and other liberating technologies.

Astonishingly (for me anyway), the blog is being hosted by leading search company, FAST. But, rather than some corporate blowhard spouting off, the contributors are all thinkers and practitioners in the, erm, Enterprise 2.0 space. You can read these people all in one place. At the moment there are just 14 public blog posts and a few pre-launch posts, so very easy to get up to speed.

The latest one has Euan Semple expressing his reservations about Enterprise 2.0. To paraphrase horribly, he's concerned that "business as usual" is trying to hijack the new disruptive technologies. Other posts are summaries of good stuff the authors have been discussing on their own blogs. It's a great distillation and talks about fears and problems as well as opportunities and case studies.

The blog also has sidebar links to what's hot in the Enterprise 2.0 space and to a number of useful blogs. It really is a good one-stop-shop. Once the initial burst of enthusiasm is over, I hope that the quality and interest of the posts are sustained.

The blog is called FASTforward and it is a prelude to a conference of the same name in San Diego in February. Sadly, it clashes with something else in my diary and I won't be able to go. But, if the blog lives up to its promise and if the conference organiser allows a healthy audience participation, the sessions could get pretty lively.

Happy reading over the Christmas break. If I'm in a fit state, I'll be back next Thursday or Saturday.

Social networking tops 2006 search rankings

Google's newly released Year End Zeitgeist for 2006 shows that social networking is top of the search lists.

After monitoring the most searched for terms on Google.com for the whole year, the search giant has revealed that social networking has dominated web searches.

'Bebo' took the crown as the most searched for term throughout the year, followed by 'MySpace'.

Fifth and sixth spots were 'radioblog' and 'wikipedia', which also got a mention in tenth as 'wiki'. Eighth and ninth positions went to 'rebelde' and 'mininova'.

Current events were outlined by the leading search query 'who is Borat' and 'what is Hezbollah', while the Duke University Lacrosse rape scandal topped the scandal searches.

Cilip cuts capitation by 50%

Cilip will pay its local branches and special interest groups 50% less capitation in 2007 as part of a new business plan voted in by its Council.

Cilip members are assigned a branch according to their locality and can join two special interest groups for free as part of their membership, but are free to join as many groups as they wish. Each branch and special interest group receives a capitation sum of money from Cilip based on the number of members it has, these groups also receive a lump sum from Cilip.

For 2007 the capitation amount per-member will reduce by 50% following a vote by the Cilip Council. "Every member of the Council voted to do this," said Bob McKee, Cilip chief executive.

Some groups may be concerned, Karen Blakeman, Cilip UKeiG Councillor said UKeiG is not concerned. It doesn't worry us, but there may be groups that will be in financial trouble," she said. Blakeman said one option open to Council was to reduce capitation by 80%, which she believes would have put a number of groups into difficulty.

"The capitation is a derisory amount, it doesn't even cover admin costs," Blakeman said.

Cilip Council voted in the new figure as part of its decision to adopt a new working model, devised by the New Business Model Working Group. "This will stop the nonsense that Cilip is in financial difficulties," McKee told IWR. Adding, "The 50% saved will be used to balance the budget as part of the new business model, which comes into force immediately."

Overall Blakeman agrees, "The branches and groups will have to have business model, react to market forces, be economically viable and do what the members want them to do."

Analytics firm Datops acquired by LexisNexis

LexisNexis has acquired Datops, which provides analytical services for financial services and public organisations. 

LexisNexis believe the purchase of Datops technology will allow it to offer clients to search news services like Financial Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Economist faster and to identify market trends, financial risks and the effectiveness of research and development initiatives. The text analytics software of Datops will be combined with LexisNexis current product offerings.

The technology Datops uses can scan and analyse unstructured information from multiple formats such as audio and video as well as multiple languages. The data itself can be assessed by the Datops software for tone, origin and source credibility, presented through a customisable dashboard interface.

“The addition of Datops to LexisNexis analytics enables information-driven organisations to derive actionable intelligence,” said Rob Veneboer, Managing Director of LexisNexis Europe for Corporate and Public Markets.

ProQuest I&L acquired for $222m

Academic database provider ProQuest Information and Learning has been acquired by Cambridge Information Group (CIG), which will merge the beleaguered ProQuest with Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA).

ProQuest and CIG have signed a definitive agreement for the deal, said to be worth $222 million which will see CIG take control. The two companies will be combined into a new privately held company, a statement said.

ProQuest has had a poor end to 2006 after an SEC investigation and having to restate its financials for the fiscal years 1999 to 2004.  A separate statement will come from ProQuest soon clarifying its restatements.

Martin Kahn will serve as CEO, relocating to Ann Arbor, home of ProQuest, while David "Skip" Prichard, current president of ProQuest will lead the company until the deal is closed.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition: is it any good?

IBM's OmniFind Yahoo Edition, mentioned in IWR a couple of days ago, has to be worth a try although don't expect instant results. There's the small matter of indexing to take care of first. I decided to let its crawlers loose on the IWR blog and website and my own hard drive.

It took a few hours to index around 35,000 documents and build an index of almost 2.5 gigabytes. It works on specific file types, which means that some proprietary format files don't get indexed. And there's a size limit on the files it will index. I don't know what it is, but the first file it baulked at was about 1 gigabyte. [Update: maximum file size is 51.2MB.]

Web crawling is continuous after a delay following the initial session but the hard drive crawling has to be sanctioned by the search administrator.

The search splash screen comes up with all the usual IBM/Yahoo branding, copyright and search destination stuff. You can replace all the elements with your own. I elected for spartan simplicity:

And here's a glimpse of the start of the results:

Set up is dead easy, although it baulked at indexing my machine from the C:\ drive. I settled for making my username folder the root of the search.

Searching is snappy. At the moment (after only half a dozen searches), the average response time is 881 milliseconds. But then you'd expect this if the index is inside your own machine.

If you want to fine-tune the search experience you can import (or key in) synonyms. You can also add featured links which appear at the top of the search results in response to certain keywords being entered. For example you could associate a support URL with the words 'help', 'problem', 'helpdesk', 'faq' and 'support'.

And there's an API for the technically-minded which delivers results as Atom feeds or HTML snippets to embed into your web pages as you wish.

Best of all, it's free. As long as you don't exceed half a million documents and you stick to the local drives in your own system [Update: and network drives mapped/mounted on the search server.]

Warning (added 16/12): You have probably realised that this version does not take account of user access policies. It's for the administrator to ensure that restricted material is not indexed, or to restrict access to the search and its cache.