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.