A taste of the new web from Library House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook

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

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

Publishers archive available and on exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft is also a key partner for the British Library.

A sign of things to come from East Anglia

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

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

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

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

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

FoI submissions on amendments close today

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

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

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

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