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