Information Research Weblog

The Weblog

It seems that my suspicions about the lack of general interest in the IR Weblog are confirmed :-) I've been contributing very little over the past month and so far no one has asked, Where are you?

New issue of the journal

The latest issue, Volume 10 No. 1, is now on the site. This one has the first batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context conference, held in Dublin last month. The other half will be published in the January 2005 issue. I finally got round to checking on what logs were available on the server and discovered that, since, the 8th October (which is when the analysis software appears to have kicked in) there have been about 280,000 hits on the InformationR.net site - most of which are on the journal. This is considerably beyond my own estimates from the various counters. InformationR.net is the sixth most 'popular' virtual domain on the University's servers.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP appears to be building up nicely. I finally got round to using it, along with colleagues in the AIMTech research group at Leeds University Business School. The voice quality, using Skype, is generally pretty good - not quite as good as the best landline, but good enough considering that it's free. I've also tried the SkypeOut service, which connects to landline numbers pretty well anywhere in the world and to mobile phones in some. You can connect to landlines in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand for 1.7 Euro cents a minute (£0.0118 or $0.02129) - mobiles cost a good deal more. Connection with landlines can be variable - sometimes connection is lost and in one case there was no voice connection at all. No doubt, with the interest being expressed, these problems will get ironed out.

Of course, governments and the big telecomms companies get very edgy over VoIP - here's a communication process where they may not be able to make any money, unless they REGULATE. Naturally, it is the USA where these concerns are raised.

It had to happen: "Boingo, Vonage Sign VoWi-Fi Pact"

Google again

A couple of things about Google - first, you'll find a review of its e-mail service, Gmail, in the latest issue of the journal. Secondly, I'm also trying out its 'desktop search' program - this enables you to do a Google search on your hard disc. It also checks your hard disc when you do a Web search - useful for bringing to your attention those items you'd forgotten you'd ever written!