Information Research Weblog

An interesting item on The Shifted Librarian caught my eye: "When does 'own' not mean 'own'?" It's a cautionary tale about the US library supplier Baker and Taylor who have plans for the electronic delivery of texts using the .pdf format. No problem you think? Well - read all about it for another example of the desire of business to sell you something and hold on to it at the same time.

The same source has a defense of news aggregators. I never realised that a defense was needed: I can't think how I'd scan as much material as I do without NewzCrawler. However, The Shifted Librarian points to an article by one Steve Bell (presumably not the Guardian satirical cartoonist) on a e-zine called Ex Libris in which, among other things, he notes:

RSS and news aggregator enthusiasts will emphasize that these technologies will save you time as they improve your access to news and information. But does the time required to obtain the necessary skills to use them payoff in the long run? I'm suspicious of anyone who claims something is easy and fast to learn and implement, but tells me I need to first read a four-page article that explains how it works.

Read a four-page article? I've installed Newz Crawler and used it for months now without reading anything at all about how to use it. I also used Amphetadesk for a while and that, too, required no reading - you just get on with using it!

Talking of aggregators, I came across an interesting one - SNARF - which lives on your Internet Explorer 'links' bar and which you can pop up at any time - worth a look.

It's been a while since I posted to the log as I'm in Sweden and have been for the past week and too busy to give time to it.

I've also been experiencing server problems - unable to access my Webmail box at Sheffield for the past couple of days, so people may have been trying to contact me with my knowing. My Swedish address will serve for anyone who has been trying to reach me - "tom.wilson@hb.se"

I assume that many of you have been infected by the SoBig virus - I received a message from one correspondent saying that he had had 700 messages in one morning. I don't think I had that many, but I certainly had several hundred over the course of last week. It is no comfort to learn (from BBC News) that this has been the fastest proliferating virus of all time.

News on the search front today: my last entry related to Overture and now we learn (from CNET news) that Google has expanded its index beyond the 3.2 billion pages claimed by Overture. As the report says:

But since then, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has quietly leaped ahead again, expanding its database to more than 3.3 billion Web documents by Thursday this week, according to its home page. A Google representative confirmed the change.

"Google raised the number on its home page to accurately reflect the number of Web pages it offers consumers," a representative wrote in an e-mail. The search company's worldwide index now includes 3.3 billion Web documents, 800 million Usenet pages and 400 million images.

On another front, the legal system hit a new high in the UK this week as a result of the Hutton Enquiry. Its Web site is attracting 'upwards of 80,000 visitors a day', according to the Guardian's Online supplement. The transcripts of the hearings into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly make fascinating reading as politicians, their public relations staff and journalists dance around the questions put. The big news, of course, related to Tony Blair's appearance before the Inquiry earlier this week - the jury is out on that performance but from what I read it was an assured performance with all the glibness of which the man is capable - whether anything he says these days can be trusted, is another matter, and the polls suggest that the public appreciation of him has waned considerably.

There news and screenshots of the latest versions of MSoft's new (three years down the road?) operating system, code-named Longhorn, at WinSupersite.com. The thrust appears to be more and more towards multimedia integration - so I guess that's another zillion features that the typical user will make little us of!

Enough for now! Have a good week-end

The Overture search engine, bought by Yahoo!, now has an index, courtesy of FAST - also bought by Yahoo! - of, it is claimed, more than 3.2 billion Web pages. (News from Research Buzz)

Ah, but can one find "Information Research", you ask? Well, it seems that it can. My usual test is to see whether the journal comes in the top two or three when searched for as a phrase or as just the two words. Overture turns up trumps - IR is the first listed 'additional' site. The first site returned is always a sponsored site, i.e., one that is paying to be listed.

There's a twist, however, the IR index page only comes up number 2 on the US listing. If one selects UK as the country, there are three 'sponsored' sites and the fourth site is the redirection page for IR on the Department of Information Studies site at Sheffield. One can play games like this all day: when I searched from the Netherlands page, the first mention of the journal was at number 3, but that was the catalogue entry at the Royal Library. From the Japan page I found no mention at all. Obviously, these country pages cover sites in the country, rather than international sites - except for the USA, which, I suppose, is thought to be international?

The Research Buzz item asks how Overture is going to wean people off Google - good question. Yahoo! has spent a lot of money acquiring search capabilities so, presumably, it must have a cunning plan.

It seems that Northern Light is planning to bring back its public-use search engine. A note on the Web site says:

If you're looking for the Northern Light web search engine, it is not currently open to the public. We are planning to bring it back later this year. If you would like to be notified when it is available again please sign up for our mailing list.

I used to use Northern Light quite a lot, but it pulled out of the public-use market, for some reason or another and concentrated on seeling its search engine to corporations. Given how the search engine arena has changed since Northern Light 'died' I wonder what motivates the decision to relaunch.

I spotted this item on the ResearchBuzz weblog

This was in response to an item on the Avant Browser, which seems to have been erased.

It is also available at http://download.com.com/3000-2356-10216118.html?tag=lst-0-1 which I'd like to recommend as a very handy one-stop shop for downloads (I'm sure however that quite a few of the reviews are "puff" pieces).

I will give it a try but it will have to go some way to beat Opera (7.11) as my number one. What I find really handy about opera is the "note" function that allows me to quickly build up notes from multiple websites without the use of MS word or some other text-editor to "dump" them in.

David Weinberger's JOHO page has been out of action for a little while, but now it is back. We might call JOHO a pre-blog Weblog, but for the fact that David also produces a separate Weblog. However, what I'd like to draw attention to is a couple of items in JOHO that are interesting: everything else is also interesting, but these two attracted me most.

First, David draws attention to a keynote address to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by Clay Shirky on groups and group interaction through 'social software'.

Second, David Weinberger's own comments on social software are worth reading. An example:

Could a term be more vague? It could be taken to include everything from email to instructions on how to hold hands. But in fact it's coming to mean something more specific: low-tech, easy-to-use tools (many of them familiar) that enable groups to decide for themselves how they will work together. But, "decide" is misleading here since it implies a high degree of explicitness. The most important aspect of social software is that it's emergent.

But wasn't 'groupware' designed for the same purpose? Is groupware now 'social software'? It shows just about the right amount of 'syllable inflation' to be the new buzzword!

Last week's issue of New Scientist (I've only just got round to reading it) drew my attention to a 'bull' eradicator from Deloitte Consulting. It's a Word add-in that will assess the bullshit rating of your prose. I haven't tried it yet, but the account made it seem promising.

My e-mail brought me a message that put me in touch with an interesting resource available at The Chalfont Project - a management consultancy outfit. On the site are some articles on various aspects of management by Dr. Leandro Herrero - readers of the pharmaceutical industry magazine SCRIP will recognize the name. I can recommend all of them as a 'good read', but readers of this Weblog may be particularly interested in Victor's leaving and his IQ goes with him

Ah well - midnight! That's enough for tonight.

An interesting account of Forrester's predictions for broadband in Europe, which puts Britain in the second tier, behind the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. The reason? Cost, of course - and that is down to BT's continuing assumption that you make more money by charging fewer people more, rather than charging a lot of people less. They'll never learn!

Long live Mozilla? With AOL's abandonment of Netscape, and the laying-off of fifty Netscape coders, it looked as though Mozilla would also go down the plug hole. Apparently not. Up rises the 'Mozilla Foundation'. Elsewhere, doubt is cast on the ability of the new Foundation to make much of a dent in IE's dominance. However, as always, time will tell.

Browsing around that last topic brought me to another Weblog, which has a couple of interesting short notes on Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firebird browser. The author, Joel Spolsky, suggests that Firebird meets all of his browser requirements and, with a download of only 6.8 Mb, it's worth taking a look at. I shall report later.

Teleworking has been around a long time as a concept, but the numbers of people who can be defined as teleworkers has never seemed to grow sufficiently to fulfil the promise - mainly, it seems, because people like the social interaction that work brings. However, that may be due to change - a report from AT&T reports that 80% of companies survey now say that they have people who regularly work away from the office. 'Working away' means at least 20% of the time - which I guess means that every senior manager and every salesman is a teleworker. A more rigorous definition of, say, 75% of a person's time, would clearly knock that overall proportion down a bit. On that basis, I'd claim to be largely a teleworker these days. AT&T's press kit also includes Ten Telework Tips.

A fascinating article in today's Online supplement to the Guardian (or the Grauniad as Private Eye insists on calling it - although I think its propensity for typos has diminished in recent years). The topic is 'software radio' - i.e.:

Instead of specialist radio hardware, a software radio uses a simple receiver to throw the entire contents of a range of frequencies into computer memory, where software - and not hardware - does the signal processing. Vanu Inc, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took an ordinary, off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPaq personal digital assistant and, using only a simple radio receiver and an upgrade to the Linux operating system, was able to demonstrate the device working as an FM radio.

That should make a hole in the market for electronic radio components!

A nice directory of RSS feed readers and news aggregators has been produced by one Haiko Hebig.

Some of the links appear to be to messages about rather than to sources from which the aggregator can be downloaded, but perhaps that will change.

From FreePint via an Australian Weblog Column Two, comes a report on how Delft Technological University chose its new 'content management system'. You can Google for CMS here.

Searching around for information on journals in the information field with RSS feeds, I came across the Documents in Information Science site. Although hosted at the University of Manchester, this service is run by a group representing Spain, Italy and the USA. The site covers more than 150 journals and more than sixty conference proceedings.

Information Research is not yet one of the journals listed, but it will be before long, since my first reaction was to contact the organizers. The reason I am interested is that the site includes RSS feeds for the journal contents. I can put a link to that feed on the journal contents pages and then anyone will be able to include the journal in their news aggregator.

And, writing of news aggregators - take a look at NewzCrawler a very nifty aggregator which retains the look and feel of the news reader in Outline Express. NewzCrawler comes with some pre-set channels in various sectors, but, of course, if you know the rss feeds for others, you can add them.

A snowy Saturday afternoon in Sweden seems an appropriate time to check what's going on in the world and my attention was caught by reference on Librarian.net to a new 'portal' to library and information resources from Steve Cohen, who runs the Weblog Library Stuff. The title, LIS Feeds is not exactly catchy, but it gets across the idea. Using a bit of software called a 'news aggregator', which is:

"software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page."

Some aggregators will sit on your desktop, others need to be mounted on your Web site server, particularly if you want to deliver a news service such as LIS Feeds. One desktop version, which is free, is Amphetadesk, which can be rather addictive. The package comes set up with access to six 'channels', but you can change these and select others from a list too big to count, or insert the url for a news-feed that isn't on the list.

Amphetadesk is worth playing with, just to get a feel for the general idea - but don't overdose on the channels, otherwise you will be suffering from information overload.

Who knows, if I get really interested, I may have an RSS feed associated with this Weblog, or with the Information Research in some other way. If there is anyone out there who would like to help.... mail me

I picked this up from Current Cites - a useful e-mail newsletter, and also a Web site. Eric Lease Morgan has produced an introduction to XML, Getting started with XML, specifically for librarians and library staff, although I think it will be equally useful to anyone who things of themselves as an information manager or even a knowledge manager. The guide is available as a .pdf file and as an html file, as well as .zip and .tar.gz files, which include sample files. An introduction to XHTML is also provided, as a 'dialect' of XML - this might prove useful, as I hope to move from html to xhtml with volume 9 of the journal.

The guide is part of Morgan's own Web site, Infomotions, which also includes 'Musings on information and librarianship', his monthly column for Computers in libraries.

I picked this one up from the Guardian Online weblog. If you can bear to read 4,000+ words on the subject, then I guess that James Gleick (perhaps you know his book on chaos theory?) is worth reading more than many. The link also had the effect of making me check out Gleick's own Web site - an interesting place to browse. Among other things it has a link to the Autodesk program, Chaos, the Software which I shall download when I get broadband (this crawl speed modem is getting to me more as I try to maintain this log). He also has three papers presenting his views on Microsoft, including one on the company's own form of 'political correctness' - never using the word 'bug' when some other circumlocution will serve.

I suppose that, as I run a fairly complex site like InformationR.net, I ought to have been interested in Content Management Systems (CMS) a long time ago. However, my attention has been drawn to them again by David Gurteen's 'Knowledge-Letter' - check out his Web site - via a link to Why every small website needs a content management system . A short, interesting read, but my interest took a step back at the statement:

The good news is that a lightweight CMS, suitable for a modest-sized website, is not expensive. It can be as low as a few thousand dollars...

That's Australian dollars, of course, but, even so, my base rate is zero, so there's a while before I give up my do-it-yourself system. Small businesses might think differently, however.