Information Research Weblog

Cyberspaces is abuzz with news of Amazon's e-book reader, Kindle, for example at the ZDNet site there's a review and pictures. In the review, Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying

"This is a 500 year technology and we forget that it’s a technology. As readers we don’t think about this too often", said Bezos. "An interesting question is why are books the last bastion of analog".
The answer: Books disappear when you read them. They fill their role and get out of the way. "What remains is the author’s world", said Bezos, referring to the reader "flow state".

It seems very odd that a bookseller - on the other hand, he's not a real bookseller, is he? - should say that books disappear when your read them. That suggests that he has no idea of what people do with books - they are an instrument of social interaction: we talk about them, we exchange them, we lend them (occasionally) to friends, we pass them on to charity shops and many of us keep those we treasure to read again and again, and even if we pass the physical object on, some of what we read remains in our consciousness.

E-book readers may become a new fashion item, but unless I am very much mistaken, they'll never replace the printed book - the book just has too many 'affordances' that a computer screen lacks - and apart from anything else, if I leave a paperback on the train before having read it, I can pick up another secondhand copy from Amazon for a fiver - if I leave my 'Kindle' behind I'm nearly $400 out of pocket!

A First Look at the Google Phone is the title of an article in the New York Times technology section. It has an interesting couple of videos from Google describing the kind of phone that can be built using the Android platform, using prototypes to demonstration the capacity of the system
The comments are worth reading - partly for their comic character, with Apple adherents whinging about the iPhone being 'ripped off' - what they don't seem to realise is that Google must have been working on Android for hundreds of man-months to get it working and that, rather than a phone, it is a platform for development of applications for phones. What any Android-based phone will actually look like is going to depend upon the phone manufacturers.
What success Android will have is still an open question - many manufacturers are locked into the Symbian platform and I imagine that these videos are at this moment being carefully watched by Symbian engineers - expect something from that direction in the not too distant future :-)

There's news around about the imminent release of Firefox 3.0 and a nice article about it, with screenshots, on Lifehacker.

Peter Suber's Open Access News drew my attention to an article in The Scientist, by Joseph Esposito. I'm publishing here the comments I made on The Scientist's site:

Joseph Esposito's article is both thought-provoking and, in parts, a little dangerous. Out the outset he notes: "Many continue to argue one side or the other of a binary choice: Either all research publishing should be open access, or only traditional publishing can maintain peer review and editorial integrity." This is a dangerous comment, since he is picking up on the 'big lie', promoted by PRISM, that OA does not involve peer review. This, of course, is nonsense: every genuinely scholarly OA journal that I know of uses peer review as part of the publishing process - it could never achieve any kind of reputation if it didn't do so. Jan Velterop also seeks to perpetuate this association in his comment on the article - yes, developing and maintaining the brand does take time and effort, as he suggests, but that time and effort is invested by the unpaid peer-reviewers and they are just as happy to work unpaid for non-commercial OA journals as for commercial publishers.

Later Esposito appears at times to conflate 'open access' with 'open archives' - confusingly both can be reduced to the same initials - when he writes of authors choosing to make their work available outside of the formal publishing process. This ignores the fact that OA journals are formally published: they have ISSNs, regular publication intervals, they are indexed by the same indexing and abstracting services as the commercial journals.

There is also the association of OA with 'author charging', and what I have called elsewhere the 'Platinum Route' of subsidised, collaborative OA publishing is ignored - and yet it is this mode that is increasingly adopted by newly-published journals. And new journals are not the exceptional case that Esposito suggests: they are appearing almost every day and many of them adopt the Platinum Route. Case studies of such journals have appeared in Information Research, which is also a Platinum Route journal. The 'one click' push that Esposito refers to is not an exceptional situation, but a common one for new open access journals and the notion that this only works at the fringe of scholarly communication is rather silly - scholarly communication consists of a multitude of 'fringes', each of little relevance to the rest of the community: like any other scholar in a specific discipline I have no interest in what is published in physics, chemistry, biology, pharmacology, Near Eastern studies, Scandinavian folklore and most of the rest of scholarship, but what is available to me openly within my own discipline is going to be central.

As another commentator has noted the costs of OA publishing are exaggerated, especially if the Platinum Route is adopted. No money at all flows in the publishing system for many OA journals, which use freely given time. That time is also given to commercial publishers, and if they had to pay true market rates for the time of editors and reviewers, the economics of scholarly publishing might be different. They would be markedly different if publishers had to pay for their raw materials - the papers - the way companies in other industries have to pay.

The suggestion of a novel OA publishing platform chimes with my suggestion that, on the analogy with music tracks and iTunes, "One future model of scholarly communication could see collaborative peer reviewing in disciplines leading to archived papers that are delivered as tracks are today - the individual (who is always going to be more interested in the paper than in the journal as a whole) downloads papers of interest, and universities provide the finance for the open archive rather than subscriptions to the now-defunct journals". I don't see such a model requiring huge additional investment - as the system changes, as it inevitably will, what is saved in subscriptions can be transferred into the development costs of the new platform.

As I note in the same Weblog entry, commercial scholarly publishing is facing the same kind of threat, brought about by technological change, as the music industry and is reacting in much the same way as the music industry has reacted up to now. Neither industry will survive simply by defending the present model - the dissemination of music and the dissemination of scholarly research are changing in analogous ways and the direction of that change is towards openness and new entrepreneurial models. Just as the old computer companies were never the leaders in change in that industry - think of the switch from mainframe to mini-computer to desktop - so it is unlikely that the giants of scholarly publishing will be at the forefront of change in their industry.

Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News for alerting me to the symposium on The Future of Scholarly Communication, which is being run, online, by Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

The starting point for the Symposium is a report from a non-profit organization called Ithaka on University Publishing In A Digital Age - not a great deal of attention is paid to open access in the report and when it is mentioned we have the usual, false equation of open access with author charging;

The academic community seems to be looking to open access models as a solution to these challenges. But while open access may well be a sustainable solution in STM disciplines, where federal and private research grants can conceivably be extended to support publication fees, one model will not serve as a panacea.

Why is it that the notion of collaborative, subsidised, open-access publishing continues to escape the attention of bodies like this when there are now so many examples of its effectiveness? It is all the more curious in a report aimed at considering the future of university publishing, when that future could include collaboration across institutions to promote subsidised, genuinely 'open' journals.

In spite of all their work it seems that, in the end, the report's authors are too timid to explore the logical consequences of the technological revolution that has hit scholarly communication: they, like the publishing industry generally, are mired in the present patterns of communication, but those patterns are changing irrevocably and numerous alternative new patterns may evolve as habits change. One possibility lies in an analogy with the music industry, which has similarly been hit by technological change: the unit of interest is now the 'track', not the CD or the 'album', and iTunes and other providers offer a delivery service for tracks. One future model of scholarly communication could see collaborative peer reviewing in disciplines leading to archived papers that are delivered as tracks are today - the individual (who is always going to be more interested in the paper than in the journal as a whole) downloads papers of interest, and universities provide the finance for the open archive rather than subscriptions to the now-defunct journals.

In small, niche areas this could happen quite quickly: for example, if a free, open access journal already exists, which is operating a standard peer-review process, it already has the characteristics of an open archive of papers and no-one ever downloads the entire journal issue. The papers are found, predominantly, by the search engines and the individual paper is downloaded or read - further collaboration among interested universities could see the expansion of the journal until it covers virtually the entire output of the niche area.

Or perhaps it will be all down to authors announcing their papers on their Weblogs and making them available without peer review and letting the scholarly community make up its collective mind about the quality, accuracy, etc. Again, the parallel with the music industry is there: bands are ignoring the record companies and putting their music straight on the Web.

Whatever happens, and, given the First Law of Forecasting, we can be sure that the future will be nothing like what the Ithaka report suggests, and nothing like what I have suggested :-)

Noted on the Crave blog: Sony opens book on new Reader
and on LIS News

Came across and interesting tool recently, called GTDinbox for Gmail. This is an add-in, or perhaps 'top-up' would be a better term, to Gmail, enabling you to use it within the 'Getting things done' methodology.

I haven't used GTD in the past, but this application may just persuade me to do so.

I joined Facebook recently, just to find out what it was all about, since libraries are now trying to use it (rather unsuccessfully, as far as I can tell) to create 'communities' of their users.

A number of friends and acquaintances seemed to join up at about the same time, so I found a group almost immediately. However, I also found that the amount of use I made of the system was minimal and that it added little more to the experience of communicating than does my ordinary use of e-mail. I also found messages telling me that person X wanted to be my 'friend' - these turned out to be spammers, peddling pornography in general and porongraphic images in particular.

I don't really need any more spam - and am thankful that Gmail's system gets rid of most of it for me, so I have deactivated my account and do not plan to reactivate it at any time.

I suppose these social networking sites are of some use, but I can't really imagine what it might be!

I imagine that most readers of this Weblog will have heard of Google's acquisition of gapminder.com and its Trendalyzer software. Recently, in relation to this, I came across a reference to www.ted.com, where TED = Technology, Entertainment and Design, and to a video by Hans Rosling, a Professor of Public Health in Sweden with 20 years experience of health research in Africa. Rosling was the inspiration behind gapminder.com and the TED site has an incredible video of his performance at the annual TED conference in Monterey, California. I recommend it: for the subject matter, for the presentation and demonstration of the power of Trendalyzer, and for the surprise ending. Go take a look.

Take a look also at the other videos available - there are some outstanding presentations: I particularly liked that by Evelyn Glennie, the star percussionist, who has been deaf since she was 12 - wonderful stuff; but there are many more available, such as James Watson, Jimmy Wales, E.O. Wilson - and that's just in the "Ws"! I think I'm going to be viewing these videos for weeks ahead!

This from John Williams, author of a letter to the editor in the last issue of IR:

Good morning, Professor Wilson.

1.In case you missed it, the announcement of the sad and untimely death of Michie and McClaren can be found at either of these sites.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/car_crash/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6281348.stm

2. Regarding my Letter in the current issue of IR, I have happened to find an even longer term that the Patent Office took in granting a patent. This was William Friedman's application of 1933 for a Cryptographic System. No version of the patent was ever declined by PTO (unlike Mooers' experience). However, it was not granted until August 2000, 31 years after his death. The Assignee was the National Security Agency. The Patent Number is 6,097,812. It would make an interesting book to discover the top 25 information technology patents that took the longest to be granted, by the way.

3. My two colleagues on the Mooers project have returned from a session of research at the Smithsonian Archives and their Watson Davis collection. Davis was Mooers' father-in-law. A number of things turned up, however there is one that might interest you. This was a letter to Davis written by John Mauchly in 1947 with a blind copy to Mooers. Mauchly sought Davis' advice on how to keep the general public informed of progress in electronics and computer science. Davis ran Science Service at the time and was able to give Mauchly some direction by return letter.

However, it's serendipitous that there is evidence of a need for popularizing computer science from Mauchly at the same time as Mooers and his wife published Electronics: What Everyone Should Know (1947: Bobbs-Merrill). Mooers, in publishing this book, was following the example of his friend Robert Fairthorne who had published several titles in Longman's March of Time series of popularizations of science/technology in the 1930's and 40'. Fairthorne's topics were aeroplanes, wireless, and cinema and television, among others. The wireless introduction became a British Army field manual during World War II, I believe.

4. One of my colleagues on the Mooers project is Gwen Alexander. She has just been appointed Dean of the Library School at Emporia State University. If you are coming to the States in the future, please drop me an email. Gwen would enjoy hosting a lecture by you to her students at the School. I've spoken to her and you can consider this a standing invitation.

Finally, congratulations on being number six in the survey of library science/information management literature. When I wrote the cohort section of the introduction to our bibliography of information retrieval and data mining five years ago, I predicted that a cohort would form around you and Information Research. That has happened. Your status pleases me and the recognition is well deserved.

Best regards,

John

This from Slashdot:

"A judge has delayed his ruling on the eBay patent infringement case. eBay has been involved in a legal dispute over the use of its popular "Buy it Now" button, which allows consumers to skip the bidding and purchase items on eBay directly. The patent suit was filed six years ago by MercExchange L.L.C. In May of 2003, a jury ruled in MercExchange's favor finding that eBay did in fact infringe on the patent, but in 2005 the US Supreme Court ruled that MercExchange was not automatically entitled to a court order blocking the offending service, essentially handing a victory down to patent reform advocates. However, the ruling by the Supreme Court does not affect the final judgment of the court."

Does this mean that 'Search' button on this page, or 'Post Item', or any other button (which, presumably, may simply be a link - like 'Home' on this page, could be illegal on the grounds that someone patented the idea?

Software patents really were the biggest nonsense perpetrated by the US Patent Office and are completely unnecessary: a program can be copyrighted, and copying of the entire programme or any significant part of it would be an infringement of copyright. Patenting simple interface features is crazy!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is interviewed in this clip and defines the Semantic Web as 'the data web', suggesting that the emerging Semantic Web standards are all about enabling sites to be created that pull data in from various data bases to create new associations of data. It may be that 'data web' is a better term than 'semantic web', since the Web is already 'semantic' (see previous message), otherwise we wouldn't understand a word of what is there :-)

In an earlier post I mentioned TiddlyWiki and my applications of it here and there. News about TiddlyWiki is best gathered by becoming a member of the relevant Google Group: one is for users in general and is mainly used for announcements and questions and answers - post a question and you'll usually get a very quick response from someone in the Group; the other is for those with the necessary technical skills to develop applications on TiddlyWiki or to contribute plug-ins and modifications.

Scanning both of these groups can be useful if you get into using TiddlyWiki: for example, a recent post drew my attention to Dave Gifford's Notes wiki, which is a nicely customised version for note taking with an excellent means of generating lists from the tags: you can get a version for yourself, if you right click on this link and then "Save link as...". That wiki advertised Dave's BibblyWiki - a version for creating and displaying bibliographic records of books and articles - again, get a copy by right clicking on this link and going through the same process. There's also a version in Spanish

The Developers' Group brought my attention to a number of things: a version of the basic TiddlyWiki in Brazilian Portuguese, and another in Portuguese Portuguese, and a very clever bookmarklet, which replaces the built-in search module of TW with YourSearch - not easy to describe what happens as a result but it means that you can search any TW with YourSearch. Of course, you need Firefox as your browser, although we are told that it may work in Opera and Safari

There's a lot of chatter on the Net about the latest Pew Internet study, which categorises IT users according to their relationship with the technology, from the Ominvores, who constitute 8% of the population of the USA, and who 'have the most information gadgets and services, which they use voraciously to participate in cyberspace and express themselves online and do a range of Web 2.0 activities such as blogging or managing their own Web pages.', to those who are Off the Network, and who have 'neither cell phones nor internet connectivity tend to be older adults who are content with old media', who constitute 15% of the population

c|net news has a nice pie chart of the data.

Rather more than 30 years ago I produced what was then called a 'programmed text' on chain indexing - apparently (at least according to a Google search) it still appears on some reading lists. The programmed text, in effect, implemented on paper the notion of hypertext.

I've occasionally thought of updating it, but not seriously until TiddlyWiki appeared on the scene. Now, as a result of a couple of days' work in retyping the text of the book, 'An introduction to chain indexing' is reborn as a true hypertext.

One of the benefits of using TiddlyWiki for this purpose is that the user can simply download a copy to his or her own hard disc (or portable medium of any kind) and use the text whether connected to the Internet or not, since everything needed to manipulate the text is actually built into the Web page.

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who uses the text or teaches the concept.

For those who thinking of moving up a class in wireless routers, here's a horror story about the gear. (Thanks to Bill Drew and the LITA discussion list.)

Quite by chance, I came across one of the most impressive pieces of 'Web-ware' I've seen to date. It is a stand-alone, browser-based, javascript-run personal wiki, which you can put on a Website, or simply use on your own PC to collect recipes, book details, extracts from papers to help you prepare a paper, organize your Ph.D. thesis notes, or whatever. Naturally, I couldn't help using it and you'll see the result (which took about a day's work to construct) in inforesearchwiki. This is, in effect, a database of the abstracts to papers published in volume 12 of Information Research, with a subject index constructed from the 'tags' (or index terms as we old school information scientists prefer) associated with each abstract.

TiddlyWiki has an enthusiastic world-wide communitity, doing all kinds of things with it and producing a variety of style sheets and plug-ins. As more than one user has said, it is a 'mind-blowing' piece of gear.

According to The Association of College and Research Libraries, Information Literacy's website: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm, it provides such a vast of valuable information for librarians, students, and researchers. The layout of the information is clearly organized for first time users and frequent users. The website provides users with the overview, standards & guidelines, resources & ideas, professional activity, and news. When I attending college for my undergraduate degree, it would have been benefical if I knew about this particular website...it probably would have made my research steps much easier.

For those few remaining who believe that governments learn from the past, the current Private Eye has a fascinating account of the IT disaster (currently costing £12.4 billion!) in the National Health Service. Unfortunately, you'll have to buy the magazine to read it - but it is a good £1.50 worth!

In 1997 Tony Collins published "Crash: ten easy ways to avoid a computer disaster", which was republished a year later with a different subtitle and a 'year 2000 update'. In this book, Collins itemised the causes of computer disasters and it seems that pretty well every cause is found the the current debacle over the National Health Service. Overweaning ambition on the part of a health minister, personal pride on the part of the project manager, credulity of practically everyone in believing what the consultancies and software houses told them, etc., etc.

The only conclusion one can reach, given that Collins's record of computer disasters has been around for the past 10 years is that ministers and their adivising civil servants can't read.

Finally, as this announcement tells us, Gmail will now accept applications directly, rather than being restricted to invitations from existing users.

Open sign-up for Gmail

No more waiting for an invitation: You can now sign up for your own Gmail account. Sign-ups are open worldwide in more than 40 languages. Now everyone can get the benefits of Gmail: fast and accurate search, a ton of free storage, chatting within Gmail, and access from your mobile phone. You can still invite your friends, but now you can also just tell them to visit the Gmail homepage. Don't miss the 4-part Gmail Theatre video, featuring our engineers and a cast of puppets, now playing on YouTube.
http://www.gmail.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YUugB4IUl4

The website http://www.libraries.psu.edu/ebsl/searchstrategies.htm provides the reader with great tips and ideas when searching for specific information. After reading the information on the website, it actually made my new searches easier with more articles that pertained to my topics. In the first section under Vocabulary Section, it discusses how one should keep a research log. Keeping a research log will save a lot of time by just jotting down little steps for each search. This is very important when you are trying to do a research paper.

I see that the BBC's technology news

has an item today on 'social tagging' - i.e., 'indexing' :-)

In the article entitled, "Public Services in Special Collections" by Florence Turcotte it explains how some research libraries are trying to bring in K-12 students into the "real research world." I think it would be very cool for a k-12 student to have field trips to famous public & research libraries especially in New York City. I also believe the children will be amazed at the architecture of the building let alone the information inside. If students were more exposed to the "real research world" as they grew older they will appreciate the nature of research. When I was in high school my firends dreaded going to the public library to research information. They dreaded the fact because I never learned how to research information correctly. Luckily, I worked at my local public library since I was about 14 years old...so I was taught by the reference librarian (friend/co-worker. My experiences with researching information in high school was a breeze. It was just a matter of when I was going to sit down and read, digest and spit out information on my computer.

I see that with Firefox 2.0 only recently released, Mozilla already has an advance version of Firefox 3.0 out - it's called "Gran Paradiso Alpha 1", presumably a reference to the Italian national park of the same name :-) But who can tell where they get these names from? The pilot of version 2.0 was "Bon Echo" - which is a provincial park in Ontario. Perhaps the development team has a thing about parks?

I have some grouses with Firefox 2.0 - the location of its new tab button is not as convenient as the one in Maxthon (where it appears at the end of the existing tabs - very convenient), and its pdf download can still be messy. In fact its downloads are a disaster - everything I simply want to view has to be downloaded and saved somewhere - VERY messy.

If you are really, really into browser development, there's also a Firefox 3 wiki.

I'm really torn, but currently I'm using Maxthon more than I'm using Firefox.

Free Conversant has a feature that enables me to prevent a long message from being posted on the e-mail list. I hope I've managed to implement it - if so, you will not have received a message about the hits on papers in Information Research. If you would like to see the message, go to http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/798

In the UK, Internet service providers advertise 'up to 8Mb' broadband - a bit of advertising weasel wording (with small print get out clauses) that hasn't been thoroughly stomped on yet.

What 'up to 8MB' really means is that you will never get anywhere near 8MB speeds - in fact, on average, across all providers you'll be lucky to get half of that and most of the time you'll get less than half. The broadband speed tester Nuria has data on a number of suppliers:

	Provider	Maximum	Average kb/s
1	Telewest Blueyonder 10 Mb elite	10240	5250
2	Telewest Blueyonder 4Mb complete	4096	2842
3	BT Broadband Option 4	8192	2420
4	Tiscali Broadband Max	8192	2307
5	BT Broadband Option 3	8192	2170
6	BT Broadband Option 1	8192	1982
7	BT Broadband Option 2	8192	1970
8	Plusnet Broadband Premier	8192	1931
9	Tiscali 2 Mb unlimited	2048	1438
10	Tiscali 1 Mb unlimited	1024	679

From this, it is pretty evident that consumers would be sensible to resist the Siren call of 8Mb and opt for a 4Mb cable connection - they won't get 4Mb, but at least they will be getting better speeds than most of us who have the 'up to 8Mb' connection!

The big question here is, 'Why does Ofcom - the communications regulator - allow them to get away with it?'

New developments in the Pipex battle. I've been contacted by the company after writing to the CEO (who, needless to say, lacked the courtesy to give even a token response himself) by someone who claims that my experience is only typical of broadband users generally! This is an outright lie: I've used the ADSLGuide.com pages to compare all of the providers in the UK - and Pipex turns out to be one of the worst. IDNet, Ke-Connect, Supanet, Twang and Zen Internet are the top performers as far as speed is concerned - regularly achieving 75% of their advertised speeds.

I also used the line checking services of a couple of these providers and they note that I can get up to 2Mb/s at present, with the prospect of 'up to 8Mb/s' in the future. (That 'up to' is really weasel wording on the part of companies!)

A further check on the status of British Telecom's exchanges (upon which all these providers rely) tells me that my loca exchange, is still undergoing upgrade, and is not expected to be finished until 2nd December. Now - if I can discover this, I think I can claim that Pipex Homecall has been mis-selling its services, since they would evidently know that the full service would not be available - I'll be asking them for a rebate for the couple of months of slow speeds.

I recently made the most stupid decision to swith ISP from Pipex, with a 2MB connection to Pipex Homecall with, supposedly, an 8MB connection. Actually, British Telecom told me that the line was capable of 6.5MB rather than 8, but, still, I expected an improvement.

Silly me! The service in now actually slower than the previous 2MB connection - this morning, for example, it was running at about 1MB, and that was an improvement over the 0.5MB and 0.7MB of previous days.

I had expected that Pipex Homecall would be using the Pipex servers that had always given me good service, but I learn that the service is actually provided by Tiscali, which has one of the worst records for customer service in the UK - there was not mention that Pipex would not be the provider when I took up the offer.

In fact, broadband in the UK is in a complete mess - even the cable company NTL, which offers 10MB, can't actually do better than about half that speed most of the time and I don't think there is a single 8MB provider in the country that is matching its advertised speeeds.

There's a clear message here - if your 2MB provider is doing a reasonable job, don't think of switching to an offered 8MB - it's a fiction. I'm not pursuing formal complaints through Ofcom, the communications regulator - as are many more: perhaps we'll have some influence on the outcome.

1. Google

The Guardian newspaper has an interesting article about Google getting into the political lobby business. With all of the threats to 'net neutrality' and related issues, this is probably not before time!

2. Firefox

Version 2.0 is due to be released at 17.00 Pacific Standard Time today - 00.00 GMT. According to the BBC News report:

The first version of Firefox was released in November 2004 and since then has steadily been chipping away at the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Now it is believed to enjoy a 12-15% market share of the net browsing market globally. But, said Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at Mozilla, in some nations the share is far higher.

Mr Schroepfer said that there were about 12 big improvements in Firefox 2.0 along with thousands of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Big changes include a phishing finder that alerts people when they stray on to a site that tries to trick them into handing over login details for a bank or other valuable service.

Another change was a spell checker that keeps an eye on every bit of text typed in almost any Firefox browser box be it in a web-based e-mail program or an add-on that lets people post blog updates directly.

Firefox 2.0 also has an improved session restoration system that will let users resurrect tabbed webpages they accidentally closed or will re-start a net session at the point before a crash.

Other changes include improvements to the web feed, search engine and add-ons manager.

So Internet Explorer Version 7.0 is finally out, but, according to a couple of reviews I've seen, still playing catch-up with Firefox and, when Firefox 2.0 is out (coming shortly), presumably IE 8.0 will have to get under development. The most complete review so far appears to that on PC World's Website. The crazy thing for IE users is that browsers using the IE engine have been providing some of the new features for some time - see Maxthon, for example - so the died in the wool IE user needed have waited all this time for something better. And, of course, Opera is still going strong and had most of the features that IE is finally bringing on stream some time before Firefox.

Just for interest, readers of Information Research over the past month have been using the browsers like this:

IE	79.81%
Firefox	15.70%
Safari	1.81%
Opera	1.07%
The rest	1.61

That's still a massive lead for IE and the picture in the rest of the Internet user world is usually portrayed as IE having about 93% of the total.