Information Research Weblog

The relationship between Weblogs and Google seems to be in the news again. The Register carries an article (again by Andrew Orlowski, who seems to have a thing about Weblogs) on the subject, claiming that searchers are fed up with links to Weblogs cluttering up their search results. I'm not sure about the circumstances under which this occurs, since I have yet to experience the phenomenon - probably means I'm just searching for serious, boring stuff rather than the latest gossip about Madonna or whoever...

The subject is also tackled in a recent article in The Observer. In it, John Naughton suggests that it is all a matter of the professional journalists envying the amateur and he points out that much of the stuff written by the professional hack is not available on the Web. His moral?

The moral is: if you want to score with Google, be on the web. Otherwise, go whistle.

That seems fair!

Tom Coates has written a very interesting article on the above.

In the article, he refers to weblogs as mini-paradigm shifts. Depends which weblogs you follow perhaps ;-)

Here's a complicated story. Some time back Andrew Orlowski of The Register published a story about Google dropping Weblogs from its searches and, instead, using a special-purpose search engine. I commented on this at the time. A story in Monday's Guardian Online suggests that this is not the case. It all leaves one wondering what is reliable on the Web and in Weblogs. This message is, because I'm just pointing you to pages that exist :-)

The virus continues to spread and, of course, it had to happen - Weblogs are now pronounced 'knowledge management tools'.

Read all about it and try to refrain from laughing aloud.

As I understand it, Weblogs are simply compilations of messages, which have an intention to inform others, or the world at large, about matters that interest the writer. Many of the Weblog messages are simply referrals to other Weblogs or Web sites and the Weblog author may have no 'knowledge' whatsoever about the matter under discussion - s/he may simply think, this looks like an interesting site or item, I'll pass it on.

Other kinds of sites created by using Weblog software are, arguably, not Weblogs under this definition, but something else - online procedure manuals, for example. The fact that one suggestion is labelled,"The Weblog as a filing cabinet", rather makes the point.

The Register reports that Google is to develop a search engine specifically for Weblogs in order to reduce the 'noise' they create when included in the normal search.

The report notes:

"The main problem with blogs is that, as far as Google is concerned, they masquerade as useful information when all they contain is idle chatter," wrote Roddy. "And through some fluke of their evil software, they seem to get indexed really fast, so when a major political or social event happens, Google is noised to the brim with blogs and you have to start at result number 40 or so before you get past the blogs."

Perhaps both Webloggers and others will welcome the move, since it will provide a focused search for the former and reduce that noise for the latter. This happened when Google acquired the Usenet groups and provided a separate search process, so why not with Weblogs?

We're aware of the value of the Web in terms of making books available, see a recent message here, for example. However, now it is the turn of modern writers, rather than those out of copyright. Ben Hammersley, writing in the Guardian's Online supplement (now, for some inexplicable reason, read backwards from the rear of the Life supplement!), reports on good modern writing on the Web. He cites William Gibson's Weblog (which I understood to have been terminated) along with Neil Gaiman and " no less than America's greatest living writer, Neal Pollack", whom I must confess to never having heard of.

Still, the Weblinks are interesting: take a look, for example, at The Simon, Sweet Fancy Moses, and Retort Magazine.

Oh, yes - and Neil Gaiman's (yes, I have heard of him :-) ) Weblog is at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp

Finally, for today, an item drawn to my attention by The Shifted Librarian Weblog, which appears in Points of Reference from the Illinois Suburban Library System.

It's a brief article called, Blogging @ Your Library by Kate Zdenek who says,

So why are blogs important to libraries? In one word—communication. You can reach your patrons or staff in a whole new way. Information can be posted instantly. You can highlight an event in your community, review a book, or announce new materials. A blog gives people a reason to continually return to your site.

Definitely worth skimming.

Yesterday's Online supplement in the Guardian newspaper carried an interview with William Gibson, who recently announced that he was giving up his Weblogging activities. I understand his reasons:

...if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.

In fact, I suspect that the activity conflicts with just about any other kind of writing, and some kind of balance has to be reached unless Weblogging is your only writing!

The same issue also had another item on Weblogs, in which Peter Rojas points to the similarity between "bloggers" and disc jockeys, who select from the pool of music to put together a programme. Similarly, those who maintain Weblogs are continuously monitoring the news in their field of interest and presenting a distilled form in the Weblog:

A weblog functions like a filter for the web, a handpicked selection of what's worth checking out. What makes blogs work so well is that it's a person, not a computer, doing the link picking, a person with specific taste that we appreciate.

Various people are now using Weblogs to provide an information flow withing their organization - yet another technology the information professions have to come to grips with - essentially, it is 'selective dissemination of information' all over again, but in a new format and with a technology that is actually appropriate to the function.

Thanks to sterling support from Free-Conversant, the new Weblog now includes the previous postings in their correct dates.

My apologies for the lapse in activity on the Weblog. I have switched to the beta version of the new software and there are some teething problems relating to finding the way to move the previous messages, which were put up while the process was taking place, to the new site. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Google's purchase of Blogger is one of the topics touched on in the first part of a three-part interview at Always On. This news was brought to me by the TechDirt Weblog, which also pointed to other news about Google - its purchase of Applied Semantics, aimed at improving the targeting of its advertisements. Why the author of that piece refers to Google as the "Search engine upstart..." is beyond me!

Gary Price produces a useful Weblog for information professionals called The Resource Shelf. Lots of useful stuff.

(This message is re-posted on behalf of Chris McEvoy)

I used to think that IR was a mechanism that allowed my pocketPC to talk to my TabletPC, but now I know differently.

I have read a lot of the articles on IR, and have found them extremely useful. I work with a lot of people in the web field who have no idea about the wealth of knowledge, experience and information that exists, which they could use to great effect.

I am interested in tying to generate some cross- discipline communication, and am currently maintaing a site called Usability Views, on which I publish links to thousands of articles from areas ranging from usability testing to games design.

I have added all of the articles from IR, as well as the items from Tom Wilson's publications page.

The articles can be sorted by Popularity. This measures the number of pages that link to the article, so whilst it doesn't measure the number of times an article is read, it does give an indication of the popularity of the article.

The articles can also be sorted by Da te as well as T itle.

Do you think that this method of presentation has any value?

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.

Regular readers will recall mention of a move to create an RSS feed for Information Research.

Thanks to the work of Ed Summers, this has now come to fruition and you can use the feed, with your news aggregator of choice, to view the contents of the current issue (i.e., Volume 8 no. 2)

The URL for the feed is http://dois.mimas.ac.uk/rss/ir.xml - just follow the instructions in your news aggregator for adding new feeds. I seem to have settled on Newz Crawler myself, and I was interested to see that David Weinberger had an item on this package in the last issue of his 'Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization'

The war on Iraq has stimulated the Web-loggers, with new Weblogs sprouting like spring bulbs. How much of what reported is simply items from the news agencies re-cycled and re-cycled and how much is genuine news as distinct from rumour is open to question. Of course, a lot of them are based in the USA, so they have a hard time keeping up with what is going on in real time (as distinct from Eastern Standard Time, or even more, on Pacific Time) However, if you want to keep track of what is assumed to be happening, here's one or two to keep you busy:

Breaking News: War in Iraq

You can read an interview with the editor of this 'Warblog' at the "I want media" site.

BlogLeft: Critical Interventions

Not strictly a dedicated Warblog, but with a lot of relevant material.

Steve's WarBlog

Get a Scandinavian perspective at: Bjørn Stærk Blog

and a German view at:

WARLOG.AAA: The Weblog Against the Agressive America

As usual with things related to Information Research, I have a counter on the top page - kindly provided by NedStat - which provides data on where the 'hits' come from.

Although it is early in the life of the Weblog, it is interesting to see the emerging pattern. We can discount the almost 40% of activity that is within the Weblog itself, since that is simply a record of my 'editorial' work. The interesting things to note - at least I think so - is that almost 20% of hits result form search engine hits. It's nice to know that Google and Yahoo (another way of saying Google) have indexed the site.

It is also interesting to see that more than 60% of the hits come from the journal Web site - which implies that people are following the links from the contents page and the top page of InformationR.net We don't have any library catalogue listings yet, and the number from other Weblogs is small, but, who knows...

I've been a little surprised by how quickly the geographical coverage has increased: initially, the Weblog was getting hits from the UK, the USA and Australia, but now it has hits from 25 countries. I imagine that by the time the next issue of the journal comes out, it could well be double that.

This message was sent to the IR-DISCUSS discussion list and copied directly to the Weblog:

Exploring the Free-Conversant site, I find that members of the Weblog can submite entries by e-mail instead of logging on to the site and using the message box found there. You can even indicate links by using html tags in the body of a plain text e-mail message. Information on doing this is to be found in the Conversant documentation and this shows how you embed the links. To send a message to the site, you simply address it to: irweblog-site@free-conversant.com

To have the message appear in the Weblog, rather than only in the Message Centre, enter the following as the first line of the message: "addToWeblog index " I am simultaneously trying this out as I send this message, as you will see from the first line of this message. Give it a go and let me know what happens - don't worry about posting test messages to the Weblog - I can remove them.

This now appears to be working, after an abortive attempt last week.

Interesting news buzzing around the Web this weekend, started, it seems by Dan Gillmor, a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, whose item was published today (Sunday 16th February 2003), but who released the story on Saturday night, with the result of course, that it was 'blogged' here, there and everywhere, before you could say 'Bill Gates'.

And the news? Simply that Google has bought the San Francisco company Pyra Labs, the producers of the Blogger software and the associated Weblog services.

There is an obvious synergy between the two systems, in that Google will be able, presumably, to underpin the Blogger Weblogs with its search engine - perhaps enabling a search across all of the Weblogs actually maintained on Pyra's servers - or, on Google's, since, as a result of the deal, Pyra will be moving them on to Google's servers.

I imagine, however, that there is a bigger draw, in that Google moves into a new market, which will, perhaps, pull customers who buy Blogger software to buy Google as an associated search engine. Weblogs are also instant publishing tools, which can be used for much more than the Weblogs and I imagine that some folk at Google will have ideas about what else might be done - ready publishing of in-house company newspapers, perhaps? Insinuating Google into more companies as an intranet search engine as a result? Using it as an e-publishing tool generally for netzines and e-books - all with Google as the search engine?

Pyra Labs has 1.1 million registered users and estimate that about 200,000 are actively running Weblogs - I imagine that that number will grow rapidly as Google moves to gain from its acquisition.

I got a nasty shock tonight when I tried to resume my analysis of the way Weblogs were linking to my paper on knowledge management. I re-ran my search, which had previously revealed about 110 links and this time Google reported no pages! And this was when I used the search for a URL feature in the Advanced search. When I ran the same url in the ordinary search box it came up with 34 links. What's going on here? Does Google drop Weblogs after a certain period of time, or is it only searching on the current pages and dropping the archives?

The helpful folk at Macrobyte have helped with my problem of allowing members to contribute to the log. I have created a small group consisting of people who have been contributing to IR-DISCUSS and this group will find, when they log on, that the 'New Message' box appears at the top of the log - this enables you to post directly into the log.

Anyone else who would like to be able to do this, rather than just read the log can e-mail me - using the New Message link on the Nav bar and I will pick up the mail at the Message Center.

Happy Weblogging!

Tom

Managed to get a look at the Guardian's 'Online' section with my lunch and, lo and behold! the front page article is about businesses becoming interested in Weblogs - not only as information management devices within the firm, but to produce commercial 'blogs'. Those without a daily delivery of the newspaper can find the item at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,884658,00.html

Some interesting links: http://www.buzzmachine.com/

http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/

http://writetheweb.com/Members/gilest/old/123 - this one still believes in knowledge management :-)

and, of course, the Guardian's own Weblog is worth a look: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblog/0,6798,517233,00.html

Tom

Well done Tom.

One thing about Conversant is it's slightly different from other blogging tools in that it isn't easy for contributors to build a network round it.

I hope you enoy the experience of keeping a weblog. You could always consider keeping a personal one to get the full experience!

Yours

Euan