Information Research Weblog

We've had occasional instances of the value of Weblogs in spreading news about papers in Information Research and we have another at the moment. Nahyun Kwon's paper on virtual reference service has been noted in a number of Weblogs and, as a direct result, the hits have soared to more than 2,400 in less than one month. By comparison, the other papers in the issue have an average hit rate of about 400. There's a lesson here for authors - if you want your paper to be noticed, make sure it's noticed in the 'blogosphere' - and you are the ones who will know which Weblog authors are likely to be interested, so get to it! :-)

Readers will probably recall Terry Brooks's short note on Web services from some time back. The subject pops up again on ZDNet in a column from David Berlind on Yahoo offering APIs to its search engine, so that Web services can be built on it by third parties.

Interesting in itself, but Berlind notes that his Weblog shows a Google search:

Although it still refers to the effort as a beta program, Google has been doing this for over two years. For example, if you check out my Transparency Channel, you can see on the lower right-hand side were I have pre-executed a Google search on "media transparency" and included a results box (Google-branded, of course) right on the page. Radio Userland, the blogging solution that I'm testing for review (using my Transparency Channel as the guinea pig) comes with pre-built macros for accessing Google's search APIs via a Web services interface. All you have to do is get a license key from Google (a relatively simple process that requires getting a user ID on Google's systems) and live with the limitation of 1,000 search executions per day. Google has some pretty tight licensing terms. For example, you can't build a commercial service off the company's APIs without asking first (according to the company's FAQ)

The fun thing is that Berlind hasn't done a search for "media transparency", but for 'media AND/OR transparency', with the result that he attributes third position on the output to one 'William J. Bennett' and sixth position to his own Weblog, whereas, in fact, 'William J. Bennett' doesn't appear on the first page of the results and Berlind's Weblog is at fifth position—or, indeed, third position if one removes items two and four, which are pages within sites one and three. Those inverted commas do make a difference :-)

A very Happy New Year to all readers of Information Research and to all associated with the journal.

2004 proved (again) to be a record year for the use of the journal - the counter on the top page records 47,056 'hits' for 2004 (an increase of 4,282 on 2003), which is more than a 400% increase on 1998, the first year recorded.

I imagine that the growth in use must flatten out at some stage, but there's no way of accurately forecasting when that might happen. I thought that this year would show only a marginal advance over last year - but what do I know? :-)

As we might expect, Google Scholar has raised a lot of interest. There's an interesting Weblog entry from a guy who works for Ingenta on working with Google to enable content to be 'crawled'—rather 'techie' for a non-nerd like myself, but interesting nonetheless.

Search Engine Watch also has an item - a moan about the lack of documentation, so that we don't know what Google Scholar actually covers - a very necessary moan, particularly when students these days seem to believe that if they can't find something by using Google, it doesn't exist.

I haven't used 'Scholar' much yet, but I don't like the output form: for some totally irrational reason, I'm happy to put up with it for a Web search, but the format doesn't fit my conception of what output relating to the scholarly literature should look like. I'll have to take a closer look and figure out why I have this reaction.

Weblogs

My thanks to folks, on and off the Weblog, who've written to encourage me to keep the Weblog going—I'll plod on when I know that it has some effect. Carol Cahill kindly says:

Our library probably wouldn't have a wireless Internet connection if my interest hadn't first been piqued by your Weblog. Now we have a four-laptop wireless training lab and patrons can come in and connect with their own computers.

Which I think is rather better than a citation in a journal :-)

"The Chief's" comments on Weblog membership counts is also interesting - as are the usage stats for the Weblog - last year 13,776 hits, this year, so far, 13,588 with those hits distributed over the continents as follows:

1.	North-America	10,780	39.4%
2.	Europe	10,565	38.6%
3.	Asia	2,961	10.8%
4.	Australia	1,735	6.3%
5.	Africa	415	1.5%
6.	South America	277	1.0%
7.	Central America	133	0.5%
	Unknown	498	1.8%

Yahoo! does a Google

News today of Yahoo!'s purchase of an e-mail start-up, by the name of Bloomba (why does the Internet generate so many silly names? Scope for a PhD dissertation here!). I'd never heard of Bloomba before, but it is an e-mail client, rather than a Web-based service. Reviews suggest that its killer feature is its search capacity; it indexes your mail as you receive it, including what's in attachments. Whatever plans Yahoo! has for the system, no one seems to know. The original parent company, Statalabs, says:

What does Yahoo! plan to do with the technology as a result of the acquisition?
At this time we do not have any announcements about the ongoing plans for the technology or the specifics of the transaction.

A case of 'Watch this space' - well, not this one, since I can't guarantee that I'll spot an announcement, but perhaps the Yahoo! site - and while you are there, you might like to take a look at MySearch

I think that Skype is useful if you are a member of a scattered team - as I am, in relation to the group in Leeds that I work with and also in relation to my work in Sweden - it brings down the cost of phoning a long way - I can talk to someone in Sweden for an hour for about 66 pence - which I can't do on the ordinary phone - and if all my contacts get themselves connected, the cost comes down to zero.

Of course, many organizations are now implementing VoIP for internal phone systems, so you may find yourself caught up in it regardless :-)

As for the Weblog - yes, I'll keep it going, in all probability - it just feels a little lonely from time to time :-)

On 10/20/04, The Chief said:

>Personally I enjoy your blog and will be sorry if you can it.

So do I. Weblogs, and everything else on the net, go through their
ups and downs. Right now you seem to be in a down period, Tom, but
I think your readers hope (and probably expect) you'll come back
again.

I tried that Skype and even put some money into being able to use it to ring
someone, but tried it once and have never got back to it. Mostly because
I'm used to using all the free methods and only occasionally make the effort
to talk to someone on a phone anyway. Guess I wasted a bit of money, or I
need to get back to using it.

And on the general lack of interest in the IR Weblog, I guess I would be
really disappointed if the IR Weblog disappeared. But I guess it's not
being a proper weblog so I guess I won't fight it. I get enough mail and
info as it is and that's part of why I haven't chased why I'm not getting
more!

Google is in the news again - on the 5th October it issued a 'new features' message to users of Gmail, to the effect that it was trialling a new mail forwarding system, which would be free during the trial. This prompted commentators to speculate on what other features of Google in general would become revenue streams.

As it happens, I've been using Gmail as a beta user for the past couple of months and a review will appear in the October issue of Information Research, and I'm now hooked on it. It's 1Gb filestore, use of 'labels' to index messages, and grouping of messages into 'conversations' make it a real winner.

This is the latest in a series of interesting posts and articles on Knowledge Management. I agree with much of what has been expressed, but my take is a bit different. You'll find it in a series of blogs at http://radio.weblogs.com/0135950. I think your readers may be particularly interested in the posts on "Has KM Been Done?" But nearly all of the posts are critical of KM as currently practiced.

Hello everyone - you've probably wondering where I've been this past month. Well - three weeks of it was holiday in sunny Italy - continuous sunshine and mid-30s temperatures for three weeks is difficult to come by in the UK! The other week has simply been catching up with things, three days at Leeds University Business School - my current UK employer - and one day of interviewing on a project on the provision of broadband access for disadvantaged groups in the community.

I had pretty well decided to draw a line under the Weblog, since it isn't really fulfilling the original intention of providing a forum for the discussion of the papers published in Information Research - instead, I've simply been drawing attention to things that might be of interest to the IR readership. Keeping that up, however, is more trouble than it's worth, since it rarely evokes any response.

The interesting question is, 'Why do discussion groups in the information science, information management, information systems area rarely provoke discussion of substantive issues?' The mailings in lists like LIS-BAILER, ASIS-L, KNOW-ORG and others consist generally of announcements of conferences, occasional calls for help with a project, student e-mail questionnaires, and the like. But how often does anyone address research issues? Pretty well never is the answer - take a look at the archives:

• ASIS-L
• LIS-BAILER
• KNOW-ORG

Is it that people are simply too busy? Or is that the research is generally solitary, with little in the way of a team approach, or has the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise in the UK provoked such paranoia that people are unwilling to share ideas any longer?

Whatever the answer, it's not really worth trying to provoke interest, since the interest seems not to be there to provoke.

I'll keep the Weblog going, but, in future, I shan't be trying to make regular postings, but simply post something when it seems more than marginally interesting.

An interesting item on wireless in the public library from LIS News.com

...and a longer piece on IT in public libraries from D-Lib Magazine

Turning to the University sector, I picked this up from Seb's Open Research - a couple of courses at Prince Edward Island University are using Weblogs as resource pages and communication. Here's one on 'Networking, knowledge and the digital age'.

And here's an interesting one! I initiated a debate on the JESSE list some time back on the extent to which Web citation was beginning to overtake journal citation as a performance tool. I then found that this had been picked up by a couple of researchers (Vaughan and Shaw, Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference? JASIST, 54(14), 2003, 1313-1322) and now ISI is getting together with NEC: Thomson ISI and NEC Team Up to Index Web-based Scholarship

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON & PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2004--Today, Thomson ISI and NEC Laboratories America (NEC) announced their collaboration to create a comprehensive, multidisciplinary citation index for Web-based scholarly resources. The new Web Citation Index(TM) will combine a suite of technologies developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation indexing" tools from NEC's CiteSeer environment, with the capabilities underlying ISI Web of Knowledge(SM). Thomson ISI editors will carefully monitor the quality of this new resource to ensure all indexed material meets the Thomson ISI high-quality standards.

During 2004, Thomson ISI and NEC will operate a pilot of the new resource to receive feedback from the scientific and scholarly community. Full access to the index is projected for early 2005.

When fully operational, the new resource will be a unique content collection within ISI Web of Knowledge. It will complement the Thomson ISI Web of Science®, and provide researchers with a new gateway to discovery -- using citation relationships among Web-based documents, such as pre-prints, proceedings, and "open access" research publications

OK - that's enough for now - I've got to go off to talk with the people at Orange about mobile technologies.

Anyone using the Weblog is probably as baffled as I am at the sight of two consecutive messages merged. I sent two messages yesterday, some hours apart and the second appears only partially and then as a lead-in to the earlier message. Apologies for this - I don't know how it happened.

Another example of how mention on a Weblog can stimulate document use is found in the latest issue of Information Research

Wally Koehler's paper on Web page persistence was mentioned in one of the popular information-related Weblogs and, lo and behold!, his paper is recording 772 hits, when the next highest is 267 and the average for the rest of the papers is 170. So, if you want your paper to be noticed, make sure it's picked up by a related Weblog.

From Column Two comes a link to a story about the use of a Weblog, using Movable Type, as a hospital Intranet. The story includes a paragraph that tells it all about systems design generally - great for those that grow up with it, hell for anyone else:

The old Intranet had been in place for many years and for the most part, probably because they had to and had grown accustomed to it, people were happy with it. To a new user coming in it was a nightmare, but to those who had learned the eight click path to get to Human Resources, it was fine.

Read the rest.

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.

Here's an interesting item from Current Cites - that useful alerting system for things about information and information technology: it concerns a new book from O'Reilly on 'Amazon Hacks', describing the tricks you can get up to in searching for books using the very powerful search engine at Amazon.com

This particular 'hack' discusses the advanced search possibilities, which go well beyond the typical Boolean search. Read all about it at the book's Web site.

On the Weblogging front, there's a dispute brewing up about RSS - Really Simple Syndication, or whatever use you want to make of those initials. The dispute surrounds the future of RSS and is too complicated to summarise here, so go look at the CNET News site.

Thanks to Sandy Starr of Spiked for this note:

I thought you might be interested in the following new article on spiked:

BLOG-STANDARD POLITICS - by Martyn Perks

Could blogging MPs reinvigorate the electorate?

Euan Semple drew our attention on the IR-DISCUSS list to a Weblog from the Netherlands (maintained by Ton Zijlstra) which had an article on 'Monstrous KM', based on a PhD thesis by Martijntje Smits, 'technological philosopher', with the title "Exorcising monsters: the cultural domestication of new technologies". Ton's article is worth reading.

Now, Ton himself joins the debate, through a message to Euan, as follows:

I read with interest the exchange on what KM is in the IR-DISCUSS list-archives of last month. And my recent posting seems to fit in with what was said there. Also the comment by Sebastian Fiedler, who is focussing on educational questions and problems, will probably be meeting approval in your group:

Yes, there is a problem with using different vocabularies but I strongly believe that part of the "monstrousity of KM" is amplified by the conceptual mess and the lack of epistemological reflection that much of business oriented KM literature displays. Take an article of your choice and replace "knowledge" with "information" ... and you might get a glimpse of what is deeply bothering me. To borrow a line from Ivan Illich..."Some words become so flexible that they cease to be useful." This is what happened largely to the term "knowledge" from my point of view. And could it be that what Ton calls the "industrial command and control style" is still widely associated with the notion of "management"? No wonder that KM was born as a monster and that would only take food from the technocrats in many organizations...

I most certainly agree with Sebastian there. He precisely points to why the term KM is a misnomer, and its (to me absurd) implication that knowledge can actually be managed. The coiner of the term KM, Karl Wiig, who introduced it in 1986, now bitterly regrets having done so.

As to what KM is, and how to define it, to me the following points are relevant:

At the core of KM is a paradigmshift from taking the organisation and its structures as a starting point to taking the individual and his knowledge as a starting point. The most poignant difference probably being the question whether you view employees as costs, or as individuals with the knowledge that makes your business succesful, i.e. the source of all your revenue. Karl Sveiby is probably one of the best known consultancy names taking this approach

.

KM is not a discipline in its own right, it is multidisciplinary to the core, taking the point above as it's angle of approach. So in that sense there is nothing 'new' about KM, other then making assumptions about what to > do with the results from a host of disciplines. The learning organization of Senge indeed fits in rather well with that, and to me Senge's ideas are very important concepts.I would not say that KM is relabeling the Learning Organization. Senge's work is part of the evolution of KM-thinking in the past two decades.

IM HRM and other fields of M are not subsets of KM, but are the fields in a company that should be influenced by a KM approach.

I hope you don't mind me intruding on your group's deliberations, and would like to know a bit more about your backgrounds. The referrer logs of my web server seem to indicate a lot of .ac.uk addresses today.

I'm sure I speak for all on the list when I say that we certainly don't mind Ton coming into the debate, although the list has not been very actively recently - it only seems to boil up around the mention of 'km'! :-)

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?