Information Research Weblog

The Firebird browser gets unstinting praise from Forbes magazine.

I'm now using it pretty well all the time, since IE causes so many problems under XP. From time to time javascript doesn't function under Firebird, but that seems more likely to be the result of poor coding than of a fundamental failure in Firebird. Version 0.8 is almost ready and will be released on Monday 9th February.

I'm very impressed by the Mozilla Firebird browzer. It may even displace Opera as my preferred system.

One of the big features is the extent to which it can be customised through 'Tips and Tricks' which allow you to do practically anything by inserting code into one or another of three text files: user.js, userChrome.css, and userContent.css

Try it out, I think you'll like it.

You'll notice a new button on the page - an orange one with the letters 'XML'. This is the standard button used by sites to indicate the source of their RSS feed. When you click on the button you get the feed for the page as it is at present - but that's not the important thing. All you need to know, if fact, is the URL for the page, which appears in the address bar. Do it now and you'll see that the URL is <http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/index/rss>. You need that for your news aggregator, assuming you have one. The aggregator will have some routine for adding new news feeds and will ask for the URL. Once in place, the aggregator will keep you up to date with what's happening on the log.

If you don't yet have an aggregator, you'll find a list of them at Haiko Hebig's Weblog I use NewzCrawler. If you use a PDA in a serious way, you might try MobileRSS

Yes, I know it isn't even Christmas Eve yet, but a number of things cropped up and this may be my last message before the festive season gets thoroughly under way.

Web site crimes

Jakob Nielsen has come up with his pet usability problems of 2003: let's hope they strike chords with the major offenders. I particularly felt sympathy with number 2:

2. New URLs for Archived Content

Archives add substantial value to a site with very little extra effort. Although more and more sites are archiving old content, most sites still fail to maintain good archives. Some sites treat archives as a separate site area, assigning pages new URLs when they move them from the main area into the archive. Changing the URL when archiving content causes linkrot. It also makes other sites reluctant to link to you. Although sites might consider linking to a current article, if they've been burned by linkrot in the past, they'll often pass you by because they don't want to bother with having to update their own pages when you move yours.

Help desk and customer service

This week's Fortune magazine has the first article I've seen on companies pulling their call centres back home from India because of reduced customer satisfaction. Funny, I was suggesting to someone just a couple of weeks ago that I figured the pendulum was bound to swing. The Fortune article tells us that Web.com and Dell have both done this recently. There's a comment that suggests that the 'one law for the rich' saying holds true:

"Not everything is moving offshore," says Amit Shankardass, solution-planning officer at ClientLogic, a Nashville-based call center outsourcing company. "Airline companies would not move management of high-yield customers offshore." Instead they practice, to follow industry jargon, "onshoring" or "nearshoring"—which means sending calls to Canada.

The Guardian gets it wrong - well, slightly, anyway.

Frank Miller - he of the wise words to the IR-DISCUSS list sent me an electronic Christmas card, which was so good that I immediately signed up to send them out myself. The artist Jacquie Lawson, together with a musician cum IT guru, designs interactive cards that are quite delightful. Jacquie was trained at the St. Martin's School of Art and lives in a village in West Sussex. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find one of her cards pictured on the back page of Guardian Media supplement (the tabloid bit) with the comment, to the effect that the card was from the USA. Very ambiguous - the sender might have been in the USA, but the server that delivered it was just down the road (well, relatively) from the Guardian offices in London. So - if you are interested in supporting British creativity - take a look and sign up. It's a modest subscription for such quality.

The possibility of privately-owned Google going public is giving financial analysts the trembles.

Wharton School of Management has a nice piece on it.

You may recall that we had a little discussion on IR-DISCUSS a while ago on the problem of dead links in electronic journals and on the probable impossibility of maintaining such links. After all, print journals that cite dead links don't issue addenda, do they?

However, I did a check, using Xenu - an excellent program, by the way - and found that there are now 2,728 links on the journal site, both internal to the journal and external from papers to the Web. 77.79% of these are still valid, which is pretty good, I reckon. 9.16% of the rest are of a type that Xenu skips (e.g., mailto links); 9.27% were not found and 0.48% were 'forbidden request'. 1.65% reported 'no such host', 1.21% were timed out and the remaining reasons covered a total of 12 links.

I intend to get rid of the internal bad links and we'll see how many that leaves that are dead externals.

If anyone has a good idea about automatic correction of links, I'll be pleased to hear about it. However, since it will have to cost no money and need no technical skills, I suspect I'm looking for the impossible!

You've probably all read this one already, but it was new to me today. The School of Information Management and Systems has had a project runnning to calculate how much 'information' is produced and/or distributed annually. Their current estimate is that:

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

What's an exabyte? Here's a definition from SearchStorage.com:

An exabyte (EB) is a large unit of computer data storage, two to the sixtieth power bytes. The prefix exa means one billion billion, or one quintillion, which is a decimal term. Two to the sixtieth power is actually 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes in decimal, or somewhat over a quintillion (or ten to the eighteenth power) bytes. It is common to say that an exabyte is approximately one quintillion bytes. In decimal terms, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.

Or, as the authors of the SIMS report put it:

...five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.

I knew there was too much of the damned stuff!

Reflecting on Terry Brookes's Web services column:

Amazon tools will let Office users access Amazon information from within an Office document, using the research pane included in most applications. A writer typing a bibliography in a Word document, for example, could click on the name of a book to get catalogue information or cover art from Amazon.

Microsoft is making a major effort to encourage partners to build online services that exploit the new Office's XML capabilities, with service providers looking at Office as a familiar interface that will encourage greater consumption of Web services. Early backers include Factiva, a Dow Jones-owned online research service, and online payment services from eBay's PayPal.

Another major digital resource - The Lancet - is going digital (with its entire archive) but:

People will still have to pay to access the electronic version, and it is likely to be available in major reference libraries at universities and in cities rather than affordable by private individuals.

This sounds very interesting. It certainly describes me.

I've mentioned Michael Quinion's site previously, World Wide Words. This is from a section of the site entitled Turns of Phrase and refers to recent terms, or at least they were recent when the article for the word was written. Some of the words are "ancient" (i.e. up to seven years old).

The one that caught my attention today was Technorealist, which our words guru describes as something along the lines of someone who doesn't believe in techno-utopianism (that technology is good and will solve all ills), nor are they a neo-luddite (one who sees all technology as retrograde and evil).

And there's a site for technorealism!

Moderates of the world rejoice (if you can be bothered). And that's one of the problems, isn't it? Being "balanced" is not exciting or sensational, and doesn't tend to attract those with an abundance of energy.

I came across the Alexa site again recently, as a result of following a link from the counter service NedStat. For those who don't know it, Alexa provides valuable information on the use of sites. For example, the page on Information Research tells me:

• Traffic Rank for informationr.net: 208,855
• Other sites that link to this site: 547
• Speed: Very Fast (80th percentile)
• Online Since: 1-Apr-1995

and that people who visit the journal site also visit:

• Portal: Libraries and the Academy
• Ex Libris
• International Journal on Digital Libraries
• LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Journal
• Library Journal Digital
• Informing Science: International Journal of an Emerging Discipline
• The Public-Access Computer Systems Review
• Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large
• Academic Exchange Quarterly Spring 2003
• Journal of Southern Academic and Special Librarianship

Here's a site with a very cool front page. Not sure how much it relates to Information Research, but it's certainly worth having a look and a play.

Apparently the site itself is well laid out and has some good information for those interested in Records Management.

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

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

Tom, I think you may have misunderstood what "Slate" was saying. I suspect that he wasn't searching for that particular site but pointing out that the most common meaning of "apple" appears after 50 other pages.

However, I agree that to criticise Google for it seems unfair. He sounds like a bit of a luddite in some ways.

It seems a bit silly to criticise technology for having a focus on technology. I can see his point, but it's an argument that I would think would be easily shot down as especially as it is used to criticise Google.

Google only reports on what's out there. If apple growers, producers, sellers, lovers etc don't have a dominant presence on the web, it's not Google's fault.

Here's an interesting little table from the counter service for Information Research.

1.	Internet Explorer 6.x	59.1 %
2.	Internet Explorer 5.x	25.8 %
3.	Opera 7.x	5.4 %
4.	Netscape 4.x	4.3 %
5.	Mozilla 1.x	2.2 %
6.	Netscape 3.x	1.1 %
7.	Opera 5.x	1.1 %
8.	Netscape 7.x	1.1 %

These are the browsers used to access Information Research and I find it interesting that Opera version 7 now ranks third, above Netscape version 4. Of course, Internet Explorer, with a total of 84.9% is way ahead of the competition - but that doesn't surprise anyone does it? It's just the kind of monopoly effect the courts were chasing. With the probable demise of Netscape, given AOL's commitment to Internet Explorer, it looks as Opera will be the only competition in town!
Incidently, Information Research is on stream to beat more records this year - if usage continues at its present rate, there will be 45,000+ hits on the top page - almost 50% more than last year, and most of that increase the result of publicity surrounding one paper - I'll leave you to guess which one that was!

If you go to Google.com and type in "weapons of mass destruction" and then click on "I'm feeling lucky" (not "Google Search") you get an interesting error message.

Read it carefully.

(My posting of this message in no way reflects my personal opinion on this issue.)

Three weeks in the Italian sunshine has a way of getting across the point that there's more to life than the life of the Web. Thanks to Grahame Gould for keeping things going while I was away.

Now that I'm back, what seems to be hot? Well, there's the news of the new Apple machine, which may or may not be the first 64 bit desktop machine - depending upon when they actually get it out. But do we actually need 64 bits? It's hard to tell whether Apple's star is rising or falling - Adobe has recently announced that the latest versions of its video-editing software will run on Windows XP, but not the Mac.

Politics and the Web seems to be another hot topic, with the '(non-existent) weapons of mass destruction' issue holding the news pages around the world - especially in the UK, where the issue of whether or not Tony Blair misled Parliament looks as though it will continue to run and run. Apparently, the topic recently became number one on Google. Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean also makes the news for his use of the Internet to gain support (people and money) - while Tony Blair still doesn't have an e-mail address! Perhaps his fearful of learning the truth about what people think about him :-)

I'm a little late with this one as a result of being away. However - it seems that AOL has signed a deal with Microsoft for the continued use of Internet Explorer as its browser. This suggests that AOL's continued funding of Netscape is no longer sensible. Read all about it.

By coincidence, that virus showed up in my mailbox today - so I was able simply to delete the entire message without evening opening it, let alone the attachment.

In fact this is the second time - I'd vaguely recalled it when I saw the information about it. On the first occasion I opened the message but not the attachment - that was fortunate!

If you survive until 30th May, you should be OK, since the virus has a self-destruct button that activates on that day.

The best account of the Palyh virus I've found is at the F-Secure site.

However, if you haven't got it yet, the best way to avoid it is simply to delete any message seeming to come from support@microsoft.com which has an attachment.

The BBC carries a recently announced item on a virus, which identifies itself as being from support@microsoft.com

"The message comes with a variety of subject lines but the attachment should not be opened because it will infect users with a worm known as Palyh."

Read more at the BBC site

I said that the previous note was my last for tonight, but then I came across the ultimate futile gesture. The British government has said that it is cracking down on spam. Of course, the means suggested have not a cat in hell's chance of achieving anything very much, but governments have to appear to be trying, don't they?

As the news article says:

Unfortunately it is not clear how the new European directive will help in combating the flood of spam which comes from outside the European Union.

As the producer of a significantly sized Web site, plus electronic journal, plus discussion list, plus Weblog, which has no financial input whatsoever, except out of my own pocket, I was somewhat surprised by the latest Knowledge@Wharton Newsletter - a fortnightly e-mail message fronting a Web site which touts research undertaken at Wharton, i.e., it is a publicity medium for the business school. Now it suggests that, in addition to its sponsors (lucky guys!) it needs donations from the recipients of the messages. I don't know how much Wharton is worth these days but, given the fees it charges for its MBA programme, I doubt that it is near to going broke.

Meanwhile, anyone who wants to sponsor InformationR.net has my e-mail address!

Social network theory seems to me to be one of those techniques that simply reports the obvious: however, if you are into that kind of thing you might be interested in a site, Buddy Zoo, that applies the ideas to 'buddy lists' in instant messaging systems. You have to have an AOL Instant Messaging user-name to sign up to see the information - and I couldn't be bothered to do that, since I get enough stuff by other means already. Still, the maps on the top page look pretty enough - according to Slashdot the site was created by a student at Caltech, and I imagine that students are among the prime users of IM.

Orwell's '1984' seems to have hit the USA, a few years behind schedule. The so-called 'Patriot Act' is causing problems for librarians, booksellers and ISPs - and they aren't happy.

Read all about it in the New Jersey Star Ledger, Yahoo! News and elsewhere

More in the Tri-Valley Herald

The Daily Review

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

...and more from an Alta Vista news search about the impact on booksellers.

Lots of mentions on the Weblogs and e-zines about Yahoo's new search engine - which, of course, is based on Google.

Wired News has the story, and you can see the new interface at the Yahoo site.

Of course, Yahoo has now bought Inktomi, to reduce its dependence upon Google, and Microsoft seems to have its eye on Google, as another Wired News story suggests. Given that Microsoft has some pretty significant work going on in information retrieval, this is not surprising.

"The medium is the message" said Marshall McLuhan - or, at least, he is credited with saying, I've never bother to check. However, there's a bit of work that suggest that he may have been right, had he lived long enough to experience the Web.

A piece of work is reported at Human Factors International which suggests that, among other things, if a Web site looks professionally produced and is attractive to the eye, it is more likely to be regarded as credible than one that is not.

Mmmm. So now we shall see the charlatans leaping to produce Web sites with those characteristics, I guess. Like the young lady of Riga, one should beware the smile on the face of the tiger. (Not my fault that it doesn't rhyme!)

You may have missed the item in The Register,which reported that the states of Massachusetts and Texas are considering making firewalls illegal.

Clearly, if the Department of Homeland Security wants to make sure that it's got all the dirt on you it really must have direct, unimpeded access to your hard disc!

No doubt George Dubbya approves highly of such measures. Isn't there something in the US national anthem about 'the home of the free'?

Whatever happened to that idea?

Following up Grahame Gould's recommendation of the Canadian site, I see that ZDNet has an item on enterprise portals that might be interesting to some.

The article, by Kevin Foster, talks of 'navigating the seven-Cs' - I'll leave it to you to find out what they are (and how far 'C' is stretched to accommodate the pun!)

I imagine that pretty well everyone gets more rubbish in their e-mail than they would like - but exactly how much?

Well, a study reported in the Washington Post:

Roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is spam, up from 8 percent in late 2001 and nearly doubling in the past six months, according to Brightmail Inc., a major vendor of anti-spam software. By the end of this year, industry experts predict, fully half of all e-mail will be unsolicited. (About 40 percent of U.S. Postal Service mail is business marketing.)

I guess that a significant proportion of this is from those idiots in Nigeria - I must get about six messages a day that simply go straight into the waste bin. In fact, I'm thinking of using the word 'Nigeria' to filter the rubbish before it hits my screen.

However, some people have fun with the Nigerian mob - if you enjoy a laugh towards the end of the week, take a look at Scam-O-Ramo and follow some of the links. Enjoy the tale of Captain Stabbin on the high seas.

If one was to think of a country that was totally Internet-connected, I imagine that most people would guess that it was Japan. Well, a recent report tells us that it is now No. 2 to the USA in the total population with Internet connection. The survey found:

the number of people using the Internet in Japan having increased by 13.49 million from a year earlier to 69.42 million

and

The Internet population ratio was 81.4% in households, registering a whopping 20.9 point increase, while it was 79.1% in business offices, or an advance of 11.1 points and 98.4% in corporations, or a scant 0.8 point rise.

Broadband is the big growth area, up almost 15% compared with last year.

See also the Ministry figures.

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