Information Research Weblog

A news item from Reuters carries information on broadband developments in Europe, and especially Sweden. The core of the story is about a broadband supplier in Sweden (Bredbandsbolaget), which delivers 10Mb broadband for 399 SKr a month (£29.33 or $52.52) - just about the same price that people in the UK are paying for 0.5 Mb ADSL connection. There's more: Bredbandsbolaget will deliver 24Mb for just 100 SKr more (a total of £36.68 or $65.68). Clearly, 'broadband Britain' has a long way to go!

Congratulations to one of our Editorial Board members, Amanda Spink, for her new book, jointly authored with Bernard Jansen: "Web Search: Public Searching of the Web" - you can find details at the publisher's Website.

Reviewing my own use of the Web some time ago, I came to the conclusion that I use it mainly as a question-answering system: What is the definition of...? Where can I buy...? Where is there a decent restaurant in...? To some extent, who puts up the information is not so important as long as I recognize that it is a fairly authoritative source - in general, I wouldn't use personal pages for answers to these kinds of questions. Except, perhaps, in relation to technology, when discussion lists often contain very useful information from people who've tried something out and are prepared to tell you why it doesn't work.

Now Jakob Nielsen has come to something like the same conclusion. His latest Alertbox column points out that people are using the Web to find answers to their questions and that the implications for e-commerce sites in particular are significant. How do you turn the casual enquirer into a loyal customer? Well, in my case you don't: I shop around for everything, and just because I got a good price for something doesn't mean that I'll go back to the same place for something similar. Time moves on, and prices move with it!

Leaving e-commerce aside, however, it's interesting to speculate about the shape the Web is taking in people's minds as they use it as a combined dictionary, encyclopedia, technical manual, cookery book, or whatever. Nielsen's point is that the Web is becoming this question-answering system by virtue of the existence of the search engines. It is not essential these days to keep a list of sites visited - Bookmarks or Favourites - if you found the page before, you'll find it again, through Google, Alta Vista, or AlltheWeb - or whatever is your favourite of the moment.

It's also dangerous, of course; particularly if you are prepared to accept the first thing you find that appears to answer your question. It seems likely that users will become less and less careful about what they decide to accept as authoritative, simply because things are being found so quickly. The bigger the Web grows, the more difficult it becomes to do more than check out the first four or five items in the output list - as long as those first items appear to provide the answer.

So, do the search engines have an increasing responsibility to validate the accuracy of what they present to the user?

There's a new report available on the state of the 'alignment' of countries in the European Union in respect of ICT infrastructure.

Produced by INSEAD, the international business school, it suggests that, on a variety of measures, the most advanced countries are (in rank order:

1	Denmark
2	Sweden
3	Netherlands
4	United Kingdom
5	Finland
6	Germany
7	Austria
8	Belgium
9	Ireland
10	Luxembourg

This is an important report and potentially very useful to anyone exploring the concept of the 'information society'.

A good portal to resources in psychology can be found at the Psychology World Wide Web Virtual Library.

I imagine that most readers of the log are aware of the World list of departments etc., in the information field that I maintain. It is a continuous problem to update the links and I use Xenu's Link Sleuth to check them once or twice a year, as well as occasionally putting out a mailing to remind people to check their links and let me know if they need updating.

Academic institutions, that one might hope would do better, appear to be just as bad as everyone else in changing URLs - all it needs is a new Vice-Chancellor, Rector, or Principal to arrive on the scene and, inevitably, there is some (usually pointless) 'reorganization', as a result of which the URLs are thrown in the air and come down we know not where. My favourite hate is the database-driven list of courses that is structured first by date, then by subject - with the result that the URLs change every year.

It's easy to avoid this: all one needs is a 'redirect' instruction in a meta-tag and the user can be transferred from the old URL to the new one painlessly and I can find out when this has happened by using Link Sleuth. Given the number of Web-based directories that are not well-maintained this would result in thousands of hits resulting in satisfied instead of frustrated users.

In some places (nameless to protect them from shame) the public relations department has taken over the Website completely, producing a structure that is supposed to be geared to the needs of different kinds of potential users, but often ends up satisfying none of them.

The silly thing is that it isn't too difficult to produce an architecture for a university site - they all have more or less the same structure of faculties and department, with separate research institutes in some case, and other, fairly arbitrary elements tacked on. External users generally want to find a department, a course, a research group, a person, the library, and possibly the Vice-Chancellor's (Rector's, etc.) office - but the number of sites that make it difficult to find some of these is legion. Finding the University Library on the Sheffield site, for example, used to be a serious problem until (presumably because of numerous objections) a 'quick link' was put on the top page. Individual departmental sub-sites reveal the same kind of problem - sometimes there are links to the staff list, sometimes not.

And why do US universities (and those elsewhere influenced by them) use the term "Academics" to mean the organizational structure - click on Academics on any of these sites and you can get an entire mish-mash of topic headings from the simple 'Schools and departments' to a strange list (in another nameless institution), which includes guides, resources, and journals. According to the good old OED, the use of 'academics' in this way in the USA is a relatively recent coinage (1974) - the rest of the world uses 'academics' as the plural of 'academic', a noun meaning a person employed to teach or research in a university.

Thursday is the Online supplement day for the Guardian and today much of it is devoted to gaming and games machines - a thoroughly boring topic from my point of view. I've never seen the sense of spending hours trying kill one alien after another. Still, it takes all kinds to populate the world. Among the more interesting items:

Flaws in Wi-fi

'Hot' source blogs

UK 'competition' in broadband.

Is VoIP in or out? No sooner do we have commentators suggesting that VoIP won't hack it in the real world than we have companies with so many subscribers that they can reduce the monthly charge. This is the case with the US supplier Vonage, which, with 150,000 subscribers on the books, feels it can cut its monthly charge from $35 to $30 - it figures to cut again when it hits 450,000

News of a new site that may be of interest to those who fluently read French. It is Ergolab - and, being French, naturally has papers on "Questions existentielles"

Denmark takes the bacon: according to a survey by IBM and The Economist, Denmark is the leading country for Internet use. The top rankings are:

1. Denmark
2. United Kingdom
3. Sweden
4. Norway
5. Finland
6. USA

George takes an interest: in what you are doing on the Internet. ZDNet reports in FBI wants to watch you type, that that service would love to wiretap the Internet -

The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers of broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in backdoors for easy wiretapping.

Welcome to the police state!

Do we call it a wireless or a radio?

VoIP for real? I see that AT&T is determined to become the biggest provider of telephony through VoIP - it seems to be making a strong start with services operating in California, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Massachusetts.

New report from the Gates Foundation

Since getting broadband and connecting my computer to the hi-fi system, I've been enjoying Internet Radio - the sound quality is excellent and technical hitches are infrequent. I'm using the RealAudio free media player, rather than the Windows Media Player, since I find the latter rather unfriendly to work with. People complain about the difficulty of finding the free download on the Read Audio site, but you can get a copy quite easily by going to the BBC help page. Not that I've got anything against Real Audio making money by selling the 'professional' version - good luck to them in their battle to survive the Microsoft juggernaut.

My exploration of the Internet airwaves is far from complete, but some favourites are:

• BBC Radio 3 - for its classical concerts and related programmes and for its jazz and 'world music' programmes, like those of Andy Kershaw.
• Hober - continuous music with only the occasional 'station identification' message - usually whispered :-). Comes from Takoma Park, Maryland and sent out by what seems to be a Web design, hosting, etc. firm, for the benefit of those who want something to listen to while they do computer work. Folk, 'world music', etc.
• Grassy Hill Radio - linked from Hober - folk music old and new. Like Hober, continuous music. The big advantage of these stations, apart from the music, is the lack of inane chat that bedevils the usual DJ programme.
• Prairie Home Companion - the famed Garrison Keillor radio programme - wonderful archive of complete shows, nicely split into sections if you want that.

Let me have your recommendations and I'll post them on the log.

The decision of Google to get into e-mail has provoked mountains of comment - mostly relating to the advertisement policy. The strategy appears to be that GMail will use automatic analysis of the text of messages to put ads at the side - much as Google now does for searches. CNN.com has a longish article on the subject, while ZDNet UK reports that the UK's Information Commissioner has been presented with a claim that the policy of retaining even deleted e-mail would infringe the UK's privacy legislation. Today's Guardian Online reports that GMail is now open for testers - however, that's not evident from the GMail site, which simply records your e-mail address to send you more information.

The Google news alerts are an excellent source of information on all kinds of things. I have two running at the moment; one for VoIP and the other for developments in wi-fi. Some items from the former may interest others:

One wonders if the powerful communications industry in the USA will actually allow this one to happen: "Legislation was unveiled Friday that would classify voice over Internet Protocol as an information service, releasing it from telecommunications regulation." (RCR Wireless News)

I mentioned Skype some time ago: here is a less than totally enthusiastice review from SFGate.com:

Trying it out, I found Skype to be a simple to use service that felt more like an instant messenger program with a strong integrated voice-over-Internet protocol functionality. But it's no substitute for a telephone.

And, finally, a useful account of what's going on from The Mercury News.

There's so much hype and counter-hype that it's difficult to figure out what the future may hold: my guess, FWIW, it that VoIP is on a roll and that the world of telephony is in for a revolution - a technological optimist would probably say two years, a telecomms exec. would probably hope for fifteen before it hits, so eight to ten years is probably a reasonable estimate for the time by which VoIP will have a significant share (say 30%?) of the market.

Visiting World Wide Words recently I discovered that not only is an RSS feed now available for it, but that it also uses a different kind of aggregator I hadn't seen before called KlipFolio. Naturally, I had to try it. I don't find it any improvement on my usual aggregator, NewzCrawler, but others may enjoy the rather quirky mode of presentation.

Google is also hitting the news this week - with new services announced and, in today's Guardian, a big article about Google's intention to offer a free e-mail service to compete with Yahoo! and Hotmail, offering a gigbyte of storage - way above the limits of the other two. I'll join that! Get more on this from Google itself.

Spam is the electronic equivalent of the bubonic plague, spewed forth by rats in Florida most of the time, it seems. However, the fight against it is on and I note that Yahoo! Mail, which I've been using as my secondary e-mail address pretty well since it started up in 1997, is getting its act together. One good thing about Yahoo! Mail is that you can mark an item as spam without opening it and then click on the 'Spam' button - this not only removes it, but transfers it to Yahoo's anti-spam team so that learn more about how to counter it.

Yahoo! Mail is free, up to a limit of 6MB of storage - after that you pay. And if you pay, for Yahoo! Mail Plus, you can now have a variety of addresses so that you do not need to reveal your primary e-mail address. Other mail providers may well think this is a good idea and, indeed, ISPs often provide the possibility of multiple e-mail addresses. Yahoo! Mail Plus starts at $29.99 a year.

Usability is a pretty hot topic and all times and I've referred from time to time to Jakob Nielsen's "Alertbox" pages. Now here's an interesting site on the subject, drawn to my attention by the developer. More than you ever need to know about the subject.

Old news now - two days old - that Yahoo! has dropped Google as its search engine in favour of its own search engine, provided by Inktomi. So I wondered how it compared. I searched for "Information Research" using both and, surprise, links to the journal were 1st and 2nd in Yahoo! Search and also in Google. Not much difference there. So, I searched for "case-based reasoning" at ".edu" sites. In the first 20 links for each search engine, only five institutions were duplicated, and from these five institutions only four Web pages were duplicated. It would seem, then, that the two engines are doing different things and that, if you want a reasonably comprehensive coverage of a topic, it would be a good idea to use both.

Found a long article today in Fortune - not available at its Web site, unless you are a subscriber, unfortunately - but you can read the first page there - about a start-up Internet telephony company called Skype. These are the guys who brought you KaZaa, so peer-to-peer communication is their game and what is telephony other than P2P? However, unlike KaZaa, which was funded out of their savings, Skype has attracted the attention of the venture capitalists who believe that their software for Voice Over Internet Protocol (otherwise known as VOIP) is a winner - to the extent of investing $25 million in the first round, with the second round of funding over-subscribed.

This is serious enough for the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to be saying that telecom as we know it is finished:

I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype. When the inventors of KaZaa are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic... - it's over. The world will change now inevitably.

The key is that phrase, 'the quality is fantastic' - VOIP has been around for some time now, but it's been a hassle and the time delays were dreadful and the quality was poor - with broadband use growing and the quality problem apparently solved... well, I'm now among the more than 7 million who have downloaded it, and I'm looking forward to getting set up to use it.

Coincidentally, this week's Time magazine has an article called 'Back from the dead', devoted to the resurgance of interest in, among other things, VOIP. [Thanks for drawing this one to my attention, Alistair... and thanks, Charles, for the link to the inevitable.] The separate bits of the article are on the Time Europe Web site - and the VOIP bit is here.

It looks as though this could be the next big thing!

Ah! A trade mark dispute - a pity really, the Phoenix metaphor that started it led naturally to Firebird - and I've never even heard of the database group that was objecting.

However, from a hint on the discussion forum, I discovered that Firefox will launch if you also have Firebird running and it nicely picks up the Firebird bookmarks and add-ins. Tab Browser Extensions are one of these, so I'll see if disabling them results in Firefox launching every time.

Keep tuned to this station for further announcements.

On 2/9/04, Tom Wilson said:

>Don't ask me why, but the new version of the Firebird browser is called
>Firefox

The reason is explained here
Seth

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