Information Research Weblog

Nokia has just announced its 770 tablet Internet device, intended for use wherever a wireless connection can be found. It's not a PC in any real sense, just a device for surfing the Internet, listenting to Internet radio and, promised, with RSS feed.

I can see this being the next "must have" toy - to be without one in Business Class airport lounges (not places I frequent much myself!) will be the same as being undressed - very embarrassing. It's quite tiny, however - 141 x 79 x 19 mm, which I translate as 5.5 x 3.125 x 0.75 ins. (approximately :-) ). (I wonder what it is about the old 3 x 5 catalogue card format that keeps it popular - does it follow the Golden Mean? Mmm. I've just checked - it does, the two numbers are side by side in the Fibonacci series. That must be the answer.)

Microsoft vs. IBM is a feature of some of today's news. ZDNet has an item on the possible purchase of Red Hat's Linux by Microsoft as a strategy in its assumed battle with the Big Blue giant. It's all speculation and based on rather complicated issues (to me) of intellectual property rights in Linux, but, who knows?

The same source tells us that IBM is promoting the use of Firefox to its staff (against MSoft's Internet Explorer), making the software available for downloading from its own servers and providing an internal Help Desk. With a reported 10% of staff already using it (that's about 30,000 people, apparently!), presumably the take-up is likely to be rapid. With IBM pushing Firefox in this way, how long will it take other companies to do the same?

Today's Guardian newspaper has a very interesting article by George Monbiot, a regular contributor, which is, in effect, about the quality (and suspect quality) of information available on the Internet. It also carries a warning to the effect that not everyone with a science degree is necessarily a 'scientist' in the true sense of the word.

The story concerns a claim by Dr. David Bellamy, a former university teacher and television presenter, that the world's glaciers are increasing rather than shrinking. Read the article and you will forever distrust anything that you cannot track down to a really authoritative source!

It's a great shame, really, that Bellamy has allowed himself to be misled in this way. He did a great deal of good for biology through his TV programmes, enthusing many for the discipline, and he is a noted environmentalist. Evidently, however, he has not fully understood that anyone can put anything on a Website.

This is not the first time that Monbiot has had a brush with Bellamy - there's more on his Website.

If you haven't yet switched to Firefox, reading the pages from the How Stuff Works site may provide you with some good reasons.

Molly Wood has an interesting little article, Good-bye, computer; hello, world! on the C|Net site. In it she proposes that Google may be developing a strategy of providing Web-based services:

I think Google's going to build a Web-based thin client-type hosted environment-slash-operating system replacement.

...Google has been working with a combination of Web application development technologies that have recently been dubbed Ajax. Ajax, which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, combines JavaScript, dynamic HTML, and XMLHTTP to, in essence, let you build Web-based applications that run as quickly and seamlessly as local software.

[You'll find more about Ajax on the Adaptive Path site.]

Netscape has beaten MSoft to the punch by releasing its new browser, Netscape 8.0. Still officially in beta, it looks a pretty polished product, with features that are now becoming expected - tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, better security, etc. etc. Plus the ability to add RSS feeds It has a pretty slick looking appearance and, although developed in partnership with Mercurial Communications, obviously owes something to Firefox. In particular, when you click on Themes and Extensions in the Tools menu, you find yourself presented with the pages from Mozilla.org

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 :-)

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn't have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by "conventional" means.

There were naysayers then, and indeed there still are, but would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallable than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

Yours respectfully

Euan

Attention was drawn, a little while ago, to the fact that Firefox was not as immune to security problems as claimed. Well, Version 1.0.1 has now been issued (not yet in all languages—so English English is not yet available). This version "fixes a few security holes and some other bugs", particularly the security problem relating to Internationalized Domain Names:

The IDN vulnerability allowed an attacker to create a fake Web site on a non-Microsoft browser in order to pull off a phishing scam. A spoofed link would seem to be a legitimate URL in the address bar of affected browsers. But instead of taking the victim to the trusted site, the link would lead to a phony Web site with a domain rendered as the same address under the IDN process. (ZDNetstory)

Mention of languages reminds me—is there any way at all of getting rid of English (US) in Microsoft Word? It causes enormous problems for a journal editor because people use the package without changing the language setting and, even when the default is set to English (UK) it always returns to English (US) as the default when you re-launch.

Following a news item in a Google 'Alert', I hit upon an item in the World Net Daily - an online newspaper of sorts, on the suggestion that the UN might take over the 'control' of the Internet.

At the bottom of the article I found:

Related special offer:

Get the U.N. out of the U.S.!

So I clicked on the link and found myself at a site headed Move America Forward, which is devoted to getting the UN Headquarters out of the USA. Without any sense of irony a cartoon shows a jackboot on Florida kicking the symbol of the UN. With the American passion for loyalty to flags and other such symbols, this presumably has a particular kind of resonance with the followers of this movement.

The site appears to be the brain-child of "The Honorable Howard Kaloogian" - 'honour' can mean some odd things in odd places like California, where Howie is a Member of the State Assembly, and no doubt this site is part of his campaign for bigger things. 'Governor Kaloogian' perhaps, even 'President Kaloogian'? Watch out for this guy - if you think that Bush is weird, you ain' seen nuthin' yet!

VoIP

It looks as though VoIP is forging ahead, with Skype announcing a PDA version (Pocket PC rather than Palm, unfortunately), and also a deal with Motorola. Motorola comment:

With over 68 million downloads of their client in the last 18 months, we believe Skype is a natural fit with our vision of simple and seamless connectivity for our consumer customers around the globe.

FireFox

It is announced that Microsoft will launch Internet Explorer 7 as a separate package, and the suggestion is that the success of Firefox has got it worried, since the plan was to keep it integrated with Windows. Molly Wood - columnist for C|Net - suggests that this will kill off FireFox. I wouldn't be too sure. MSoft's reputation for producing insecure, buggy code, which doesn't satisfy W3C standards is unlikely to make people confident about a new browser, even if it has all the goodies that FireFox brings. But FireFox may find it difficult to maintain the momentum.

Check this out

I have fifty invitations to Gmail to give away - anyone want one? It's now my main e-mail package, which I guess says something. :-)

There was a piece this morning on NPR about Skype and other VOIP companies. Here is a link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4488307


Laurie H. Hime

Skype has just released the latest version of its software and now claims that almost 65 million downloads have been made. Whenever I log-on it seems that one-and-a-half million other people are simulataneously logged on, not that the number of people seems to make any difference. It's a subjective matter of course, but I think that the new software improves the already excellent quality.

Currently, I'm using Skype to keep in touch with colleagues with whom I'm working on a research proposal: as this involves people in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, France, Sweden and the UK, regular telephone communication is clearly desirable and if one can do it freely, the telecomms costs are kept down.

Of course, VoIP is more than Skype and the telecomms providers are well into the game: for example, NetworkingPipeline reports that: "The number of cable VoIP subscribers rocketed 900 percent from 2003 to 2004" that is, from 50,000 to almost 500,000 - a long way behind Skype, but, of course, you have to pay for it :-)

Skype, by the way, can now be used by those using Linux or Mac OS X

I see that the Financial Times, yesterday, was reporting a 20% rise in online shopping over the Christmas period in the UK, so I thought I'd report on my contribution and experience.

First, of course, one has to survey all of the price comparison sites, since most of them only include the stores that pay them. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I was looking for an iRiver mp3 player - it turned out the ShopGenie was the only one that included the high street store, Richer Sounds - and, as the local store is just five minutes walk away, it was actually more convenient to buy the device there. Actually, 'high street' is a bit of a misnomer - the company generally leases properties in cheaper parts of town, presumably this helps to keep its costs down.

However, I was also looking for a new scanner and online reviews persuaded me that instead of going for a Canon (my cameras and my printer are all Canon products) I should replace my old Epson scanner with a new one - the Epson Perfection 4870 Photo. This one draws plaudits for delivering near professional quality output at retail prices, and my reason for switching was to have a scanner that would help me reduce the decades of slides to digital storage. It turned out that Amazon.co.uk had the best price and immediate delivery - so I set it up yesterday and, although I have got to the slides yet, I am very pleased with its performance on, for example, OCR and copying prints. So - stars to Amazon for fast (and free!) delivery, and to Epson for a good product.

Of course, with more CDs to convert to mp3 (or, rather the .ogg standard in my case) and slides to convert, I'm obviously going to need more storage space, so the next thing on the list was a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB 7200rpm external hard drive. According to one or other of the shopping sites Dabs.co.uk had the best offer, but was out of stock. So, I had an e-mail conversation - or, rather, I tried to have an e-mail conversation, only to end up being told that the only information the company had about possible delivery dates was on their Website - the only problem was that, for this particular product, there was no information. Sorry, Dabs, but your customer relations policy is crap - you're off my list for ever. I then moved on the the next best deal at Technoworld and got all the way through to the point of ordering, when some database glitch sent me an error message - a totally unintelligible error message, of course. Again, an e-mail conversation ensued - this time they really were trying to be helpful, but the error message happened again, so I said goodbye to Technoworld - it you are going to sell online, get some software that works.

Back to the shopping sites and I discover that Komplett actually has a better deal than Technoworld - the order goes through without a hitch and now I'm sitting waiting - not for long, I hope. Interestingly, Komplett is a European company, based in Norway, operating in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK with a turnover in 2003 of 1,732,000,000 Norwegian Kroner (that's £148,207,359 at today's rate, or $277,310,790 - no doubt 2004 showed an improvement on that.

Finally, blank DVDs - back to Amazon, which turned out to have best price, instead of a number of other places recommended on various discussion groups - delivery is promised for Monday or Tuesday.

From a buyer's point of view is that Amazon has the best interface once one gets to the point of ordering and I have no doubt that its software must have been pretty pricey to develop. Other places I suspect of relying upon off-the-shelf packages of one kind of another and they may be letting the company down. If that interface is not easy to use and glitch-free, the consumer experiences a big turn-off.

The news on wi-fi in libraries continues to increase:

• Today's FT has an article In the clouds over municipal Wi-Fi, which is on municipal use generally, but nods in the direction of libraries
• A PR press release on new developments in Kent.
• Hingham library tech trends for 2005, includes news on wi-fi applications.

And, as for Firefox's increasing share of the browser market - as a result of now having better log analysis on the University of Sheffield's servers, I see that the share taken by 'Netscape' - including Mozilla and Firefox, has gone like this, over October, November and December, 2004.

	Oct.	Nov.	Dec.
Internet Explorer	82.44%	82.90%	77.42%
'Netscape'	8.72%	9.61%	9.93%

It'll be interesting to see what the end of January brings.

Interesting news on the progress of FireFox as browser of choice, which comes in an article about a flaw that could encourage 'phishers'. It notes:

A survey at the end of November found that Mozilla-based software, including Firefox, accounted for 7.4 percent of browsers in November 2004, up 5 percent from May.

This is interesting, because, as I have noted previously, IR readers appear to be ahead of the game. Currently, i.e., today, FireFox and Mozilla account for 9.7% of the hits on the top page of the journal

A game where you predict which web pages will rank more highly on Google in the future! The output of the game will be used to build the Speculative Search Engine that ranks those web pages more highly today.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~amichail/spec/

Google has been much in the news as a result of its venture into the digital library - on a huge scale. Today's Observer (one of the so-called 'broadsheet' Sunday papers in the UK, for those who don't know it, and part of the Guardian family) has an article in its business section on Google's latest venture, in which John Naughton refers to Howard Reingold's seminal work on the virtual community:

Many years ago, Howard Rheingold, who was one of the first people to understand the social potential of cyberspace, posed an interesting question: 'Where is the Library of Congress, when it's on your laptop?' To most people at the time, it seemed a meaningless question. What lay behind it, however, was an attempt to think through a profound consequence of a networked society - what Frances Cairncross later dubbed 'the death of distance'.

Naughton also notes:

Once upon a time, being learned involved holding a lot of knowledge and information in one's head. Are we moving towards a world where the important thing is not what you know, but how to find it?

an idea expressed many long years ago by Dr. Johnson (as reported by James Boswell—in 1791):

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

which is also a very neat definition of the difference between 'knowledge' and 'information' :-)

Google was also the subject of one of Fortune's long articles last week, too. The focus was on the share price and the probability of investors getting their return (the verdict seemed to be, 'Be cautious'), but, among other things it has some interesting stuff on the competition.

Thanks also to Gerry Mckiernan and the ASIS-L mailing list for bringing another Google item to my attention; this time in the New York Times (you'll need to register to read the article, but registration is free).

The article contains a nice story about the irreplaceability of the physical book – for some purposes:

Mr. Jimerson said, 'A scanned image will only tell you some things, and the sheer volume of records makes scanning everything difficult'. But he added that he supported Google's plan in theory. 'I recall the story of a gentleman being in a library and watching a researcher sniff books', he said. 'It turned out that the aroma of vinegar was still embedded in those that had been treated with vinegar to prevent cholera during an epidemic'.

Thanks to Gerry also for another item in the New York Times – this time on Firefox. With Pennsylvania State University telling everyone on campus to switch from Internet Explorer, it would seem that Microsoft has a little problem on its hands – one that may result in a policy switch, unless arrogance holds sway in Redmond. If there is a policy switch it would require IE to be re-written from the ground up, so Firefox may go ahead by leaps and bounds. Try it—my guess is that, if you are an IE user, you'll need less than ten minutes with the new rival (well, not so new, if you've been using it for the past couple of years in its development phase) to convince you to switch.

I've been working in Oporto for the past week with little chance to catch up on current developments, so here's my backlog:

• There's news of IBM's efforts to develop information retrieval systems for use in corporate networks, rather than on the Internet. It comes a little late to this sector, with Google Desktop and a new version of Copernic already in play. My guess is that IBM is likely to make the usual technology-led errors in producing a system, that is, greater complexity in preparing search formulations than users are likely to buy, and not enough work behind the interface to interpret relatively simple formulations. Corporate files also suffer from a very difficult problem for information retrieval, one that was described to me many years ago on a visit to Shell - a North Sea drilling platform could be identified in documents by a project code-name, by geographical coordinates, by the designation assigned once the platform was in use, such as 'Platform Alpha' or by a phrase such as, 'the project'.



• The The International Telecommunication Union has produced a press release headed, Low Cost Broadband and Internet Access Essential to Information Society with a link to Best Practice Guidelines for the Promotion of Low Cost Broadband and Internet Connectivity. This document lists some very worthy aims, but one wonders whether competition and regulation are really likely to deliver low prices. In many countries the national PTT or the dominant controller of existing wires can effectively control access to the necessary exchanges and so on; in these circumstances something stronger than 'regulation' may be needed. As for competition: well, we have that in fuel supply to the garage forecourt, but I don't see too much impact on price.



• The big news for libraries, of course, was that Google is in the process of scanning millions of books in the libraries of Harvard, Stanford and Michigan universities, in the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Other contributions to the debate about this initiative can be found here, and here, and at the Wall Street Journal (setting aside its neocon bias for a change!)

Those folk at Google are certainly stirring things up with the launch of 'Google Scholar (Beta)' a variant of the search engine to access the scholarly literature.

According to the New York Times (you'll need to register):

The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center.

The new Google service, which includes a listing of scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at libraries that are not online, will not initially include the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages for Google search results.

Testing something like this is rather tricky when the coverage is unknown. However, I tried just a simple, but slightly obscure search phrase, "colliery spoil" and got a list of 146 items. Some are listed as 'CITATION', for exampe:

[CITATION] Effective passive treatment of aluminium-rich, acidic colliery spoil drainage using a compost … - Web Search
PL Younger, TP Curtis, A Jarvis, R Pennell - Cited by 10
Journal of the Chartered Institution of Water and …, 1997

Click on the 'Web search' link and, as you see, it does just that; click on the 'Cited by 10' link and you are given a list of the ten sources that have cited this item, with the same layout and more links to items that cite the cited items—one could get rather dizzy going through this lot!

Other items in the original list are links to information on the Web, although not always the complete document. For example, this link leads to an abstract in PubMed, not to the original document:

Substrate characterisation for a subsurface reactive barrier to treat colliery spoil leachate
PW Amos, PL Younger - Cited by 4
Substrate characterisation for a subsurface reactive barrier to treat colliery spoil leachate. Amos PW, Younger PL. FaberMaunsell ...
Water Research, 2003 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The 146 items consisted of 35 Citation entries and 111 Web links

I've just noticed something rather interesting about the hits on papers in Information Research. According to the page counter, the most hit paper in Volume 8 No. 2, with 3,371 hits is in Spanish:

Judith Licea de Arenas, Emma Santillan- Rivero, Miguel Arenas, and Javier Valles Desempeño de becarios Mexicanos en la producción de conocimiento cientifico ¿de la bibliometria a la politica cientifica?<

This would seem to provide at least some justification for my decision to publish papers in Spanish which, according to one source, has the same number of speakers as a native tongue as does English - 322,000,000 The only question is why other journals that regard themselves as "international" in scope feel that it is necessary to restrict themselves (and their readers) to English?

Ideally, of course, the journal ought also to be published in Chinese and if there is anyone out there who would like to set up a mirror site in China, please get in touch.

On 11/15/04, Tom Wilson said:

>Opera has many of the same features as FireFox (and had them
>earlier) and it does some things better; but I like the way
>FireFox does tabs better, even though its inability to stop sites
>from launching windows without the navigation bar is frustrating.

Actually, it can do that, but it's a hidden preference.

In your browser, go to this url: "about:config". (No http: or
anything, just exactly "about:config".)

At the top of the long list of preferences that it shows, there is
a textbox. Paste this into that checkbox (without the quotes):
"dom.disable_window_open".

Double click on the line that says
"dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar". That will change the
value from false to true. From now on, when a web page opens a new
window, it will be unable to hide the toolbar.

Seth

There's an interesting little discussion going on at ZD-Net about the open source browser, FireFox. One of the staff writers is bidding farewell to Internet Explorer and, as one or two of the discussants ask, "Why's it taken you so long?"

I've been using alternative browsers since Opera first appeared and I now use FireFox most of the time - it's something of a toss-up between these two: Opera has many of the same features as FireFox (and had them earlier) and it does some things better; but I like the way FireFox does tabs better, even though its inability to stop sites from launching windows without the navigation bar is frustrating. Also, unless you aren't bothered by ads, FireFox is free, whereas Opera costs - not a lot, but...

With Opera and FireFox in the market I just don't understand why anyone uses IE any longer, other than for those sites that seem to imagine that nothing else exists.

From Wi-Fi Planet:

By 2009, fueled by a skyrocketing increase in home wireless networks, consumers will require 57 Mbps for Internet connection speed—up from today's 3 Mbps—to meet the demands of an ever-growing collection of always-on home media devices.

The findings come in today's report from JupiterResearch (which is owned by the parent company of this site) and its first-ever look into home wireless bandwidth demands. Entitled "A Portrait of the Wireless Home in 2009", the study finds a shift toward wireless home networks and a growing reliance on digital media.

For tech-savvy consumers, the bandwidth requirement will likely be even higher, as much as 84 Mbps.

"today's 3 Mbps" - what? I don't know anyone who has a 3 Mb connection - ADSL is commonly provided as so-called 'broadband' at 512Kbps and getting even 1Mbps is likely to cost at least 50% more, 3Mbps would be a fantasy dream of the future in the UK!

IDC reports that for the first time in four years, Sweden has slipped from top position in its ranking of countries on an Information Society Index for 2003.

	Country	ISI Score
1.	Denmark	963
2.	Sweden	958
3.	United States	938
4.	Switzerland	929
5.	Canada	925
6.	Netherlands	919
7.	Finland	911
8.	Korea	904
9.	Norway	899
10.	United Kingdom	870
Source: IDC Information Society Index, 2004

So Tony Thatcher's (oops, Freudian slip, I meant, of course, Blair's) much vaunted drive for Britain to be the leading state seems to be going nowhere very fast.

And with the dismal news of a probable Bush victory in the US election (how can more than 50% of the American electorate not realise what a disaster this is?), I assume that the monkey will be intent on dragging the US back to some stone age condition. After all, the Information Society isn't in the Old Testament, is it?

I don't know about you, but whenever I see the issue of 'Internet governance' raised, I assume that big business is once again seeking to control what we can access, how we can access and when we can access. The warning shot comes in a longish article at allAfrica.com. Not one of my regular ports of call but it brings us news that the UN is setting up a Working Group on Internet Governance, about which more can be found at the UN site.

Business and governments don't like the inherent freedom of the Internet: and they worry about anything they cannot control. It's curious how those who inveigh against the lack of freedom of information in, say, China, are quite prepared to erode freedom of information on the Internet. Of course, there are some Western governments, like Blair's New Thatcherites, who don't give much prominence to their freedom of information policies anyway—mainly because they are trying, desperately, to curb the freedoms the legislation has delivered by imposing whacking great charges for access.

The UN Working Party however, has a bigger cabal of interested parties, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). WIPO, of course, is run for the benefit of the big corporations and, through its support for patent rights, those big corporations prevent the development of, for example, generic anti-HIV drugs, in the third world. The WTO is similarly oriented towards global corporations and the protection, predominantly, of US interests—although there are signs that the developing countries are beginning to get their act together in countering the hegemony of the developed world.

The problems that the UN Press Release mentions, '...management of Internet resources, spam, cyber-security, cyber-crime, multilingualism and data protection' are a curious mixture. 'Internet resources' are managed by those who maintain their Websites, so what does this mean? Not management of what is there, but control over who can put what on a Website, I imagine. 'Spam' - yes, a problem, but not one that is likely to find a solution in a Working Party and solutions of various kinds are being delivered already, through legislation, and technology developments that prevent the spam getting through. 'Cyber-security' - a matter for organizations with Internet connection to see to. 'Cyber-crime' - the same - and often a reality because security is lax. You can drive around the City of London with a wi-fi detector and a laptop and readily access a number of corporate sites: the only solution to that is a local one, not an international one. 'Multilingualism' - that's an odd one. Do they mean a lack of multiligual sites, or too many? In the early years of the Net, the fear was that English would dominate, now the feeling is that Chinese sites may dominate. What's the problem? 'Data protection' - see above under cyber-security.

Do you get the feeling that this Working Party is a cloak for something else? A desire on the part of those organizations that lobby the UN for control, perhaps?

See the item in Cordis News

As readers of Information Research know, I am dedicated to the idea of 'open access publishing', which takes a number of forms, from the 'self-archiving' in institutional archives that Steven Harnad champions, to truly 'open' access in the form of journals like Information Research, which levy no page charges and charge no subscriptions, to 'semi-open' access, such as those journals supported by 'author charging' - which are open to readers, but only available for publishing to those who, in one way or another, can pay the submission fees, to disciplinary 'e-print' archives such as as arXiv for physics, to the latest initiative from the National Institutes of Health in the USA, which proposes:

NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding. This would include all research grants, cooperative agreements, contracts, as well as National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowships. We define final manuscript as the author’s version resulting after all modifications due to the peer review process. Submission of the final manuscript will provide NIH supported investigators with an alternate means by which they will meet and fulfill the requirement of the provision of one copy of each publication in the annual or final progress reports. Submission of the electronic versions of final manuscripts will be monitored as part of the annual grant progress review and close-out process.

The proposal is now going through the legislative process in the USA and the publishers appear to be biting on the bullet and falling in step - but this is medicine, people may die for the lack of information, so they can't very well draw their skirts aside, can they? I wonder what their response would be if the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK made the same proposal?

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'.