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Archive for the 'Online Information 2007' Category

Nitot evangelizes about Firefox

ITI Bloggers December 7th, 2007

Jimmy Wales was not the only hero of the open web community attending and presenting at Online. Tristan Nitot, Founder & Principal of Mozilla Europe attracted a packed audience to hear about Mozilla’s software design philosophy and process.

 

Nitot gave an unashamed commercial for Firefox, but given that a show of hands in the room revealed that the majority of attendees already use Firefox as their preferred browser, he found himself mostly preaching to the converted. As for the non-users, he cheekily told them, "You know you are wrong, just talk to person sitting next to you."

At present Firefox has 120 million users, representing an 18% world share overall - a better share in most of Europe. This has been achieved with no advertising budget - purely word-of-mouth endorsement.

The software development process allows anyone in the world to suggest code for an add-on or bug fix as well as a 40 strong in house development team. Before release, software is tested by the development team, 100s of daily contributors, 1,000s of occasional contributors, 10,000s of nightly testers and 500,000 beta testers.

The result of this collaborative approach is that some 37% of code has come from the web community itself.

Jim Ashling

Information Today, International Correspondent


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InspecDirect: A Facelift for an Old Favorite

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

 

One of the more ineresting new products that I saw in the Exhibit Hall was InspecDirect.  The Inspec database has been a favorite of searchers since it first became available online on the Dialog system in the early 1970s.  It has been through a number of overhauls and adaptions to various technologies as they appeared.  Now Inspec has done it again with a new interface incorporating many features used by searchers.  Stephen Arnold ("Inspec’s own Stephen Arnold", at left above), Product Manager, and Simon Thomson, Publishing Director & General Manager, Inspec, showed me the beta system (launch of the full system is scheduled for January 2008), and I was very impressed.

Arnold and Thomson emphasized that Inspec’s relationships with aggregators will continue, and its database will continue to be available through all its current channels. InspecDirect represents another access channel for current customers who may wish to use the new interface.  In addition, access to the Inspec database by individuals will be available for the first time (Thomson could not give me any pricing at this time) through the InspecDirect web site.

InspecDirect has three parallel ineterfaces:  Quick Search, Advanced Search, and Expert Search.  Here is a screenshot of the Advanced Search page.

I was very impressed by the InspecDirect interface (in fact, I commented that I wished I had had access to it during my early days of searching Inspec on Dialog at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s!)  Watch for complete coverage of the launch of InspecDirect in future issues of Information Today and an in-depth review in an ITI journal.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today


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Is There Any Innovation Left in Search?

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

Is there any innovation left in search? After all, it has been around since well before the web arrived. Indeed, there is much left to learn, as three speakers discussed in one of the closing conference sessions. New Web2.0 technologies are overturning traditional search as we have known it and are forcing a complete re-thinking of the search process.
 
Jayne Dutra, Information Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), observed that search is no longer a box in the corner of a web page, and crawlers do not meet the needs of today’s businesses. Instead, relationships and context have gained a new importance, and new technologies present new opportunities. Data and information objects now occur in many formats (audio, video, image, etc.), and search must be redesigned to deal with them. Generating metadata must become part of the work process and be transparent to the user.
 
Socialization and increased interactions between people and content mean that content has assumed a new importance, and relationships define the context. Some features and implications of the new search environment will be:
  • Social networking will be enabled across teams,
  • Information discovery will occur without the necessity of knowing an exact search term (or keyword), and
  • Flexible graphics and interfaces tailored for the iPod generation will be available. 
Dutra was followed by Nicolas Bombourg, sales manager for Reportlinker, who echoed and expanded upon many of her points. (Click here to read Bombourg’s blog.) He noted that general search engines are reaching their limit because the web is becoming more complex. For some content (audio, video, images, etc.) tagging is the only way to describe it. And because of the “deep web”, much content is unavailable to search engines. Bombourg predicted that new vertical search engines concentrating on a single subject area will become widespread by the time web 3.0 becomes available. They will have much better search features than today’s generalized search engines. In fact, search engines may become “recommendation engines”, in which the semantic web will become public and results will be presented in “clusters”. The question will be whether searchers long dependent on Google will be willing to change their habits and use these new engines.
 
Finally, Tom Reamy, Founder of the KAPS Group, suggested that many things regarded as new technologies are really things we have been doing for many years. For a good discussion of Web 2.0 themes, Reamy suggested reading “The Cult of the Amateur” by Andrew Keen. In his view, semantic structures and new types of content will lead to new and complex search interfaces that will provide functionality for better findability and support for software-generated metadata creation. 
 
This session showed that there is not only much room for innovation in search, but that search engine developers will be busy for a long time!
 
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today
 


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The “FaceBook Generation”

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

The final day began with a fascinating look at “The Facebook Generation” in an overview by Roo Reynolds from one of IBM’s UK research laboratories, who began with the observation that social networking has become a big way for people to spend their time on the Web. It’s where people can meet others and make relationships as well as a way to communicate with thousands of people whom you don’t know even exist. In fact, he wondered if systems like World of Warfare are beginning to take the place of golf. (Golf is well known as an activity in which business relationships are formed and deals are made.) 
 
Some social networking sites are modeled after MySpace and are being used for training in situations that might be difficult or dangerous to do in the real world. For example, a system called Olive is used to train emergency personnel how to respond to a traffic accident. 
 
Social networking is moving into the corporate world. People must talk to each other. Some organizations are banning Facebook use. Reynolds raised the challenge of trust and whether such companies trust their employees to behave responsibly. Security and confidentiality are valid concerns, however, and hosted applications cannot be used to discuss sensitive topics. The solution to this problem is to host the social networking application behind the firewall, and IBM has developed Metaverse for this purpose.
 
Reynolds was followed by Ewan McIntosh from Learning and Teaching Scotland (click here to see his blog). He works with children from about ages 3-12 (the “Bebo generation”) and studies how they interact with social systems. The old ways of doing one thing at a time and receiving an education linearly from a teacher is giving way to multitasking and social networking, which has a potential audience of over 1 billion. For example, a video on the sport of cup stacking, which is becoming very popular in this age group was put on YouTube and received over 450,000 hits in its first week. McIntosh observed that any CEO would be delighted to have that kind of an audience. In the conservative corporate world, an executive might ask how a blog would help their business. McIntosh’s opinion is that because of the huge potential audience of social platforms like blogs, the correct concern should be how the business could feed a blog.
 
How does all this social networking apply to information centers and how should they respond to it? These questions were addressed by Mary Ellen Bates, an independent information professional. Information professionals must learn how to interact with digital natives (the “Millennial” generation which does know the world before the Web). Digital natives thrive on ambiguity. They have learned that failure doesn’t hurt, risk is real and natural, leaders are irrelevant, and coaches are unnecessary. They pride themselves on their ability to figure out things for themselves, which is a very different attitude from when the real work world.   Millennials demand easily navigable web sites, have less interest in “authoritative” sources, and trust their ability to evaluate information. 
 
In response to Millennials, information professionals must adapt to their attitudes and acknowledge their expertise. They know how to search in ways that we do not. Learning must be made intuitive, and self-learning must be enabled. Personal networks are the key. Mary Ellen predicted that social networking searches will soon emerge and the PageRank algorithm to rank search results will be replaced by “FriendRank” (or perhaps “InfoProRank” for us). She challenged us to remember the first time we saw a web page; do we have the same sense of wonder and awe now when we are introduced to the new resources now available?
 
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today


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Unintentional consequences

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

Free access to online journals and bibliographic databases for developing nations is surely a good thing, right? Philanthropic individuals and generous publishers are naturally praised for making such donations.

But, for struggling, local journal publishers and database producers, free access to western information can destroy the market value of publications created in, and for, developing nations.

NISC (National Inquiry Services Centre) in South Africa supports African online journals with an online platform (African Journals Online) as well as 40 bibliographic databases of Africa-related information. Margaret Crampton, NISC managing director, told me that African users ask her why on earth they should pay to access this material when donated material can be totally free. These services were created specifically with local needs in mind, but the ludicrous situation is that the majority of usage is outside of Africa for NISC data while Africans may have free access to foreign material of little local relevance.

Certainly, all nations deserve equal opportunity access to the world’s literature, but not at the price of stifling the development of emerging research and publishing activity. Funding to support such publication is desperately needed, but if it doesn’t come from traditional subscriptions it is hardly any more likely to come from author or institution fees. Are there any better models out there?

Jim Ashling

Information Today, international correspondent

 


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FIZ-K, 30 Years & Looking Forward to the Future

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

Earlier this week FIZ Karlsruhe’s CEO & Presdient Sabine Brünger-Weilandt reflected on the 30-year history of the German Technical Information Center (Fachinformationszentrum) she now directs. 

She and Dr. Leni Helmes, Vice President for Development & Applied Research at FIZ-K, also described for me their strategic relationships with CAS/STN, ACS, and the Max Planck Institute.   It should come as no surprise at this conference, but even organizations like FIZ-K, who focus on the scientific and technical research community, are evaluating Web 2.0 applications for incorporation into their classic services.

In the future, said Ms. Brünger-Weilandt, "we will be a service provider not just of scientific information but will support scientists in their research."

To listen to the short interview, recorded on the convention show floor, click on the icon below (and forgive the background noise). 

Dick Kaser
ITI, V.P., Content


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Voices: KM 2.0? Why not?

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

In his keynote presentation Wednesday morning, David Gurteen, Gurteen Knowledge Community, discussed the evolution of Knowledge Management and considered whether the natural evolution of the practice would be enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies.

After listening in on his remarks, I invited him to sit for an interview to discuss the trends.  As he notes in the context of the interview, he had no choice but to say yes to this invitation, since he had interviewed me earlier this year for a video podcast on another subject and therefore owed me.

Though, as he observes here, "KM 2.0" is not an expression commonly heard, the 2.0 community tools and other technologies can be a great complement to KM initiatives.  His own Web site employs many of them.

The interview also includes a forecast of what’s ahead for the deployment of 2.0 collaborative tools. 
(Audio File)

Click anywhere on the play box image, above, to hear the audio file from a separate window.


Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content


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Not Just an English Interface but an Outreach Effort

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

Mohamed M. Elewa, CEO, Arabia Inform, is a man on a mission.

At Online Information, his company — which for 15 years has been monitoring, abstracting and indexing news and other sources in the Middle East — announced in London the release of a new English-language interface, AskZad.

When I sat down to talk to him about it, however, he denied that AskZad is just an interface.   It’s also a goodwill gesture to the West.

"One of my main objectives as a businessman is to connect East and West," he said, during an interview earlier this week.

The AskZad service–and other services offered by Arabia Inform–help companies, countries, think tanks, researchers and anyone with an interest in the Middles East monitor information sources, ranging from media to journals. 

AskZad is available on a pay-as-you-go remote access or pre-paid, site-license basis.  The new English-language service may also be licensed to popular aggregators in the West.  And other European-language interfaces are planned.

Jan Diggs, GM, Business Development, and Mr. Elewa shared with me additional plans going forward, which include the launch next year of a business intelligence service focused on various vertical market sectors in the Middle East.  They told me they plan to offer risk assessment, terrorist reports, company/country image analytics, and so forth, as part of the service.

"We’ve started to make a good approach to the West," said Mr. Elewa, "We’ve only started . . . "

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content


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Happy 10th

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

Robin Neidorf, GM at FreePint (above) was in a celebratory mood on Tuesday evening.  "Two important things happend in 1997," she told attendees at the FreePint reception:  the Google domain name was registered and FreePint published its first issue online.

In her short remarks, Robin credited FreePint founder Will Hahn with the "vision, in 1997, to combine digital publishing with online community building . . . at a time when most people couldn’t do e-mail."

Dick Kaser
ITI V.P. Content


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A Catch of Information Experts

ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007

Caught together on a single sofa at last night’s SLA reception were (l-r), Neil Infield, of the British Library; John Coll, of the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh); and Hazel Hall, of Napier University School of Computing

Dick Kaser
ITI, V.P., Content


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