Most of the Fortune 500 is not Blogging

Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield list which Fortune 500 companies have business blogs. Their definition of business blog is "Active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products." They found that only 3% is blogging. 97% is missing a huge opportunity in connecting to their customers. As far as I know at Reed-Elsevier we are not "blogging" either and I strongly hope that in 2006 all our business units start blogging and implementing RSS in all the web products.

What's Driving India's Rise as an R&D Hub?

Knowledge@Wharton interview with Ramesh Emani, president of Wipro Technologies' Product Engineering Services .

"Knowledge@Wharton: You said that India's advantage in R&D lies in IT experience and knowledge of English. What happens in a generation when the Chinese speak English just as well?

Emani: English has developed in India over the past 100 years. It takes time to build such skills. China may be able to converse in English, but to say it can reach the level of India, I don't see this happening that quickly."

Amazon Connect

NYTimes reports of a new Amazon service called Amazon Connect where authors have their blogs and connect with buyers and readers. I think STM publishers should be testing something similar. Hey we have Science Direct why not expanding this to Science Connect

Talking about OPML Thomson Take the lead

Dan at Syndication for Higher Ed introduces OPML for Thomson Peterson’s Edufeeds.com . Way to go Dan.. If anyone from Reed-Elsevier is reading this post and shows me an OPML implementation in any of our products like Lexis Nexs or RBI, I'll post that too. Btw does Lexis Nexis have RSS feeds. At London Online, Marydee Ojala told me that LN did not have any RSS and she was very suprised. I am waiting when WOS and Scopus will go with RSS. Common folks let's move on, even my newspaper in Turkey is providing RSS feeds, so I can get Galatasaray's score in my feeds.

Google Medicine

In an editorial at BMJ, Dean Giustini proposes Google Medicine.

Dean, should share his idea with Marisa Mayer who posted the following (sounds a bit markety) in Google's official blog in reference to AOL deal.

"Our service and our business works because of you - our users. You're important to us and something that we think about all the time -- as we build new products, negotiate deals, and think about what our future holds.
We're looking forward to what AOL can help us do for you, and believe that our new agreement with them will only create a better experience for you in 2006 and beyond -- one where you can continue to trust that we're giving you a result because it's the best one we can possibly provide."

RSSLabs

I was playing with this OPML stuff (I hope some of our Reed-Elsevier technology guys are looking into OPML and figuring out how it can enhance our content distribution) and converted my NFAIS presentation power point presentation to OPML file through RSSlabs and made it available to be shared by public thinking that no one would even look at this. to my suprise yesterday I noticed that Dr. James Moore posted a link to my mini-site

Google's Eric Schmidt on Information Industry

Google's CEO discusses the information industry and Google's approach to innovation at University of Washington. Video available at UWTV

NYTimes Strike mash-up

The City is cold and people are walking or biking...The strike was really bad idea by the union leaders, anyway NYTimes has a good idea creating a mash-up of what New Yorkers are telling about their experience. via bob wyman

I have some ideas of how we can do create some cool mash-up with our content, (there is nothing wrong if we make searching experience fun too) but our development team is busy preparing our next release. It's surprising to see that STM publishers are so behind (except Nature folks, btw their office is accross our building) what's happening right now in the web...

CSA acquires Community of Science

Congratulations to Jeff Baer, CEO of COS . via NFAIS listserv announcement.

Debate on scientific publications

It think for most of people that's true...

"I suspect that most people do not understand what peer review means. They would not know a kite mark from a Chelsea football flag...

viaIssues in Scholarly Communication

Sun Opens up the chips

At Syndicate Conference Suns' COO Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun will "open source" the design of their microprocessors. via Syndicator Blog

Structured Blogging

Marc Canter announced the launch of Structured Blogging at Syndicate Conference

Get the inside of Google Scholar from the man who created it

Anurag Acharya's presentation at Brookhaven Lab

"Why Johnny And Janey Can't Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time"

Via Will Richardson


Mark Federman's essay "Why Johnny And Janey Can't Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time":


"The UCaPP world – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate – is a world of relationships and connections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.

On China

OECD report
China overtakes U.S. as world’s leading exporter of information technology goods and Thomson partners in China

addition: Guardian reports that we (Reed Elsevier) appointed Shan Mei who has been Kissinger's key advisior, as Chairman in China.

How to speed up development

Matt MacAlister "A product that hasn't changed in 6 months is in a dangerous position. Iterate constantly."

TagWorld

A new social networking platform via Om Malik

Talking about tagging

Folksonomy made the list on New york Times The Year in Ideas

Unique IDs and DOIs

David Weinberger states that

"Last year, it was Web 2.0 and tagging. This year, it's going to be unique IDs (UIDs), and for the same reason that Web 2.0 and tagging matter: The Web is going miscellaneous."

Tagging

Great reading by Ellyssa Kroski on tagging and folksonomy. Hopefully Yahoo's acquisition of del.ici.us will increase the adaptation of tagging as they did with RSS. STM online publishers should adapt tagging asap. Tagging will be a great complement to control vocabulary and free language terms that indexing databases use via Steve Cohen

Engineering Village 2 RSS implementation is mentioned in Research Information

David Mort who is the Director of IRN Research has an article on RSS where he mentions:

"IMeanwhile, Elsevier's Engineering Village 2 is one of the first abstracting and indexing services to allow users to view, group, organise and retain references (including article titles and hyperlinks) using an RSS reader. Subscribers are now able to define their own tailored searches for comprehensive engineering databases including Compendex and Inspec, and receive results delivered directly via RSS. "

Bloggingheads.tv

Bloggingheads.tv offers a combination of podcast and video blogging on politics. I envision that in the very near future we will see STM issues dicussed by authors and researcher in a similar media form and students watching these on their ipods. Let's see which of the major publishers will take the lead in this. via JD Lassica

Googlizers and Resistors

Library Journal has an article how information professionals view search engines and vendor platforms. I would invite all the Googlizers to use Engineering Village 2 faceted searching and see what they are missing by using a "good enough" product like Google or Google Scholar.

When it comes to time and dollars that are being wasted to locate information "good enough" is not good enough for business and academic insititutions' bottom line. As I said before Google or Google Scholar are presenting just search results, there is no insight or intelligence about these results in the Search Results Page. Until they stop presenting a "dumb" search results page, my suggestion would be to use subscription based services like Engineering Village 2, Scopus, Proquest, EBSO or ISI.

A new OCLC report on international study on information-seeking habits and preferences.

Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources; read the Report

Science in the web age: Joint efforts

Great article on blogs on Nature



"Jason Kelly, an MIT graduate student involved in OpenWetWare. The upcoming generation, he says, believes that excessive competition can harm science; they see the benefits of brainstorming their research ideas on blogs as far outweighing the risks.

Kelly admits some may regard this view as naive. But Schmidt[Gavin Schmidt, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York,] suggests that once scientists come up with some sort of peer-review mechanism for blogs that increase their credibility, without diminishing their spontaneity, blogs will take off."

Yes, blog in scientific publishing will take off and may result in BlogFactor too.

truthdig

A new site with "The purpose of our new Web magazine is to provide you with insightful and accurate reporting on current subjects and on issues that need to be brought to your attention. We want to challenge conventional wisdom. Over time, we hope to build a solid and reliable resource for those of you who want to explore particular topics by drilling down to unusual depth. In addition, we hope to create a home for thoughtful, provocative ideas and dialogue by a group of talented contributors and editors."

Engineering Village Does Patent Analysis

I showed our new Ei Patents implementation to Marydee Ojala who is the editor of ONLINE today at London On Line, and here is her comments

"Engineering Village is not something I use on a regular basis, so I was delighted to be introduced to a feature I was unaware of -- the ability to do some pretty exotic analysis of the patent literature. Take a company that is secretive about its patent portfolio. Search the company as an assignee. At the right of your screen are various screens that let you drill down into available patents, one of which is the most prolific inventors from that company. Now you take those persons and search whatever patents they have irrerespective of assignee. This can give a fuller picture of the company's future product plans, based on patents of its employees. Or you can drill down via patent classification codes to see areas of interest. You can extend the search by searching Compendex, Inspec, and NTIS in addition to the patents.

Here's what I really like -- RSS feeds. Somebody cites a patent in their patent and you get notification by RSS feed. That's not all. If you've got a blog and you want to talk about the implications of this patent activity, there's a button to take you immediately to your blog. This is so cool." via Infotoday

While chatting with her she mentioned that she was at LexisNexis booth and was surpised that there was not an RSS feature in the new LN product. I can't understand either what the online database publishers are waiting for? I would suggest to everyone "just do it", your customers would appreciate it.

Lessons From Andy Grove

Andy Grove is in Fortune cover story.

"Harvard historian Richard Tedlow.... recounts a recent meeting Grove, who helped start Intel in 1968 and served as CEO from 1987 to 1998, had with Intel employees about the company's new health care initiative. He advised those employees to be "quick and dirty" and to "engage and then plan." He doesn't mean they should play dirty–they need dig deep and "get it better." His advice isn't what you would expect from a big company CEO, but Grove has never been a conventional manager as Tedlow outlines."

via Dan Farber

Course-casting: It's all about convenience

Good article about course-casting in Newsweek.