Wednesday, November 30, 2005

STS Wiki

We will definetly see more wikis like this. The beauty will kick in when all these scholars are going to start communicating and sharing their knowledge openly in a wiki environment.

Best STM Information Product: Scopus

Congratulations to Scopus team winning this award at London Online via Marydee Ojala

Go with Yahoo

via Managing Technology at Whorton



"Yahoo defines itself as "a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company" and, in doing so, has managed to stay somewhat out of the fray as giants like Google and Microsoft battle each other over everything from search dominance to providing a platform for next-generation web development. In fact, Yahoo's position as primarily a media company is likely to keep it quietly at the forefront of the next generation of world wide web players, say experts at Wharton."


"This means that traditional media companies will see Yahoo as both a partner and competitor as it increasingly creates its own content and integrates media with information created by its users. Already the lines are blurring. On Yahoo's earnings conference call, Semel noted that the company is "still at the beginning of significant long-term opportunities" and highlighted the media group, which is "expanding its content initiatives and its integration with community features."

Coming Soon:Technical Intelligence in Engineering Village 2 using Patents


We are at the London Online Show demonstrating Ei Patents which we will launch in February 2006. So far the feedback has been very positive. Everyone (including two Thomson Scientific staff who got a demo of the product) loves to see the analytical tools that at the search results page (SRP) using our clustering feature.

Skillful blogging can boost your company's credibility and help it connect with customers

Here is a good summary from Harvard Management Communication letter on the value of corporate bllogging:


"What Lutz and other executives recognize is that a blog is an incredibly effective yet low-cost way to:

  • Influence the public "conversation" about your company: Make it easy for journalists to find the latest, most accurate information about new products or ventures. In the case of a crisis, a blog allows you to shape the conversation about it.
  • Enhance brand visibility and credibility: Appear higher in search engine rankings, establish expertise in industry or subject area, and personalize one's company by giving it a human voice.
  • Achieve customer intimacy: Speak directly to consumers and have them come right back with suggestions or complaints—or kudos."

It's all about "conversation", if you have a business (small or large) stop thinking, or studying about blogging, just blog it and connect to your customers in an honest and open way.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

IBM and social bookmarking: Dogear

ACM queue article on IBM's initiative with social bookmarking in enterprise

RSS is Plumbing


Ilan Marco agrees with Greg Reinacker of Newsgator that RSS is plumbing

From Impact Factor to BlogFactor

When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?
by Robert Boynton, via Slate

Monday, November 28, 2005

Elsevier is not Evil

Prof. Myers thinks that Elsevier is evil. Prof. Myers I would respectfully disagree with you. Hitler is evil; Elsevier is not evil. I don't see any evil activity when I come to my office everyday or when I interact with my colleagues or managers. You may disagree with some of the business issues but let's not exaggerate.

Marketplace for Content

Michael Parekh's interesting article on consumers setting the price for content.


"The following struck me after reading the NYTimes article and Joel's post:

Despite having all the resources of the Internet, from Web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond, and after over a decade of Internet commercialization, there really is no ONLINE mechanism where consumers can send pricing signals of their own back to publishers on individual pieces of content, be it music, movies, books or otherwise.

There's no eBay like marketplace where content can find it's own value as stocks do in the stock markets."



"But there's no online site that gives you a sense of what a piece of content is worth from a consumer point of view..

But there will be.

After all, Content ultimately seeks Attention, and Attention ultimately prices Content."



Sunday, November 27, 2005

Google Scholar Tools

Scholar Tools is using Google Scholar data with better sorting choices

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Harvard Podcasts

Understanding Computers and the Internet is available free for everyone. via Tuaw

Friday, November 25, 2005

Thomson Special Topics

I was linked to Special Topics site through Thomson's PR that I get in my RSS aggregator. I think this is an excellent way using all the content and impact factor data that Thomson has. I wish we were doing something like this with our Scopus content. It's surprising to me that they are not using RSS and Blogs/wikis in order to make this site and content more useful to the readers.

Web 2.0 or Shweb 2.0: This is all about Creativity

Gothamist Labs is another cool site to check via The Blog Herald

We need few creative people who knows how to code and do similar nice applications using STM content. I think opening the content will bring definetly more usage to the content that we publish and bring the users to our fee-based products to see the additional value that we provide.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Faceted Searching at Google Base (Finally)


Google finally discovered the beauty and logic of faceted searching and implemented in their Google Base.



let's see if they will move this feature to google scholar?

Thomson's Web Citation Index for Open Access

IWR reports Thomson's new produtc based on NEC's technology.

"At the heart of WCI is technology that crawls the internet searching for research documents that are freely available. Once the software has located the document it indexes it, locates the citations within the document and automatically links these to the cited document. This technology is the result of a partnership between Thomson and electronics giant NEC, who provided their CiteSeer scientific library system. "We married their technology with the ability to index citations, combining algorithmic and editorial processes," said Jim Pringle, Thomson vp of development, government and academic"

Knowledge in Transition and Importance of Conversation in Knowledge

David Weinberger has an interesting article in i.e. Interactive Education



"Experts put knowledge into documents to communicate what they know. The postmodernists have been saying for a while that authors have no special privilege when it comes to interpreting their work. Now the web has made that idea real"


Think about the author keywords in the peer-review-articles or indexing done by A&I providers and how tagging can bring another dimension to indexing and discovery of other related subjects that the authors or indexers haven't thought about it.

Kudos to Gale-Thomson for including Podcast

They started including podcast in their database. InfoTrac is one of the databases that they are offering podcasts. Here is the press release

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Process

Interesting posting and comments on Ross Mayfield's blog on The end of Process

" If a knowledge worker has the organization's information in a social context at their finger tips, and the organization is sufficiently connected to tap experts and form groups instantly to resolve exceptions -- is there a role for business process as we know it?"

He starts with Clay Shirky's quote "
process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity."

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Definition of STM by Financial Times

Until two days ago I thought that STM meant Scientific, Technical and Medical. In an article in FT.com on Google Print Library Project the writer used STM for Scientific, Technical and Management. I am wondering if there is typo or they really meant to replace Medical with Management.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Ranking Scientist Output : h-index by Jorge Hirsch

"Jorge E. Hirsch, a physics professor at UCSD, devised an alternative that appears to be a simpler and more reliable way to rank scientific output within a discipline than any now in use."

"In a paper published in the November 15 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which appears this week in the journal's early online edition, Hirsch explains that his "h-index" can give a reliable "estimate of the importance, significance and broad impact of a scientist's cumulative research contributions." What's more, for each scientist, his method provides a single number, which takes only 30 seconds to compute, that can be used to compare a scientist's relative rank within a discipline"

via EurekAlert!

Monday, November 07, 2005

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Amazon Book Does it: Pay-per-page-view and perpetual online access

From WSJ (subs req)



"The Seattle Internet retailer said it is introducing two new programs that allow consumers to buy online access to portions of a book or to the entire book, giving publishers and authors another way to generate revenue from their content. Bertelsmann AG's Random House Inc., one of the country's largest publishers which doesn't participate in the Google Print program, said today that it is negotiating with vendors including Amazon to make the content of its books available to consumers for online viewing on a pay-per-page-view basis."

New Yahoo Maps re-mix

see the local events at local.yahoo

via programmableweb

ispecies.org

A remix of Yahoo Images, Google Scholar and NCBI to search bilogical specis. I think there is more opportunities like this by using GS and Yahoo's content and provide a better to search experience to researchers via Lost Boy

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

CourseCafe

Techcrunch and Steve Posted about this small start-up recently. CourseCafe CEO Puneet Gupta was kind enough to give me a user/pass to see what they are building. I think they have something very innovative that will help students in their research process.

MonitorThis :Creates OPML for your search terms

MonitorThis offers an easy way (1 minute) to subscribe to 15 different feeds and monitor your search terms via LibraryClips

CoverPop

That's creativity. Want to see some vintage Science Engineering Titles with their cover go to CoverPop via AmazonWeb Services Blog