Holiday Time

All family packed and ready to go to Israel for a long vacation. What's happening right now there, was discussed only one minute, but our attititude is (without being philisophical) life goes on.
So the kids are looking forward to enjoy the beach and visit a moshav that their great grand father helped to build.

Object Level Vertical Search & Microsoft Academic Live

Some insights where Microsoft may go with Windows Live Academic.
It sounds more exciting than Google Scholar which there hasnt' been any new enhancements lately.

“For example, in academic search for a researcher, his information may be distributed on different Web sites. We need to collect, extract, and integrate all of this information. On one Web site, we may find the e-mail address of this person. On another Web site, we can find his telephone number and his publications.

“We collect all this information and integrate it. Then, after extraction and integration, the results will be a virtual page containing all the related information about this person.”

“In the vertical domain, people are really interested in information about specific objects, not the pages themselves. For example, if you are a researcher, you always want to find information about other researchers and conferences and journals. If you want to find information about the best researchers in the world, and you use a basic search engine, it’s very difficult to find who the popular researchers are in a particular domain. But using our object-level search engines will specifically give you a list of researchers and extract and integrate the information together. The user can have a much better understanding as a result of a query."

research paper by Wen and Nie who are pioneering this at Microsoft Research Asia

Boundary between work & life

I have to show this quote to my wife who has been asking for the past 5 years since I joined Elsevier why I am spending a lot of time in front of my laptop:

"If an invidiual chooses a job that he or she really enjoys and that represents the values they believe in, the boundary between work and life may become meaningless"

Irwing Wladasky-Berger, VP for Technology and Strategy IBM (from IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2004)

On Innovation

Tom Peters presentations on innovations via BusinessInnovation Insider

Effective prototyping may be the most valuable core competence an innovative organization can hope to have.” Michael Schrage

I wanted GE to operate with the speed, informality, and open communication of a corner store. Corner stores often have strategy right. With their limited resources, they have to rely on laser-like focus on doing one thing very well.” Jack Welch

Acting and Planning

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version No. 5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from day one; others plan how to plan - for months.”

Bloomberg by Bloomberg via Tom Peters


I am with my Mayor on this, while developping product we should act, involve the customer in the product development, get their feedback continously, make the changes, continue iterating this, and the rest will come.

Some good insights on scientists from scientists

Chris has a post on Thomas Sharpton and Arpan Jhaver's paper on

"Leveraging the Knowledge of Our Peers: Online Communities Hold the Promise to Enhance Scientific Research"

Thomas and Arpan are the founders of SIPHS


The comments following the post is worth reading to understand scientists..

Nice enhancements at Biowizard

The biomedical research portal BioWizard has some nice features (sharing, ranking and discussions) that brings "interactivity" to bibliographic database searches.

Manufacturing.net

Our sister company launches manufacturing.net a website dedicated exclusively to manufacturing industry.

"In coming weeks, Manufacturing.net will be rolling out a host of valuable on-line tools for our readers; live Web interviews, on-line surveys, even blogs, all in addition to the high-quality journalism you will come to rely on from us everyday. So, take a tour of the only website dedicated exclusively to manufacturing news,..." link

They already have a blog run by Jack Keough

BlogBridge: Libray BBL

A new service from BlogBridge

BlogBridge:Library is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It's not the content of the library (the books,) it's the software to organize the library (the building.)

BlogBridge:Library (BBL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the 'store' where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here's the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization. from their site

OUseful content has been testing the software

Human Trail in Cyberspace

"The future of computing is social computing," said Marc A. Smith, leader of the Community Technologies group at Microsoft Research, at the conference here. "The question is how do you harness the swarm."

Marc Smith is working on a project called Netscan to analyze Usenet discussion forums.

"What we're trying to do is show patterns of contribution to threaded conversation communities,"

We'll need these kind tools when the open peer review (Nature like initiatives) goes into the mainstream.


From an article (sub req) in Chronicle of Higher Education

World Cup recap from Elsevier point of view

Not a good weekend for my colleagues in Amsterdam and our CEO Erik Engstrom

Portugal 1- Netherlands 0




Germany 2- Sweden 0









And England is still alive with 1-0 win over Ecuador

More on Google Scholar

Allan Cho has a brief review of "The Depth and Breadth of Google Scholar: An Empirical Study" published in Portal Libraries and the Academy (I could not read the article, subs required) via Dean Giustini

Secondlife & STM Publishers

Who will be the first publisher to open a store in secondlife?

I need to update my video card to get in there and sell some Engineering Village Day Pass

Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz on CEO's Blogging

Kevin: Last year you said every CEO should have a blog. Not a lot do. Why not?
Jonathan: Five years ago, most CEOs had their admins print out their email. The job of a leader is to communicate. via David Weinberger

Yes, communicate internally with colleagues and externally with customers and suppliers. I think Richard Charkin (Nature) is still the only CEO in STM world who is "communicating" since my original post.

Nanolearning

"You will be able to incorporate NanoLearning objects into your blog, website, or business process. You can even recombine and aggregate NanoLearning objects into a NanoList."

The service which is being developed by Fusion Learning Systems has not launched yet. Via MicroLearning


Correction:
Nanolearning is not a product of Fusion Learning Systems. Bryan Menell who is the CEO of Fusion is chairing nanolearning too. Thanks for clarification Bryan.

Factiva Search 2.0, Engineering Village and NetVibe

Factiva released few enhancements to their Search 2.0 beta by creating a Netvibes like entry page and exporting the facets. I like the Netvibes feature and have been showing this to our customers as a good tool to create personalized information portals and to share information within departments or company. Here is my Netvibes where I incorporated a module that was created by OUseful Info Indeed Tony Hirst is running an OU Netvibes competition

We have released a beta version of our export utility for our facets to few customers and we'll launch this very soon to all EV customers where they will not only export the graphs of the facets but import the facets data into their excel.












And whiletalking about facets Flamenco Search Interface which we got our inspiration for faceted searching is now open source.

Reed-Elsevier CTO in the list of Top 25 IT leaders

Congratulations to Keith McGarr our Global CTO for Reed-Elsevier being selected by InfoWorld in this year's top 25 CTOs. I think he is the only CTO from a publishing company in the list.

Open Peer Review Debate

Interesting post by Richard Ackerman from CISTI on evolving peer review. He posted some more details on his blog.

His dream research work environment:

One can certainly imagine a dream research workflow environment, where as you work, relevant articles appear in your workspace. To make that happen is very difficult. What is most relevant, articles with a high number of journal citations? Linked to by a lot of web sites? Being discussed in science blogs? Assigned 3-or-more stars by your science peers?

Open Peer Review Trial by Nature

This is very clever way of opening the peer review process and generating additional content for the scientific community. I bet if used properly and with enough participation there will be a great knowledge sharing within the scientists and papers will stop being static but be "interactive".

I would also let the author to respond to the comments before and after their paper is published.

Another important element would be how to capture the knowledge that is being discussed in the comments and put these next to the full-text article i.e when I am reading the full-text I want to see the discussion that took place abou the article, think like FAQ for the article.

I hope that my primary publishing colleagues will start a similar initiative soon.

A new PhD Dissertation on faceted searching

Katherine La Barre's thesis on Faceted Analytico Synthetic Theory (FAST)

Nippon Steel Patent

This is new
HOT ROLLED STEEL SHEET FOR WORKING

Post Post:
This post was generated in an example that I was giving about hor to use Blogs and RSS in coprorate setiings to our European corporate customers who participated in the Library Connect seminar in Amsterdam last Thursday and Friday.

GeoRS and Reuters News

It would be interesting to do something similar using GeoRSS with Compendex feeds, placing authors, publisher, articles on a map. via Pierre Lindenbaum

AOL version of Digg

Here is what people are digging about Science in AOL's new service

It's World Cup from a scientific perspective

Nature has a World Cup special via Richard Charkin

Brainstorming or Blamestorming

I really enjoyed reading the article (sub req) by Jared Sandberg on "Brainstorming" at Wall Street Journal

"John Clark, a former university dean of engineering, says brainstorming sessions come in handy to distribute blame in the event of failure. But in his experience, most often someone hijacks the topic at hand, tries to prove everyone else wrong, works to impress the superiors who are present, or just plain blathers for his own enjoyment. "I can't remember a single instance where a group produced a really creative idea," he says."

"The popularity of brainstorming results in part from corporate America's knee-jerk faith in teams."

Corporations need to have a blogging policy

In an interview Alan Weiner a VP for Gartner said that" "the worst thing you could do is not have a policy." Via Blog Business Summit

TechStreet new interface is called: Web 2.0 Interface

I have all the respect for TechStreet and their founders Andrew Bank and Gregg Hammerman with what they have done in delivery of standards, but I don't get what Thomson Press release means with "Web 2.0 Interface" in their new product release

At Engineering Village or Day Pass Engineering Village we have just an interface. We won't call it Web 2.0 or Web 3.0.

My question to Thomson marketing team do WOS or WOK have a "Web 2.0 Interface"?

TechStreet has been doing a fine job, if I were in charge of Thomson's marketing I would not use this term to describe and market the interface.

TechTrends

Information Sources, Inc introduces an new service supported with ads; good move by Ruth Koolish who is an industry veteran trying to leverage the growing ad business market.
Some cool suggestion feature in the search box. via InfoToday

Tim O'Reilly on Nature

"Bravo. Nature continues to be a leader in figuring out how the web can be used to transform science publishing, with experiments ranging from social bookmarking of scholarly articles with Connotea to Declan Butler's use of Google Earth for bird flu tracking, and now, deep thinking about peer review as the very bedrock of the scientific process."

Via O'Reilly Radar

We (Elsevier) and Thomson should learn from Nature in quick execution.
It's not that at Elsevier we don't have ideas, we have plenty of them but apparently we are not very good in experimenting. We need to have more "just do it" attitude.

Elsevier Engineering Village Day Pass

If you are an engineer, researcher, consultant and looking for engineering literature and don't want to waste your time to find authoritative and trustworthy information on the latest technology and research go to Engineering Village Day Pass.

For $49.95/day we'lll give you the technical intelligence that you won't find on Google, Google Scholar, Live Academic, Yahoo or any other free web search engines.

The most trusted engineering source is now available for everyone....enjoy!

Post Addition:
If you want a complimentary free day pass just send me an email at r{dot}sidi@elsevier{dot}.com We are also offering a complimentary pass-along that you can invite your friends to use the site for free for a day.

New Look now and new service for engineers coming up very soon

users of our product will notice a new Ei logo and drop of 2 from Engineering Village 2..... let us know what you think ?

very soon we will release a new purchase model for engineers to search the most authoritative engineering research content source (Compendex) on the web....

Scopus & ISI competition is good for the market

Today Thomson Scientific announced a new feature for author identification. I was wondering why it took so long for Thomson Scientific to find a solution for author disambiguity issue. Is it the Scopus pressure? Whatever it is the users will definetly benefit from this competition and the enhancements that both product groups will introduce in the future. In terms of future, it will be interesting to see how Google Scholar and Live Academic will use CrossRef and figure out to provide better cited reference searches and how Scopus and Thomson Scientific will compete with Google and Microsoft. One unanswered question here is that we don't know how serious Microsoft and Google are in providing services to scientific and engineering community.

Nature launches Network Boston

Nature Network Boston is a networking site for scientist in Boston. With all the new product launches Nature is becoming publishing industry's Google. What we need now is to expand this globally and create a network for all the scientist and researchers and engineers. Who will do this?
Elsevier, Yahoo or Nature or an alliance of these three?

Google's new spreadsheet sproduct and their product launch philosphy

WSJ reports (sub) a new product launch from Google called Google Spreadsheets. There won't be any sophisticated feature initialy which goes well with what John Herlihy (European director of Google’s online sales and marketing division in Ireland) said in an interview with Silicon Republic Ireland's Technology news Service:

"We tend to put out products that aren’t finished because we believe the customer knows more than us and this informs our R&D efforts. It is arrogant of companies to delay launches of products until they believe the product is perfect."

I was checking irows site to see if they are a "part" of this new product launch but I could not reach their site.

Peer Review Debate at Nature

Nature's weekly publication from scientists, researcher and publishers on "peer review". Nature also established a blog for the Peer Review Debate

Peter Jasco Revisits Scopus

It seems that on the content site we still have issues on Jasco's review:

"No matter how smart and swift the software is, it cannot compensate for certain types of database content deficiencies such as those caused by omissions of articles, issues and entire volumes from core journals which should have complete and consistent coverage. If users can so easily get an X-ray of the entire database in Scopus, then the developers certainly can get a more comprehensive, more detailed and visual report about gaps and roller-coaster coverage of journals. They could help by providing a map for fixing this problem and to give teeth to the proud claim of the exceptionally broad journal base too."