Want Mashups

check out mashupfeed Anyone seen any cool mashup in scientific literature? via David Berlind’s ZDNet post through programmableweb

Grokker & Ebsco Partnership

Here is a demo how Ebsco is integrating Grokker in their search products. I am not sure which way of refinng is easier for the end user: guided navigation/faceted search or visual way of clustering? via Syndication for Librarians (Sarah Houghton)

Great Article on product development and conventional market research

Profs. Ogawa and Piller article (subs) should be a must reading for all the product development people. They explain "collective customer commitment" (pdf) in product development and connecting with customers to get new ideas for product development.

Federal R&D Funding in 2006: $134.8 billion

Highlights from AAAS

Kosmix

Scoble mentions about a new search engine Kosmix in health market. Kosmix uses nicely the clustering in the search results and present the information better than the Healthine for discovery purposes, but still we - all the information providers -are not where we are supposed to be: provide intelligent answers to searchers.

When I do a search for "turkey cancer" should I be getting a result for "Homemade Turkey Soup - Weight Management and Metabolic Disorders including… in the treatment clusters. I would let the doctors decide if this is a valid search results....

Added later: when you search for "cancer turkey" the first result is "Cancer Sucks Clothing! In this case I don't need any MD assistance to see that this can't be the most relevant record...

Like Healthline, Kosmix hasn't implemented RSS feeds for search queries yet. Probably this must be in the queue in their development.

Taking Visualization to another level

Theyrule has a very nice way of visualizing the content. The site was created by John On. via Rashmi Sinha

Microsoft Search Champs

More on Search Champs from Emily Chang

Among the attendees were Craig Van Dyck (from Wiley); Jenny Levine; Mary Ellen Bates; Paul Mouton (Thomson Gale) ; Walt Crawford (RLG). I had applied to go, but was not able to get an invite "due to a huge amount of very qualified responses", I'll try my chance for Champs v5.

Elsevier-Thomson battle continues

Thomson- Elsevier war analogy continues. I'll try to keep track how media and analyst are representing this competition.


Deb Wiley reviews ALA and she mentions that

"The Elsevier-Thomson battle continues with Elsevier announcing the addition of Citation Tracker to its Scopus database product. I saw an impressive demo of citation analysis and lateral searching. Of course, Scopus doesn't have the depth of coverage that Web of Knowledge has, but it wins in the breadth department, depending on the size of your subscription, of course." (bolding is mine)

As far as I know there is there is no slicing of content in Scopus and all the subscribers access to the same content.

Deb has a point when she says

"The secondary services are the ones that need to think twice. While all the librarians I spoke with agree that the A&I services provide terrific added value, they pointed out that students don't use them as much as they do Google Scholar."

I think one of our main tasks is how to communicate this added value to students. Once they know the value that they are getting from secondary services and the valuable time that they can save, they will stick with us. But we also need to make their searching experience more fun in our products.

World 2.0

Microsoft announced Live Labs. You can read their manifesto here .

"It’s about a revolution in how we create, share, and refine anything that can be digitally encoded, be it news and information, artistic forms, scientific breakthroughs, personal communications, economic transactions, and, yes, even software. This is not Web 2.0. It’s World 2.0. "

One of the focus areas of the group will be " Rapid prototyping – small teams that produce functional and conceptual prototypes outside of the normal product development process. "

"Rapid prototyping" with involving our users as co-creators, is something that we should be doing more in Elsevier to come up with innovative products that will really blow our users' minds off and help them to find answers to their needs/problems and provide them great experience when using the product.

Also check Gary William Flake's presentation ( ppt) via Frederico Oliveira WeBreakStuff

National Academies' Report on how to enhance Science&Technology enterprise

"Two key challenges that are tightly couple to scientific and engineering prowess
Creating high quality jobs for Americans and responding to nation's need to clean, affodable, and reliable energy."

Committee came up with four focus areas:
K-12, research, higher education, and economic policy.

Here is the summary of the report. Thanks to Rich (and his brother who was at a meeting where Stanford University president reviewed the report.)

MedScan Reader

A new tool for students and researchers in biomedical domain from Ariadne Genomics, Inc. It searches Pubmed, BiomedCentral, HighWire Press, Google Scholar and Google. It does entitity extraction and show relationship. Need to check it more later. They offer a trial at www.ariadnegenomics.com.

More on Reed-Elsevier Lobbying

William Walsh who is the head of acquisitions at Georgia State University Library has a final post on our lobbying efforts in the US. He also gave the year breakdown. As I mentioned in my comment to Christina, the number that was in the article is a cumulative total covering multiple years and it includes U.S. lobbying efforts on behalf of various Reed Elsevier units such as LexisNexis, Harcourt and others.

Knowledge2Go For Corporations

Richard Hoeg who is a eContent and elearning manager at Honeywell and a colleague whom I appreciate exchanging ideas, has a good idea in using driving time to push knowledge and create learning bursts while Honeywell employees are on the road.

"Time in the car is the one opprtunity most people have when they are not overbooked. I can deliver executive briefings, or shorter learning snippets."

Is this a war?

"Thomson ISI Web of Science sustains attack on one of its key USPs, as Scopus adds Citation Tracker" (the hyperlink are my edits)

This headline from Information World Review reminds me something that I read but I don't recall where that the marketing people are using "war" related terms in their product messages like campaign, launching etc. It looks like media folks are encouraging to use this terms too.

Believe me we don't have any intentions to send any scuds from NYC to Phili. Having two great companies developping great products will only help the end users and scientific community.

Snapshot of 2005 Global Innovation by Thomson Scientific

The report includes hot research areas, highly cited authors , most cited countries

Reed Ventures Invests in Healthline

We invested in Healthline. They raised $14 million. Hope they can spend few thousands to provide RSS feeds. Mike Arrington says that this is an absolutely wonderful search engine. I think their HealhtMap feature is very nice.

Also we need (at least I need) more intelligent ads in my search results from any company that is basing their biz model on ads. When I do a search for "turkey cancer" I don't want to get a ad for "left Over Turkey Recipes" in a vertical search engine.

Vivisimo and Serials Solution from ProQuest

partnered to provide clustered search results for federated searches

"Under terms of the agreement, Serials Solutions is licensing Vivísimo's Clustering Engine for integration into its federated search product,"

it's good to see other indormation provider getting on the clustering wagon..it's good for the end users.

Shrink 2.0

"Three out of 10 bloggers in Norway blog about their mental problems. According to an analysis of 100 Norwegian blogs, conducted by Univero Fishnet, the blog has come to substitute for the old diary, not only in the sense of a serving as a journal, but also as a place to express one's deepest feelings. " via PoynterOnline

"Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California"

A must read report from Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California (UC) Libraries . It's kind of bummer that Engineering Village 2 were not mentioned in the guided navigation/faceted braowsing example. Scopus is one of the eamples with Endeca
in faceted search, and Scirus was mentioned under federated search category

Customized Books" Mix 'n' match textbooks: lower prices, high utility"

Something that we should consider and test...

"And in fast-moving fields like information technology, business or engineering, even new textbooks may be out of date." via The Mercury News

STM Publishers and Blogs

Here is the first STM senior exec with a blog. Richard Charkin CEO of McMillan is blogging at Charkin Blog . Nature is parent company of McMillan. I have been telling my colleagues that Nature is leading in innovation in the online STM publishing so no wonder that their CEO is blogging. Thanks to Timo Hanney and William Walsh . I would suggest to the rest of the STM execs (including my company's, Wiley, Springer, Kluwer etc) to pick up the phone and speak with Richard and get some perspective on his experience.

Where is entreprise search going?

Interesting insights from Anant Jhingran who is the CTO and VP of IBM’s Information Management Group in San Jose in a podcast with John Furrier


"To cut the long story short, really search will go in two directions. One is it will become an “-ity” and it’s probably a phrase that will get quoted a lot. It will move to a hard level plain, with respect to the “Do what I mean,” as opposed to “Do what I say.”

Reed-Elsevier among the top UK spenders on US lobbyist

William Walsh points to an article in The Times listing top British spenders with US lobby groups. It seems that we spent $12.5 million since 1998.

"According to Alex Knott, the political editor of the Centre for Public Integrity, British lobbying in Washington was higher than for any other country, and was more than the total spent by 35 American states.

The highest spenders were GlaxoSmithKline ($32.4 million), BP ($26.8 million), HSBC ($23.8 million), Reed Elsevier ($12.5 millon) and Reuters ($12.2 million). Defence manufacturers, such as Rolls Royce, have, Mr Knott suggested, obtained particularly good value for money. Rolls Royce has spent $2.9 million on lobying since 1998, while obtaining $1.8 billion in US defence contracts."

I haven't contributed to it yet, but I support our lobbying efforts , as I support other lobbying efforts including AIPAC .

Good reading on DRM

Michael Godwin who is a fellow at the Yale Information Society Project has written a technology brief on Digital rights management: A guide for Librarian. via Sarah Houghton

Factiva Search 2.0

Today I had a chance to look at Factiva's Search 2.0. It's definitely a more meaningful information presentation as their CEO Clare Hart pointed out. It's very similar to our Easy Search except they also present the counts with graphics. They don't have the bread crumb or search path which enables the user to change the search strategy with one click. It's good to see another information provider leaving the "dumb searh results page" schooling that we see in Google, Yahoo, MSN and moving to displaying insights at the search results page by clustering the results and leveraging the metadata and taxonomies.

Post Note: One thing that I missed is that user can't create RSS for their search query, I think Factiva Search 2.0 team will get this feedback from the other users and may integrate it in a later phase.

An Ei press release from 1996: Ei COMPENDEX joins IBM infoMarket service

I got this link today through a search feed that I have for Compendex.

"HOBOKEN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 31, 1996--Engineering Information Inc., best known for its Engineering Information Village(TM) an Internet-based service offering content and community for technical professionals and managers, and Ei Compendex(R), the most comprehensive interdisciplinary, engineering database in the world, has announced that Ei Compendex is now available through IBM's recently launched infoMarket program. IBM infoMarket, developed as a search engine for NATO, is the first secure environment for intellectual property owners to reach a worldwide audience over the Internet. The delivery system utilizes IBM Cryptolope(TM) secure container technology"

Thumbs up for faceted searching

David Weinberger posts about NCSU implementation of faceted searching

"Why is this a big deal? Unlike parametric searches that let you enter specifications for your search, a faceted search doesn't simply apply search criteria. Instead, a faceted classification system — in this instance, called a "guided navigation" system by Endeca, the company behind this implementation — the browsable interface changes with every choice so that it never shows you parameters that would result in an empty results list. So, you don't have to keep randomly banging on it and then backing up, trying to find the one book you want, or the one left-threaded, chrome-plated, 15mm, philips-headed, round-capped screw you need as you build the specs for your new aircraft engine. And when it turns out there are no screws exactly like that, you can decide you could do without the chrome-plating, or the philips-headedness, until you get something that works. "

STM Publishers and Blogs (2)

Some readers emailed me additional links to my original post on lack of official blog publishing by senior executives at STM publishers.

Richard Ackerman posts some official and unoficial blogs and includes Factiva's Clare Hart's blog under the unofficial blogs.

Peter Suber points to Jan Velterop's blog at Springer and Chris Leanord's blog at Elsevier. Chris' blog was not an official Elsevier blog and his departure from Elsevier was not-blog related. I emailed Jan to see if the blog is an offficial Springer blog or not.

Joe Wikert from Wiley also has an individual blog

Factiva's CEO Clare Hart Got It

Ok, she is not an STM executive but I hope her blog will be a good example to her STM colleagues who don't blog. via Jeff Clavier

NCSU Joins faceted navigation

It's great to see faceted search/navigation being implemented in an University Library. (via ACRLog). Conragulations to NCSU team having the vision and choosing this technology. Today's search results are not enough, we need to help users to refine the results in a intelligent way. NCSU is using Endeca . Another company to watch in this market is Siderean. In Engineering Village we are using FAST technology to provide faceted navigation/search. Another great example of this technlology is Flamenco Search at Berkeley by Prof. Marti Hearst. Any search company and information or e-commerce product which is not using this technology is missing the boat.

Hakia

a new search engine that was has some Young Turks and an international team. (via MoMB) Here is their vision

" Our vision is to fulfill the promise of the next generation search engines by offering leaps and bounds in performance and human-like communication. We want to bring the Internet one step closer to becoming a central brain of human civilization"

It would be interested to see what kind of "human-like communication" they will bring into the search space.

Starbucks & Coffee

In WSJ (sub req) Starbucks' Chairman Schultz said "Starbucks isn't an entertainment company," But "we want to have an entertainment strategy that supports the foundation of the coffee experience that our customers have come to expect and enjoy."

Ottomans were experts on this concept.

We should also take lessons from Starbucks and make online search experience (specifically for scientific and technical content) more "fun" and enjoyable.

STM Publishers and Blogs

I am kind of surprised that we haven't seen any major STM (Elsevier, Thomson, Wiley, Springer, IEEE etc) publishing companies' senior execs embracing blogging and officially blogging. Here is what David Weinberger said in "Talking from the inside out: The rise of Employee Bloggers" (pdf) a white paper by Edelman and Intelliseek

"Many corporations are afraid of Weblogs because they are afraid of the sound of the human voice. But that voice-the unfiltered sound of an actual person writing about what she cares about, sounding like herself-is actually the most important way of connecting with customers and partners"

If you see one STM publishing exec official blog, let me know.

There is only one GS in Turkey

and this is not Google Scholar that all the information professionals, publishing and search industy are referring to.

Peer reviewed Blogs

Ed has a good idea on how STM publishers can play a role with Blogs so that we can start analyzing Blogfactor .

"If the pastrami sandwich goes down the drain, there's no hope for this country at all."

That's what Jackie Mason said on the closing of 2nd Ave Deli. Unfortunately. our neigborhood is loosing another great institution. Eventhough we haven't frequented the place (the sandwiches were too big for me and can't beat a good kosher doner) I just loved to see the place which reminded me the old Jewish life of East Village and my kids enjoyed the Sukkah that they had outside the restaurant during the Sukkot holiday.
Anyway I hope Jack Lebewohl finds a new place in the area. more on this at Times

Google Co-Branded Sites and Google Scholar

After Dell, there is another Google co-branded home page, this time from an ISP, Current Broadband via Steven Rubel.
I think this gives another opportunity to Google to put Google Scholar in front of millions if these ISPs or OEMs create a section on their homepage for research.

Newsvine Beta launches

Newsvine launched their beta. You can create your own news page and make money.If you need an invite to use the site let me know.

A great example of product development by users

Pierre Lindenbaum who is a Connetea user created a Greasemonkey script PubMed2Connetea that inserts Pubmed records directly in Connetea.

OPML Feed generator for Connetea from OUseful info

You can use OUseful's OPML feed generator for Delicious too.

Peter Jasco on Scopus, Google Scholar and Web Of Science and citation enhanced databases

Peter Jasco's article "As we may search - Comparison of major features of the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar citation-based and citation-enhanced databases" in Current Science via Eugene Garfield in Sigmetrics Listserv

RSS and being Customer Focused

Our customers are asking and we need to respond to quickly by integrating RSS in all our online products, come on folks it should not take months to do it.

Why clustered search results?

"Categorizing web search results into comprehensible visual displays using meaningful and stable classifications can support user exploration, understanding, and discovery.

"....six emerging principles (Kules & Shneiderman, in process), that draw on the fields of information science, information retrieval, human-computer interaction and information visualization

Provide overviews of large sets of results
Organize results by meaningful classifications
Tightly couple category labels to results list
Arrange text for scanning/skimming
Visually encode quantitative attributes on a stable visual substrate
Support multiple visual presentations and classifications"



from a new paper by by Bill Kules and Ben Shneiderman, of the Department of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland. via Search Engine Roundtable


That's one of the reasons that we introduced clustered search results (faceted searching) in Engineering Village 2.

Guy Kawasaki's Istanbul Experience

Unfortunately the newspapers( including Hurriyet) in Istanbul too, need a good "under the belt" headline to sell.