InfoWorld launches IT Exec-connect

from their beta site

"InfoWorld is expanding the ways we help you connect and communicate with industry peers, product and systems experts, and InfoWorld staff through an exciting new service, InfoWorld IT Exec-Connect! This free service includes unique online matching tools that will help you:

Expand Your Network - Search, match and connect with other members.
Schedule Times to Connect - Plan online or offline meetings.
Build Business Relationships - Grow your network of industry contacts."

Article Distibution Service

Ezinearticles offers a platform for authors to distribute their content.. via Joe Wikert

Istanbul and Book Benches

OCLC colleagues post about benches that they saw on Istanbul promoting 18 Turkish poets. The point is that buying these books are luxury for middle and low income people in Istanbul for the book prices are so high...... So I am wondering how much of these is just PR?

Tacit brings expert locator to the web

Keeping the tacit knowledge and finding the right experts is crucial for the corporations. Tacit with its new product Illumio tries to bring this to the web.

Bill Gates and the New world of Work

Google, shmoogle, just watch Microsoft's vision for knowledge workers

"It's also not easy enough just to find the information people need to do their jobs. The software innovations of the 1980s and 1990s, which revolutionized how we create and manipulate information, have created a new set of challenges: finding information, visualizing and understanding it, and taking action. Industry analysts estimate that information workers spend up to 30 percent of their working day just looking for data they need. All the time people spend tracking down information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure their teams have the data they need, could be much better spent on analysis, collaboration, insight and other work that adds value. " Microsoft White Paper

Here is the link from the remarks of his years CEO Summit

Some good stuff from Reed-Elsevier's FlightGlobal

A sister (or cousin) company from RBI has doing some nice stuff with their content. Flight is providing sharing tools (like digg, reddit, delicious, technorati) at article level and letting their users to rate the article.
They also announced today a partnership with Linkstorms (previously contentdirections). To see the new navigation from article level check this link and mouse over the title.

Nuvvo

A new e-learning product from Canada. For everyone who loves using (or abusing) the term "wokflow" check this out. via Rick Segal

Larry Page on Google's position on copyrights

"We follow copyright laws. Where we don't have permission, we won't show you the content,"

also where Google will take the search "We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence. from The Independent via Greg Linden

Microsoft is getting into Knowledge Network

This initiave can be crucial in some corporate engineering markets where brain drain is a problem with retiring engineers and companies are losing all the tacit knowledge

"We’ve done a great deal of research to understand where people feel their time is being wasted, and how Knowledge Network can help. With some of the research referenced in this blog we’ll share with you how Knowledge Network addresses the following familiar problems:

· Most information is not “documented” in a formal sense.

· It’s often difficult to connect with the right person.

· “Weak ties” are not easily discoverable."

Richard Charking, Google and defending publishers

Richard Charking has a very good piece on copyright, Google, NY Times and double standards...

"It is really a very strange world where those who are arrogant or mad enough to think they can build a 'perfect search engine (which) would be like the mind of God' (Google co-founder, Sergey Brin) are treated as cool and honourable and publishers such as Random House, Bloomsbury, Reed Elsevier, Blackwell, Macmillan etc are regarded as dinosaurs when they spend money and creativity developing new ways to support their authors and excite their readers. Go figure."

I wish that CEOs of the companies that Richard mentions were also blogging and sharing their thoughts on these topics with the market like Richard.

Links from delicious for May 21

1. Taglocity Tagging for Outlook. Another step for entreprise tagging
2. Collaborative Tagging in Avaya

   A paper from Ajita John and Doree Seligmann from Avaya Labs Research.

3. IBM's people-tagging experiment: Fringe

   A paper by Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau of IBM Almaden Research Center. People Tagging can also be used for expertise location in companies

4. Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds

   Ben Lund's (Nature) paper on Social Bookmarking at XTech 2006.

5. Beyond Business Intelligence: Delivering a Comprehensive Approach to Enterprise Information Management
   Microsoft's enhanced search for knowledge network (expertise management).
   
6. Google Jockeying

   This is another reminder of the challenge that we face as (fee-based) research information providers in academic and corporate settings. I would like to have a Google Jockey, Elsevier Jockey, Thomson Jockey and Microsoft Jockey in these classrooms and get the feedback from students and teachers on which content sources were most useful and the quality of the results.
   

   
   

Innovation at Google,

Marissa Mayer spoke at Stanford on how Google "innovates" via Alleywag

Things that I don't understand

This week I am visiting some of customers in Houston, Texas with my sales colleague Don Chatten. We were driving in one of our customer's lot and looking for a building and there was this sign:

Speed Limit
21


Why 21 and not 22 or 19?

Social Bookmarking in corporate setting

Mitre is assessing the value of social software for infomation sharing and management. They are running a prototype "onomi" with an open source tool. Here is more details by Laurie Damianos, John Griffith and Donna Cuomo.

Also a very interesting article "Entreprise 2.0: The Dwan of emergent Collaboration" on wikis, blogs and collaboration within the enteprise (example from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein) by Andrew P McAfee is published by MIT Sloan

Engineering Village won a Codie Award but the real winner is our customers

Engineering Village won a SIIA Codie Award in Best Content Aggregation Service category.
I believe this award goes to our customers too, without their support, feedback (positive and negative), suggestions, patience, and help in our product development we could not have won this award. Thank you all!

Here is the list of the other winners

Made in by Customers

A lot of good examples in coopareting with customers in developing new products and services at Trendwatching

"With traditional brands shit-scared to really open up to their customers, fearing the deluge of hitherto unanswered questions, complaints and suggestions, there's money in helping them get started in a controlled environment."

At Engineering Village we are always open to any suggestions, questions and complaints that our users have.

Today's news

It is not Elsevier, or Thomson or Google related: Galatasaray won the the Turkish football championship. I watch the Fenerbahce- Denizli and Galatasaray-Kayseri games with Ilan (4) and my cousin who was visiting us from Istanbul. Nowdays I don't care too much about Turkish football, but it always feels good to be the champion and get the championship from Fenerbahce.
This was Ilan's first Galatasaray Championship.

Google Co-op: An opportunity for premium content publishers

Google Co-op looks like an open invitation for any publisher but especially subscription-based content providers (in my case STM and A&I publishers) to put their content in front of their users where they all go first -the free web- most of the time. It has potential to increase the subscribers' usage of the fee-services and increase the pay-per-view revenue for non-subscribers.

John Blossom in his overview on Google Co-op states that "Google Co-op has the potential to be an extremely powerful tool for publishers - especially those providing premium content."

Agreed!

Here is a Pubmed record in the Co-op














Also a more technical write up on Co-op is at Google Blogoscoped

One question to Google Scholar team: How about creating a Google Scholar Co-op?

btw Google finaly discovered the power of refining search results by tagged (oooops sorry) labeled terms.

Google Trends & Some things that I don't understand

Google launched few new services yesterday Google Trends is one of them. It allows you to " analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time."

Here is the results for Elsevier. I don't have a clue why Iranians are leading here for Elsevier searches....










Also just for fun here is a comparison or Elsevier and Thomson












Google Co-op is another service that they announced yesterday. Marrissa Mayer is quoted in the Times as "A little bit of human involvement goes a long way". More on the Co-op later.....

Another new online "colloborative" initiative from MacMillan Publishers (Nature)

Dissect Medicine is a new collaborative medical news website similar to Digg. Macmillan group is excellent in adapting and testing with what's happening on the web. Connotea was also an expansion of delicious

Excellent Idea: Complore

Finally it was not any major publisher like Elsevier, Thomson, Wiley or Springer but few engineers from IIT Delhi who launched Complore an online " Social Research Collaboration Tool for researchers, academicians, students around the world. It aims to build a community where people can collaborate research by just not searching for articles, papers, journals but by actively helping each other by sharing research material with anybody anytime, anywhere." via Complore Blog

Way to go.....I wish you all the success.

I did not see any ads in the site and I am wondering how they will generate revenue. May be we should just buy them out and bring their creativity and talents into our company. Hey if Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are buying small companies with few talented folks why can't we?

Faceted Search And Tag Cloud

Nice example from FacetMap on different ways of showing facets.