Alternative for Endnote & Refworks?

Zotero has started getting attention from librarian community.

Denodo

Denodo is the first Spanish company in Silicon Valley. It provides easy content integration for entreprises for competitive intelligence. I haven't seen a demo yet but it looks interesting. via ebizQ


ps I have been in Sitges (outside of Barcelona) since Tuesday attending a Reed Elsevier meeting where I showcased Engineering Village to my colleagues from the other business units. I always feel good when I am in Spain, it's like coming home after more than 514 years.

Clever use of social networking data in physical life

A paper titled "A wearable interface for visualizing coauthor networks toward building a sustainable research commununity" published by Nara Institute of Science and Technology researchers shows a great and innovative way using a sensor and display device and data from bibliography databases (including citeseer ) to facilitate communication (introductions) between researchers in a trade show or conference. Imagine that you are a young scientist wearing one of these display devices and you are sitting two rows behind of another scientist whose latest paper is the most cited article in your reserach area and you can see from your device that 10 years ago he has coauthored a paper with one of your professors....... just go ahead and intoduce yourself and mention that you are working with one of his colleagues....
via information aesthetics

MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte on new web era

"As for the Web 2.0 era, he [Negroponte] believes that mass communications will become almost meaningless. “There will be extraordinary events, such as sports events, elections, and breaking news stories. But most people will spend about the same amount of time consuming news, as they do creating it. The days of the couch potato are gone in the sense of merely watching broadcast media.” via Globes

Thomson & decision support tools

Thomson acquires Solucient which provides healthcare decision support solutions. It will be very interesting to see how this whole "decisions support tools" market will be shaped in the future in healthcare and engineering fields.... Press Release

Coming Soon? Social Networks for Hermits...

"Hard to say if it will work, but if you add "social network" to anything right now, you can get $17 million. Walk into a venture firm's office and say, "I've got a social network for hermits." Boom. Seventeen million dollars." (Kevin Manney)

Read the Kevin Manney's article at USA Today and Michael Eisenberg's post on Meetoohickeys

Clustered Search Result & Microsoft

In a recent article titled: Microsoft—Faceted Search Coming Soon? at Information Today, Paula Hane highlights Microsoft Search Results Clustering site (SRC) where they experiment with on the fly clustering of search results and entity extraction. If I may my advise to Microsoft team to move ahead quickly and integrate this solution at least initially with Academic Live, stop being displaying just "search results" (Google Scholar does that too) but provide some insights of the results and refine tools for the users.

I wish that someone from Microsoft Academic Live team (or even Google Scholar team) would explains why they haven't introduced the clustering and entiy extraction tools into Academic Live or Google Scholar?

Bringing some authority to WikiPedia model

Citizendium (another project by Larry Sanger who started Wikipedia) will use an editorial model.

The next generation office

Some interesting vendors present their solution in the upcoming Office 2.0 conference. As content publishers we should be thinking what role we will play in the next generation of office application.

No Reed Elsevier participation so far in the list but the Phili folks (Thomson) are there.

New Division at SLA: Knowledge Management

"The Knowledge Management (KM) Division of SLA will focus on the characteristics and processes through which organizations facilitate the creation, sharing and use of knowledge. " via SLA

Tom Peters suggestion for Innovation

"Experiment fearlessly"

"Experiment fearlessly," he advised. Strategic plans, which extend present operations forward in sustained growth, "work brilliantly under conditions where you don't need them." Use a strategic plan "called doing things," he recommended.

Perhaps your company will be successful in the same manner as he was, Peters said. Success of In Search of Excellence was an accident of timing. Peters was involved in a car accident and forced to stay at home for two months. At the time, "We were being hammered by the Japanese in steel and autos." At a time when the public was worried about what was wrong with American business, Peters and co-author Robert Waterman promised the answer by using the word excellence in relation to business in a title for the first time.

"Innovation is bloody random," appearing in unexpected places in the best managed organizations. It may be the most successful corporations of the future will be shooting stars, making a big impact for a brief period and then disappearing.

"My number one company is Netscape. It was born, changed the world and died in 72 months. I love this company," he said." via InformationWeek

SysytemOne: Solving Content Integration & Retrieval in Corporation

SystemOne offers a very compelling solution to corporations without the hassle of buying expensive content integration softwares. via TechCrunch

Here is how they describe their solution.


While you create a document in a wiki/blog environment, their engine brings real time information from entreprises' external and internal content including subscription databases and enables users to connect to experts within the company and ease the collaboration within company.

You can also watch their screen cast

Their solution reminds me of a project that we did 4 years ago at Ei with Xerox using Document Souls solution that was developped at Xerox Grenoble Lab.

ASIDIC Highlights

If you missed ASIDIC conference (the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers), John Blossom from Shore has a great post highlighting the event.

Blogs, Wikis and Corporate America

WSJ article shows how IBM, Intel, Quark, SAP and Honeywell are experimenting with blogs and wikis, and social bookmarking applications. A recent post from Rich Hoeg who was mentioned in the article highlights Honeywell's success in adoption of these new initiatives.

If you know any engineering company with similar initiatives (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking) drop me a note. I would like to find out about their experiences. It will be very interesting to see how corporate engineering world especially people in R&D will use IBM and Microsoft's solutions (dogear and Knowledge Network).

At Elsevier we are still experimenting with wikis and internal blogs but nothing like in the scale of the companies which are mentioned in the article.


Update: WSJ article titled "Offices Co-Opt Consumer Web Tools
Like 'Wikis' and Social Networking" was published Sept 12th and written by Vauhini Vara

Nice PR from Google on Banned Books Week

ALA President Leslie Burger posts at Official Google Blog on ALA and Google's Book Search initiatives supporting Banned Books Week.

"For 25 years, libraries and bookstores nationwide have been celebrating the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, which is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Association of College Stores, and endorsed by the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

Now Google has joined the party. "

Intelligent use of RSS in corporate engineering environment

Rich Hoeg from Honeywell has a put a great screencast tutorial showing how to use RSS and Google Alert with major engineering publishers sites to provide competitive intelligence.

I was wondering how many of large (and small) engineering companies are using RSS so effectively in their organization?

If you have or know of any good implementation of RSS in corporate engineering world, please let me know and I'll include them here.

Google News Archive and Lexis Nexis

Paul Kedrosky puts Reed-Elsevier (Lexis Nexis) in his "assaulted" company list because of Google's new service. Similar to Google Scholar, definetly this ain't a small challenge for all the news aggregators including Dialog, Factiva. The way these news aggregators can win this game is to provide more insights and intelligence from the search results. Silobreaker is a good example of an "intelligent" news aggregator and Thomson, Lexis Nexis and Factiva can learn few things from Silobreaker on how to present contextual insights.

Diode

The joke in Elsevier is that I am the diode searcher in Engineering Village. Usually when I present EV, I start doing a search for "diode" because I have been always fascinated what one can do with diodes. I always like when I read new application using diode like the new Philips lumulalive fabrics where they use light emmitting diodes. Next we have to get t-shirts or jackets from this material and use Elsevier logos on them. via Physorg

USA Today: Libraries are not closed for the college students

I noticed the following in a USA Today article by Kim Komando where she provides tips for highschoolers and college students:

"Research it. Researching major papers requires trips to the library. But the library closes; the Web never does. [bolding is mine]

Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) and Windows Live Academic (http://academic.live.com) both specialize in academic and scholarly journals. Both sites are in testing phases, but work well enough to be useful. Windows Live Academic has mostly indexed computer science and engineering journals. Google Scholar draws from a greater variety of journals.

Using the sites is similar to a regular Web search. If you type in a few keywords on your subject, you'll get the title, author and other information on articles, as well as links to the articles.

Not every article listed is available online, but you'll have enough bibliographic information to find them at the library." via USA Today

Sorry USA Today, but nowdays the libraries never close and researching major papers do not require trips to do library. Students can do this from their dorms or any wi-fi accessibe places login to their library site. College libraries physically close their doors after some time but all their online content is accessible to their students 24x7.

Another nice enhancement from Yahoo search team: Live Search

Yahoo launched their Live Search at alltheweb and at Yahoo Toolbar on Firefox . This is similar to the autocompletion but missing the facets. via Yahoo

A new search engine with paid helpers

ChaCha will provide a searh site using paid guides and having searchers chat with guides while they are searching. The key would be how authoritatives the guides would be? Who knows may be ChaCha can employ some of the reference librarians as guides and provide more intelligent answers to users.

A research tool coming to Firefox

Zotero is currently in private beta. The public beta will be availabel in Fall. via Dan Cohen