Google and information trustworthiness

I was reading Adam Bosworth post on "How you know you are getting the best care" and after reading the following section:

"How do I know if the information is trustworthy and reliable?
There is a lot of material out there about drugs, diseases, procedures and treatments. How do you know what is trustworthy and what isn’t? Search is great at finding us places with relevant information, but it is hard to know which links are reliable and which are less so."

I could not stop thinking about a children book called "MRS ARMITAGE on Wheels", where her bike was having problems and everytime she had a problem she was asking to her dog Breakspear "What this bikes needs". What Google needs is trusted content sources of the scientific publishers, this can be one way to improve the trustworthiness and reliability of the information. On top of that they have to develop something better than what Microsoft has with MedStory

Social Tagging at Columbia Teachers College

Pocket Knowledge has a very nice implementation of tagging with multiple ways of viewing and sorting it. Harvard also has its own EdTags. via Michael Hemment

What's the relationship with Bill Gates and Felipe Calderon

Use SUNY Brooks entity extraction engine TextMap and find this out. This is a good attempt to put some context around the data and show associations. Their system extract 12 different entities. via Resourceshelf

Another good example of cooperation between universities and corporations

Collaborating with Intel, Bilkent University in Turkey has solved the largest integral-equation problem with 33 million unknowns and broke the world record that belonged to University of Illinois which had solved a problem with 22 million unknowns.

A new semantic web search agent: Zitgist

Frederick Giasson provides some concrete examples how Zitgist and Semantic Web search agents will help getting better search results and knowledge from different data sources.

Email and Slot Machines and Interruptions

Nathan Zeldes is right on the point. We need to start checking our emails 2 or 4 times a day. We don't want to get interrupted continuously. Indeed 3 years ago my former manager and colleague Bernard Aleva had introduced me to this concept of turning your email off for few hours and it definetly works.

"... she’d [Prof. Gloria Mark of UC Irvine] conjectured that email is like the slot machines in Vegas – one checks and rechecks the Inbox in the hope of finding a recently arrived “good one” and getting a “high” as a result. Gloria actually plans to do some research to confirm this intuitive observation.

Which goes to the question many people ask me when I come up with my more aggressive solutions to the problem: why not simply tell the user to only check email twice a day? If you explain the benefit to them, surely they’ll do it?..."

How to turn a Purple Cow to a Mad Cow

Boris sent me Seth Godin's post where he rightfully complains about the emails that he has been getting from my colleagues at Reed Business "to swap links". From what I am reading in the post this was a mistake from our part and we should have told the truth of what happened, apologized, and move on.

We all need to educate ourself how this medium works and how one can establish trusted relationships in the market.
Indeed I would suggest that we should invite Seth to one our meetings. I bet there is a lot of stuff that we can learn from him.

When I read the post in the afternoon Seth had included the email links of three Reed employees that sent him the emails. Now he removed these links which is also the correct way to handle this.

Btw Boris who is a serial internet entrepreneur is organizing the next web conference in Amsterdam in June 1st. He has put a very nice mix of speakers for his one day conference.

It's all about ease of access to the content

There has been some postings (2) (3) (4) (5) on MIT's decision to cancel Society of Automotive Engineers’ web-based database of technical papers.

"At a time when technology makes it possible to share research more quickly and broadly than ever before, and when innovative automotive research is a matter of global concern, SAE is limiting access to the research that has been entrusted to the society. In addition to imposing DRM on access to the papers for paid subscribers, the SAE also prevents information about its papers from being found through any channel other than the ones they control.

What does this mean? In contrast to information about research published by other engineering societies, which can be found in databases such as Google, ISI’s Web of Science, or the Compendex engineering database, information about SAE papers is only made available through SAE’s proprietary database. Such policies severely limit access to information about SAE papers, and are out of step with market norms.

One of the roles of publishers is disseminate quality content and to make the access and reach to our content easy. In February 2005 when we launched our e-books offering (Referex) we started with DRM too. Within few days our customers (academic and corporate) started to complain, and they were right, it was a painful process for them to install the plug-ins. Based on their feedback, we stopped using DRM in May 2005.

Lesson learned: trust the customer and forget the DRM today when "open collaboration" is picking up.

On entrepreneurship

Some of the qualities that Ho Nam outlines would apply for product developers too. They need to have "just do it" attitude, conviction and passion. via Michael Osofsky

"If you want to be an entrepreneur, just remember this - follow a different path. The most successful entrepreneurs win with or without VC funding - they go out and just do it. Forget about the cocktail parties, the hot sectors, hot deals, or what's popular with investors or anyone else - think for yourself. If you do, you just might come up with something that you will pursue with all your heart and soul. Conviction, rather than convention, is the key. "

Freebase

If Freebase (sub req) team can integrate scientific content this can turn into a very interesting and useful application for scientists and researchers.

Bolt is gone

Before Elsevier I used to work for Bolt handling their e-commerce operations. Seven years ago when no one was doing social networking and tagging we had a huge amount of users (teen agers) coming to our site and hanging out with other teenagers and generating user content. Aaron Cohen and Dan Pelson had the right idea at the time to create a teen-age social networking site. After the crush, Bolt continued the operation with a small stuff. Apparently in order to pay $10 million settlement to Universal, Bolt was sold to GoFish. Btw working at Bolt was a great experience.