Reuters acquires Clearforest

Finally a publisher acquired Clearforest. Reuters can do some very cool and intelligent stuff with Clearforest technology. Congratulations to Clearforest team.

Discourse DB brings Semantic Web to politics

Discourse DB uses semantic wiki technologies to "collect the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues"

Where is Turkey heading?

Turkish military choose to issue its warning for the Islamic rooted government just posting their press release (or ultimatum) on their website, no press conference, no TV announcement. Turkey is going through a turmoil and no one knows how she is going end up: Iran-light or continue on the traditions of Ataturk.

Benefits of corporate blogging from Sun Microsystems

On their third anniversary, Tim Bray reviews how Sun has benefited from blogging:
improve image, helping executive in communicating their message; helping sales process; improve the morale and improve getting feedback and ideas.

Any corporations which would not love these benefits????

"Semantic Reconciliation" and contextualizing the information

Jeff Jonas post on "To Know Semantic Reconciliation is to Love Semantic Reconciliation" made me think how we can solve "author normalization" issue in our scientific databases and publications and other contextual information we can present when users try to find information on any topic.

According to Gartner we all will go virtual

"By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life,” but not necessarily in Second Life, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments will dominate in the future, and significant transaction-based commercial opportunities will be limited to niche areas, which have yet to be clearly identified,” said Steve Prentice, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, the majority of active Internet users and major enterprises will find value in participating in this area in the coming years.” via adverlab

Gartner also identified five laws for entreprises:

Virtual worlds are not games, but neither are they a parallel universe (yet).
Behind every avatar is a real person.
Be relevant and add value.
Understand and contain the downside
This is a long haul.

Science Bloggers and Fair Use

There are some interesting posts and discussion going among science bloggers on fair use that started by Shelley Batts who is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan when she posted a table and graph from a Wiley publication in her blog. Shelley removed the table and graph and replaced it with excel charts when she got a note from Wiley. (I learned this issue through BBGM)

It would be interesting to see how and if the publishers will be more flexible in the future with this kind of fair use issue. If a blogger includes a paragraph or a table from an article with proper copyright notices and links to the article would not this bring more usage for the publishers for their articles?

Pan Macmillan experimenting and positoining in Second Life

After their Second Life Book Fair, Richard Charkin states that:

"This has really been an interesting experience, despite various technical problems to begin with. I certainly think that we will pursue other in-world opportunities. Our colleagues at Nature are ahead of the game as they already own two islands, but expect to see a more permanent Pan Macmillan presence at some point soon!"


I am wondering if there has been any subject specific conference in Second Life similar to the ones organized in real life by STM publishers or engineering societies like SAE or IEEE?

Lessons from the Grand Bazar Rug Dealer

Dharmesh Shah recently visited Istanbul and here is his insights on business and customers treatment for start ups (or indeed anyone who is in business of developing and selling a product) from his experience with rug dealers.

1. Make your customer smarter
2. Focus on relationships, not transactions
3. Make it safe and easy to leave
4. Don't disparage the competition
5. Don't judge the customer

I was schooled and worked in my father's fabric shop in the Grand Bazar and Eminonu district for years. And all these elements applied in our small business too. Sometimes our competition was selling the same fabric to a lower price that we used to, but we had customers buying the fabric from us because of the relationship and trust that we have built with them.
In some cases we had a new customer buying for the first time from us for his new tailor store, and we use to give the guy a break and help him start with his new business. Then few years later the same guy whose first order was only 2.70 m of fabric was buying hundreds of meters as he has expanded his one shop and became a small manufacturer and referring other customers to us.

Indeed the joke was that the best MBA programs were offered in Eminonu and Grand Bazar districts where people learned real business

Infolust is new context search product from SystemOne

Infolust which is still in Alpha mode will provide context of the web pages or any text that one is searching. Infolust is another product coming out from SystemOne's lab.

Promise of Science to search Dutch doctoral theses

This site lets you search for over 10,000 doctoral e-theses in the Netherlands.

A new tool from IBM to analyze unstructured text

IBM's new Unstructured Information Modeler allows analyst automatically generate and edit taxonomies from unstructured text.

Nature and EMBO launch a new journal blog

Seven Stones is the blog of Molecular Systems Biology which is published by Nature and European Molecular Biology Organization The blog integrated Connotea and Pipe in their Quick links section too. Via BBMG

Deepak states why we need to have blogs with journals: "To me one of the biggest advantages of a blog associated with a journal is the ability to discuss journal content and relevant scientific content."

Google can do better than suggesting marijuana

Related search is a good concept but suggesting mail order marijuana as a related search for MOM
that's a bit far fetch....

Conde Nest Launches Portfolio

Portfolio is a neatly designed business magazine site but I did not think that it was going to have such a big effect in RE sales and gross operating income.

A new full-text search engine from major engineering societies

Barbara Quint from Information Today reports the expected launch of a new science and technology vertical portal called Scitopia.

Scitopia is a collaboration of 13 the major engineering societies which includes SAE. There might be more members coming in the future. The platform will be powered by Deep Web Technologies and use federated search technology. To see an existing Deep Web Tech implementation go to ScienceResearch and Science.Gov

In the press release Terry Hulbert from IOP states that " Scitopia will offer the most direct route to the most very latest research, within hours of it appearing on the web".

Does this mean that there is some "unhappiness" the way that Google Scholar is getting the information and displaying it with delays from these publishers?

This will be an interesting initiative to watch for A&I publishers like us and fee-based online information providers like Dialog. Nonetheless it's good for the market and customers of sci-tech research: now they will have another entry point besides Google Scholar and Microsoft Live Academic to access to limited aggregated scientific content for free.

Integrating content into workflow

John Blossom is reporting from SIIA Content Forum 2007. Here is his valuable insight from a panel on content integration into workflow where speakers included Bill Burger, VP of Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center; Sasha Gurke, SVP and Co-Founder of Knovel Corporation and Jim Reeves, SVP of New Product Development for Thomson RIA.

"....but I think that the key lesson I learned from this is that your product will benefit from thorough field research to understand your users' needs. I.T.-centric products that presume too much about the value of a current platform are likely to result in "workflow" solutions that may increase productivity on some level but are not necessarily truly integrated into the ways in which users really to their job. Workflow is a sword that can cut both ways: if you invest heavily in a tool that works well in a closed environment when your customers are looking for more open-ended workflow integration you may be finding your content locked in to a platform that will have a problem responding to competitors who can devise more horizontal integrations via widgets, mashups and other new technologies." Via Shore Online

If the "workflow solution" is not built on an open architecture and customer can't build on it or integrate it with another solution this ain't workflow solution in today's environment.

A new blog search engine using faceted search from NTT

I wish I had known Japanese to play with this new blog search engine Blogranger from NTT that supports "three types of blog search: topic, blogger and reputation search". A research paper describing the system is available here.

Biowizard gets funding from MentorTech

Biowizard which brings interactivity and Digg like features to bibliographic search gets funding from MentorTech Ventures.
""There is a significant demand in the biomedical research community for an interactive web community like BioWizard," stated Michael Aronson, managing director of MentorTech Ventures and BioWizard board member. "Thesite offers a unique combination of information and collaboration toolsthat are not otherwise available to scientists and physicians." PR Newswire

Open innovation and entity resolution

Spock is a new "people specific search engine" which is still in private beta . The company is using entity resolution for people search and now they are giving $50,000 and a job offer for anyone and team which can improve the entity resolution technology.

It will be very interesting if they can use their technology for all the authors, researchers and scientists in the scientific, technical and medical (STM) world.

Are we obsessed with busyness?

"So I should have been less surprised when my students talked about the negative perceptions associated with E2.0 [Enterprise 2.0] contributions. They were likely just relating how these contributions would have been seen in their former companies. In environments that value 'busyness' enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts can be seen as laggards, goof-offs, and people who don't have either enough to do or enough initiative to find more real work to do.

Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don't want to be seen as not busy enough.

And even if the leaders in such companies sincerely want to exploit the new tools and harness the collective intelligence of their people, they might have a tough time convincing the workforce that busyness is no longer the ne plus ultra. Corporate cultures move slowly and with difficulty, and it will take a lot more than a few memos, speeches, and company retreats to convince people that it's a smart career idea, rather than a poor one, to contribute regularly and earnestly to E2.0 platforms. "Via Andrew McAfee

Zotero + Zitgist= Better Navigation and Search for citations

If Zotero can be integrated into Zitgist solution it can be a very interesting application to search and navigate citations can work together it would be a very interesting application.

"In fact, such an initiative could have a deeper impact than only integrating a tool into an environment. It could certainly have an impact on how people are describing documents, citations and works. It could probably help people managing documents, creating and managing document portfolios, automatically generating bibliographic references, etc." via Frederick Giasson

A magazine that you can listen to

Blogger and Podcaster is a new magazine on blogging and podcasting. They are publishing it 3 format with 3 subcription options: print, digital and podcast. Joe Wikert has an interview with Larry Genkin who is the publisher of the magazine.

Music companies are looking for subscription model

Music and publishing industries can learn a lot from each other. It will be interesting to find out how the subscription model will work with ipod or other devices? What would happen if I don't want to get the subscription service from Universal? Will I still be able the download 1 or 2 songs? In our case we provide pay-per-views access to journal articles.

"Executives at Universal and other labels believe a subscription service could prove more lucrative for them than iTunes’ prevailing model of charging consumers 99 cents per track because it would increase consumption of music. It would also entitle the labels to a share of monthly payments, in addition to small licensing fees each time their songs are played."

The negotiations offer another example of the tensions between traditional media companies that create content and the technology groups that distribute it online. via FT

Benefits of opensource for entreprises

JP Rangaswami who is the CIO of Global Services for BT Group lists 10 reasons for using opensource in the entreprise"

"Opensource makes it easier for you to get married. When your architecture is primarily based on opensource components, software and data integration costs stay low and the process works.


Opensource makes you cleverer. You innovate faster because you have access to faster innovation. Whenever you look at an opensource ecosystem, try and compare it with a closed-source version. Compare it in terms of the time taken for launching in different countries, languages, whatever. I should say “try to compare it in terms of….”. There is no comparison".

FAST Company on Open Innovation and Collaboration

"Many [big companies] will survive, but they'll need to reinvent themselves to participate fully in this new interconnected, networked, decentralized world. Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) recently deployed 70 "technology entrepreneurs" around the world to look for "not invented here" ideas. It has figured out that for every one of its 7,500 in-house scientists, there are 200 more around the globe--some 1.5 million total--who are just as advanced. Ideas flowing the opposite way can have disruptive power too: Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT), the old-line maker of heavy equipment, now sees itself as an "intellectual-property company." It has begun to aggressively license its copyrights and 7,000 patents to unlock their value.

Those are promising strategies. The more a company opens itself up to engage with the outside world, the better its chances. In this new era, scale won't guarantee viability in the face of massively interconnected customers, suppliers, and competitors. But all of those scientists and employees can do amazing things if they connect with what's happening outside your walls. John Nike won't know what hit him." via Allan Deutschman's article in Wired

Publishing CEOs blogmenting on the future of reference books

While corporations are "brainstorming" to create guidelines on how to blog , when to blog or who should blog or is there any value in this blogging stuff, CEOs of three publishing companies Richard Charkin (MacMillan/Nature) , Karen Christensen (Berkshire Group), John Dove
(xRefer) are discussing the future of reference books in Tim Coates
post. The commenting that is going on here is a great example of how one can use blogs. Heads off to these folks to find the time and the will to blogment ( to comment in a blog) this topic.

Correction: Richard, Karen and John, a colleague of mine brought to my attention this unintentional language mistake: I don't have any intention to harm you or decapitate you. I meant hats off to you all. Thanks Joe.

Google and Holocaust Memorial Museum partnership to visualize the atrocities in Darfur.

"The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth." via USHHM

"Educating today's generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth. When it comes to responding to genocide, the world's record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most." Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, USHMM

Jakob Nielsen on breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs is good for online navigation. Implement it and you'll delight the users...

• Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
• Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page. (via AlertBox)
  

Can DOIs help linking issues in blogs and wikis?

John Udell's podcast with Geoffrey Bilder who is the director of strategic initiatives for CrossRef.

Get a taste of what search may look in the next 5 years.

DBpedia has great examples of how search should answer real questions like show me the names of soccer players with shirt number 11 from clubs which have stadiums that hold more than 40,000 seats and born in a country with more than 10 million population. DBPedia gets the content from Wikipedia and is using semantic web technologies. The solution is a collaboration of Universitat Leipzig, Open Link Software and Freie Univesitat Berlin. You can also easily modify the queries. Once the search syntaxes are are simplified there is a great potential for this type of technologies. You'll get an answer to your questions!

While Reed Elsevier Evolves, is Samuel Zell trying to change the online news business

Times has a story about Reed Elsevier and our CEO Sir Crispin Davis. The writer got it right when s/he states where we are moving in our business units:

"The unlovely jargon for this is “workflow solutions”. " The workflow revolution is set to turn Reed Elsevier into more of a software and services company".

I strongly believe that authoritative content plus software and services which will solve customers' business questions will be key for our success. Just being an information provider will not fly any more.

I could not agree more with Crispin Davis when he says that " this is a very good company in a fascinating market going through a real period of change."

Will this change come from Samuel Zell who is a real-estate magnet and who recently spent billions to buy a media company when he stated that "if all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be? ........ "Not very."

Ok, Google is not stealing content but are all the publishers getting the share that they are supposed to get or are they leaving some money on the table to Google because we are concentrating only on the links that Google is sending us?

Made by Monkeys

Electronics Weekly's blog provides some funny and practical examples of bad design for engineers.

Here is an example of bad LEDs fading away...., how to avoid this? Here is one suggestion:

"Georg Bogner, Director, Visible LED Engineering at OSRAM, stresses that engineers should be demanding their vendors to, 'Show me the data.'" via Made By Monkeys

Here is the oldest record that we have in Engineering Village indexed under LED
Integrated optical tamper sensor

PeerWisdom: Wisdom of crowd for health information

Seattle based company is currently in development to provide answers to health information seekers. I like the way that they list (they can't mention the name) their new VP of technology.

ABCs of collaborative innovation from IBM

IBM report (pdf) highlights ABCs of collaborative innovation within and extended entreprise

• Alignment

• Boundaries

• Commitment

The study finds that on 17% of CEO were relying in their R&D team for innovation. Employees, business partners and customers were ranked at the top for sources of innovation. The report also finds that 50% of strategic alliances fail.

If you need your logo flip-flopping on concrete get a light transmitting concrete

Litracon is a combination of optical fibres and fine concrete. It was invented by Hungarian architect Áron Losonczi in 2001.

Here is what we have on Litracon in Compendex

Transparenter Beton macht Furore (Transparent concrete causing a sensation)

Bring in 'Da Collaboration

This is what we'll be hearing in the next couple years in the corporate and academic and government world.

Harvard hosted a seminar on social tagging end of March and some of the presentations are available online here and here

Samsung is asking for your ideas

Another example of bringing customers into the R&D process and pitch your ideas

Scribd and Publishers

Scribd looks like the YouTube for documents. It would be interesting to see how the STM publishing community will deal with this new company when the copyrighted scientific papers

start showing up in this new platform. May be few of them will take the CBS view of YouTube

Social bookmarking within corporations

Collaboration is one of the ingredients of working efficiently within the company's firewalls. IBM has been developing their dogear social bookmarking (pdf) system for corporations. I am not sure if they have released this product yet but it looks interesting. Meanwhile Honeywell is taking the lead and piloting a social bookmarking system developed by Connectbeam to connect their knowledge workers more efficiently and increase knowledge sharing and discovery. Indeed as many large companies, we need something similar for Reed Elsevier.