Playing with Zlango

Wiley gets a new life at SecondLife

Congratulations to Wiley with their experiment in SecondLife by hosting an author event for the book they published on SecondLife. I am wondering if the island has the view of Manhattan similar to their Hoboken office. via Joe Wikert

Social software services and challenges (or opportunities) for traditional peer review process

In this very interesting post Dario Taraborelli introduces "soft evaluation" concept:

"Traditional peer review has been criticised on various grounds but possibly the major limitation it currently faces is scalability, i.e. the ability to cope with an increasingly large number of submissions, which—given the limited number of available reviewers and time constraints on the publication cycle—results in a relative small acceptance rate for high quality journals. Although I don’t think social software will ever replace hard evaluation processes such as traditional peer review, I suspect that soft evaluation systems(as those made possible by social software) will soon take over in terms of efficiency and scalability" via David Weinberger

Publishers here is an opportunity from the "voice of customer"

Matt McAlister is giving an excellent idea for a new magazine:

"This magzine should be printed monthly with lots of possibilities online that may actually be more successful in the long term. (I can imagine the print magazine turning into a sort of marketing vehicle for the web site. )

It includes longer deep-dive articles that have been throughly researched and copyedited. The editors are paid very well because they are experienced and talented. It also includes samples from the blogosphere and insights from contributors and participants who care deeply about the subject. There are intelligent interviews of people who are innovating and actually doing important things. There are insightful case studies of both the methods and results of certain technology breakthroughs. And there are columns that remind us to keep it real."

Eploratory Search and Faceted Search

Some great examples from mspace team which is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

AdaptiveBlue gets funding from Union Square Ventures

AdaptiveBlue gets funding from USV which is few blocks away from our office. AdaptiveBlue is "working towards the vision of a personalized Web, where consumers own their information and choose to open it to web sites and services in order to get personalized recommendations, personalized alerts, personalized news, personalized shopping and personalized search. You can read more about our thoughts on the Attention Economy here."

I have tried using AdaptiveBlue but so far I haven't seen anything interesting besides just linking to some other sites. I agree with their vision and probably we will see some more interesting application coming in their new version. Indeed their vision reminds me of Xerox's Document Souls project too.

Collex releases NINES with many interesting features

Collex launches NINES "Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship" which is " a federation of peer-reviewed resources and innovative research tools, made freely available to students and scholars of 19th-century culture" where users can collaborate, search, tag, annotate text and images

Collex "builds on semantic web technologies and brings folksonomy tagging to trusted, peer-reviewed scholarly archives. Its exhibits-builder is analogous to high-end digital curation tools currently affordable only to large (offline) museums and galleries.
via Dan Cohen

TechStreet launches a new redesigned site

Thomson launches a new design of TechStreet via Keith Instone

Create your own streaming media channel using Splashcast

Google once again takes the lead to promote National Engineers Week

We missed it again, we should give all the credit to Google who is doing a lot of better job promoting -what we should have been doing- and sparking interest among children for science and engineering.

University of Texas Health Science Center deploys semantic web platform

"UT-Houston's SAPPHIRE system facilitates bio-surveillance and symptom trending by enabling SAPPHIRE team members to take advantage of Semantic Web capabilities to integrate and manage myriad data from a variety of sources. UT-Houston built its SAPPHIRE architecture using Oracle's Resource Description Framework (RDF) Data Model, a feature of Oracle Spatial 10g, an option to Oracle Database 10g, integrated with TopQuadrant's TopBraid Composer." via Sys-Con

Chinese New Year and helping Chinese children in rural China

Sunday I went to China Town with the kids to celebrate the Chinese New Year's festivities. We all enjoyed all the fire crackers and dragons. The kids were a bit scared when we got in a big crowd mele but overall we all had a good time in a freezing weather.

Talking about freezing weather and China, my good friend Rich Hoeg is dedicating his marathon run and raising money for children education in rural China. It is a very interesting personal story . Check it out his post and if you can, sponsor him in his run. Like Rich, I have been fascinated with the potential in China specifically for scientific publishing and online product development opportunities in education, research, and mobile. Indeed I have been talking to my kids that one of these days we should move to China....

OpenURL and Digital Archiving

John Udell (now with Microsoft) interviews Dan Chudnov (Yale University) and Tony Hammond (Nature) on OpenURL, DOIs and related issues.

"I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with — persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis — are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals." via John Udell

Is there a hint here that Microsoft can be moving to digital archiving similar to Amazon?

Some positive feedback to our tagging feature

An Ole from a Spaniard for the Tagging and Groups feature:


"Constituye una innovación importante, sobre todo por la filosofía subyacente, que hace entroncar a un servicio comercial de información científica con las métodos de la web social y con los modos de comunicación más libres (Flickr, Del.icio.us, Connotea). Es también un guiño a los usuarios, una entrega de poder al consumidor."

"Es una iniciativa interesante sin duda. Lo más significativo es que muestra la voluntad y capacidad de los grandes sistemas comerciales de información científico-técnica, históricos diríamos, de competir con las formas emergentes de comunicación y con los grandes buscadores abiertos al público y sufragados con publicidad." via Observatorio de Martinej


It constitutes an important innovation, mainly by the underlying philosophy, that brings to a commercial service of scientific information the methods of the social Web and the freer ways of communication (Flickr, Del.icio.us, Connotea). It is also a wink to the users....

"It is an interesting initiative without a doubt. Most significantly it shows the will and capacity of the big scientific and technical commercial platforms, historical we would say, to compete with the emergent forms of communication and the big public search engines ....."

Accenture study shows that majority of information obtained in the workplace is useless

"Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50 percent of the information they obtain has no value to them. In addition, only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs."

Here is one of the pain points for knowledge workers:

"More than half (57 percent) of respondents said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs. In order to get information about competitors, customers, project responsibility or another department, respondents said they have to go to three different information sources, on average. In addition, 40 percent of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information, and 36 percent said there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data"

More on study at Accenture

via Maggie Sacco

Experiment and Learn

This was one of the messages that I gave yesterday to our sales team in San Diego where we had North America Academic and Government Sales Kick Off meeting.

Today's launch of Tags and Groups in Engineering Village is an example of this for Elsevier.

Another example of testing is going on at Honeywell. It seems that forward looking senior managers agreed to pilot a tagging and social networking project. If they are successful in proving that these tools will "help drive faster and better engineering design" this will be a big coup for Honeywell in improving collaboration within the company and social networking vendors like Connectbeam which transformed itself within two years.

Folksonomy meets taxonomy: Introducing Tags & Groups in Engineering Village

Our indexers have been "tagging" free language terms for years for Compendex now it's time to test and add to this a bottom up indexing from users. Go ahead and tag any record in Engineering Village.

Our new release with Tags and Groups feature is live and we might be the first abstract & index database (subscription) who is taking the "indexing" to the next level.

Here is the tag clouds which are currently being generated from our free language terms in Compendex database.
















Users will be able to tag records for public, private, their institution and for their groups too. We also suggesting terms when you add a tag.













Our tech team has done a great job putting this release out.

With this release you'll see some major enhancements for Referex Engineering books too. Finally you don't need to download the whole book to read a page.

We are running training sessions for the new release. Our training manager Gali Halevi will show you how you can leverage tagging and groups feauture within your organization.

Go check the new release of Engineering Village and don't forget sending us your feedback.

Will Xerox PARC and Powerset solve the search problem?

I do hope so! Powerset and PARC signed an exclusive deal to develop and commercialize a new consumer search engine using natural language search technology.

Barbie and open access debate

The debate between government-funded research results is getting interesting. It's time for the GTA to take a position on this (no blood please). William Walsh has more insights on this.

How technology is changing teaching

If students are expecting to see a show in the classroom, we may want to look into video gaming industry and learn some tricks to make online search products an interactive learning experience and fun.

Oracle goes Semantic with Siderean

Oracle released their Oracle Technology Network in a new skin using semantic web technology and some cool AJAX UIs. The system is powered by Siderean. This is a well deserved accomplishment for Brad Allen, Michael Schmitt & company from the early days of BPAllen Technologies to powering Oracle's system.

Yahoo Pipes need Ilan Marco

I love the humor too. It's all plumbing

Google says: Don't throw the TV away

""The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress." via Haaretz

Knowledge Management Challanges within Corporations

It's not surprise that one of the main problems faced in the corporations is to manage and locate the knowledge within the company. Henry Story from Sun highlights 3 main problems:

"Large companies such as Sun Microsystems have a number of knowledge management needs. Plain text search engines can help find documents by searching through keywords in document content. The problem is that

1. This can return a huge number of documents
2. The keywords the user is thinking of may not be the right ones
3. The things searched for may not be text documents – they could be pictures, people or things"

1. 
   

One of the solutions that he is proposing is tagging and wiki implementation within the corporate wall. No wonder why IBM also is diving into this arena.

Opportunities for growths in the wake of disruption

is this year's NFAIS 2007 Annual Conference theme. No doubt that Google and Microsoft have changed the way that our users are accessing to our content. But one thing that I have been hearing from end users is that there is a love and hate relationship with Google when they look for information in Google, hence more opportunities for content producers....
In the past few years we had Google members in this conference courting publishers to include their content in their index and showing the benefit of being indexed by Google. Personally I am all for the publishers to include their content where their users start their search. It would be interesting to see if any representative from Google or Microsoft will attend this year's meeting. If you are looking how to register, here is their online registration .

I am looking forward to meet and hear the final key note speaker Tony Hey who is the Corporate VP for Technical Computing with Microsoft.

Collaboration and Innovation between universities and corporations

ibridge is an excellent initiative from Kauffman Foundation via Frederik Questier

RSC enriching the user experience of online research articles

The aim of the new initiative called Project Prospect is "to make the science within RSC journal articles machine-readable through semantic enrichment - the integration of metadata into text. " This is right direction for any publisher to make their online research journals more interactive and enrich them with text mining and use of ontologies. RSC has partnered with The Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics to start up this project.

Tagging matters

If you are an online publisher and still thinking if there is a value of deploying tagging feature on your online offerings (or your company's intranet) read the latest Pew Research report which shows that 28% of online Americans are tagging content.

Kind of peer-review certification for finance bloggers

Seeking Alpha introduces Certification and Author selection for contributing bloggers in its network. Can this be extended to other verticals like engineering, health and can we publisher do this? Yes...... via Michael Eisenberg