I've just started using 2Collab, Elsevier's free social bookmarking tool, and I'm contemplating a switch from delicious. The service officially came out of beta Tuesday.
Besides storing and organizing your bookmarks on 2Collab, you can share them with others in public and private groups - which delicious doesn't allow. Members of groups can also rate, comment and tag your bookmarks, or contribute bookmarks to their own groups. This makes finding people with similar interests much easier than on delicious, which only relies on tags to achieve the same purpose.
I've imported my bookmarks from delicious and Connotea and so far, it has been working like a charm. There's also a Firefox extension that allows you to go to your 2Collab bookmark list or post a new bookmark with single click. If you are a Scopus author, you can also import your articles using your ID.
In addition, you can sort your tags according to when you last used them, in alphabetical order or frequency of use. When you choose to view all bookmarks with a certain tag, you can also see other associated tags. Oh, you can also create metadata for your bookmarks - journal article, conference paper, web document, DOI number, ISBN etc.
In future, Elsevier will also integrate bookmarks with other Elsevier products – such as ScienceDirect, Scopus, Engineering Village, The Lancet and Cell Press. So, for example, on ScienceDirect, you will be able to see comments, ratings and tags posted by 2Collab users for relevant journal articles. By the end of this week, they're releasing an API for developers to create mashups from 2Collab.
While I like 2Collab's interface, there's one drawback: you can't group tags into bundles, unlike delicious. Bundling is an important mechanism to imbue some taxonomy-like structure into folksonomy, which will most likely remain flat. This will allow for the aggregation of disparate tags into more meaningful groups.
According to this email I received today, Red Hat has announced their public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the Amazon EC2 computing cloud.
"Beginning Monday, November 26, customers can purchase a subscription to the supported BETA for $19 per month and deploy instances at hourly rates of $0.21, $0.53, and $0.94 per hour for small, large and extra-large instances respectively. These hourly fees are inclusive of hourly instance fees from Amazon; however, additional fees for bandwidth ($0.11 per GB of data in and $0.19 per GB of data transfer out), and data storage on S3 (at Amazon published rates) apply.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is the same technology available under an annual subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but has been made available as multiple Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Infrastructure. Initially, we're releasing AMIs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and will add new AMIs for access by subscribers as they become available.
We've certified and tested the released AMIs within the Amazon EC2 environment, and will provide an email-based support to subscribers for the public beta. While the software is well proven, we anticipate modifications to the deployment models and use-cases during the beta period and will refine the delivery of our services throughout the beta period.
We're happy to be part of the cloud and look forward to working with you during this beta."
Sounds like a good deal, and it's worth checking out if you are looking at getting some server space on the cloud. Much has been written about cloud computing lately, first with Amazon's partnership with Red Hat, followed by a similar initiative by IBM earlier this month.
Cloud computing, I think, is the next evolutionary step for the utility computing model as businesses face mounting costs in power consumption, though it requires confidence on the part of corporations to place their data on the cloud. If you're jittery about security (no thanks to past security lapses by Salesforce.com) or are a control freak, then cloud computing may not be the right solution for you.
This library ad by the New Jersey Library Network is one of the best I've ever seen. The commercial, which promotes the library's 24/7 digital reference service, was shown on MTV on September 9 this year. During a recent OCLC webinar, New Jersey librarian Beth Cackowski told the audience that usage of the service increased by 50 percent on the night of the broadcast. During the following month, service usage was up 20 percent. How cool is that?
Oh, that guy in the car asked for "lyrics to the new Green Day song", I wonder what kinds of questions the librarians received that night...
I've never liked calling up Apple's PR. In fact, they hardly do any PR at all, apart from showing off their latest iPods and Macs. There was never once when I got an answer for industry pieces, like this one on offering developers native access to the iPhone. "No comment" seems to be the favorite PR tagline for trend stories. The reason: "Apple can only comment on products".
In this video posted on Valleywag, a British journalist asked an Apple exec about iTunes' monopoly in music downloads for the iPhone.
"Apple's PR people jump in and try to end the interview, saying how they're excited about the iPhone and want to stay focused. The problem? Their body language betrays them. This is why Apple is really screwed if it ever loses Steve Jobs: He's the only guy at Apple who can actually pull off this act and handle the press convincingly while parroting the party line. Everyone else at Apple who's even allowed to speak to reporters just ends up looking robotically defensive when they try to erect a Jobsian reality-distortion field."
I know that guy must have been briefed to only talk about the iPhone - and nothing else - but the journo's question wasn't entirely irrelevant. Shouldn't Apple at least try to provide some "high-level" answer, or is Steve Jobs the only one who is qualified enough to comment on industry questions? What do you think?
Stumbled upon this app that determines the reading level of your blog. I'm not sure how it works - there isn't any information on the algorithm it uses.
I decided to look for similar tests like this and found a site that assesses your blog's readability based on the Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid reading level algorithms. Reading level algorithms only provide a rough guide, as they tend to reward short sentences made up of short words. Whilst they're rough guides, they can give a useful indication as to whether you've pitched your content at the right level for your intended audience.
I put my blog through the test and got the following results:
Interpreting the results
The Gunning-Fog Index
A rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.
Flesch Reading Ease
This is an index number that rates the text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. Authors are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.
Flesch-Kincaid grade level
A rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. Negative results are reported as zero, and numbers over twelve are reported as twelve.
Oops, it seems that I'm way off in the Flesch Reading Ease index!
A Slashdot post today pointed me to a Microsoft Research project called MyLifeBits. In 1945, Vannevar Bush came up with his Memex vision of including full-text search, text and audio annotations, and hyperlinks. His concepts are manifested with the advent of the Web in various ways today.
What MyLifeBits does is to take that vision to a personal level, where everything about your life is stored, indexed and retrieved, for you make sense of whenever you need, however you want. The brains behind the project is renowned computer scientist Gordon Bell.
Wearing a device called a SenseCam, Bell has captured a life story comprising articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
SenseCam contains a sensor that can detect where Bell has been to, and capture his surroundings. He also has a portable GPS device that constantly transmits his location to his digital archive. That works in tandem with the camera to log an exact record of every photograph. The objective is not just to capture all that information about your life. The end game is for all that information to undergo permanent, invisible analysis.
If you've read Everything is Miscellaneous, you would know that every bit is a node in the endless connections we make our of lives. "It is impossible to know what will be required in the future," Bell told Fox News recently in this story. "Furthermore, recording everything allows one item to be used to find another item that may have been created at the same time."
For this to work, however, we'll have to annotate every bit of our life. A majority of our digital photos are neither captioned nor tagged and it would seem awfully tedious to go through this whole process at the end of each day. Microsoft's approach to making more annotation happen is to allow annotation at the moment the user feels like it, in the mode they feel like using. An example of this is by using audio annotations where you can surf the Web and just speak whenever you want to annotate the Web page you're looking at. How this will manifest in other situations and information environments is still anybody's guess.
Time pivoting will also allow you to bring together bits of your life connected through time and space.
Microsoft says: "Suppose Gordon has a telephone conversation with his real estate agent, and she tells him to look at the web page of a comparable property. He views it while they discuss it. A few months later, he wants to look at this page again. But a search for "home" or "real estate" gets way too many hits. So, he looks up his real estate agents contact entry, and finds the recorded telephone call that has been linked to this contact based on the number in caller-ID. Gordon has recorded this call, so he could listen to it again, but he doesn't need to: he can just ask MyLifeBits what overlaps with this call in time and find the web page (which he has a copy of, even though it is no longer on the web, the house being sold).
All these sound messy, but life's a mess anyway.
I've just received my invitation to participate in a private beta for lifestrea.ms, a new social web aggregator. The service was previously called YoWhassup!, but its German creators decided to change it to lifestrea.ms because of some connotations associated with the earlier name. So far, the service looks promising:
"lifestrea.ms brings together all kinds of things that you and your social network create on the web in one place. There you decide who sees what. You can share and re-publish your contents and even add additional texts and media from your lifestrea.ms dashboard. To make sharing your life easier, lifestrea.ms breaks down your social life into seven of the most important parts: public, family, friends, local, professional, romantic and secret. You have one fully adjustable profile for each of your networks. The same way you share your life with others, your network contacts share their life with you. To keep you in the loop, you can even read your newsfeeds ('cause these are written by people you follow) and your emails ('cause these are people that contact you) from inside your dashboard. Staying on top of what's going on has never been more effortless, so come and join today and start communicating with all your friends, family and colleagues in a new way."
At first sight, lifestre.ms looks like any other aggregator like Flock and Multiply. However, the best part of lifestrea.ms is this:
"As lifestrea.ms stores information about what you read, what you post and what you communicate, we are able to enhance this data semantically and generate a stream of attention data for each of your profiles from this. That way you have a continuously updated APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) file on each of your profile pages. By using all these open standards you as a user have full control over your data and you as a developer can build new applications on top of this.
Lifestrea.ms even enables users for the first time to practice the vision of a Portable Social Network and the Open Social Graph (not to be compared with the widget-only Google OpenSocial). But we don't calculate your APML only for external purposes. It's also in heavy use inside your dashboard. From your attention data we calculate what newsfeeds have a high priority for you, what new topics could be of interest for you and what people you should get to know, 'cause they are heading for the same things. We suggest feeds, topics and people (anonymously) to you as soon as we find them in your - you guessed it - live dashboard."
So far, I haven't received many useful feeds from the limited tagging and voting on the items that stream into my dashboard, but I'm expecting it to get better as I go along. Let me know if you want to try this out, I'll send you an invite.
WebCite is a new Web archival service for Web references used in scholarly articles and books. Authors increasingly cite Web pages which can "disappear" overnight. The problem of unstable Web citations has recently been recently referred to as an issue "calling for an immediate response" by publishers and authors.
The service is entirely free for authors, regardless of what publication they are writing for (even if the journal/publisher authors are writing for are not yet listed as members. According to WebCite, an author can do this in two ways:
* Either manually initiate the archiving of a single cited webpage (by using either the WebCite bookmarklet or the archive page) and manually insert a citation to the permanently archived Web document on webcitation.org in his/her manuscript, or;
* Upload an entire citing manuscript to the WebCite server via the comb page, which initiates the WebCite tool to comb through the manuscript and to archive all cited non-journal URLs. The WebCite software also replaces all URLs in the manuscript with a link to the permanently archived Web document on webcitation.org.
In its FAQ page, WebCite alleviates concerns that it may disappear overnight. Ultimately, the service will be owned and operated by a consortium of publishers, who together have a vested interest in keeping this initiative alive.
You may wonder how this compares to existing archival initiatives such as Internet Archive or even Google's cache. These, however, do not always archive academic articles and caching cannot be initiated by authors wanting to archive a specific web reference as they saw it on a specific date when they quoted it.
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. There are just too many broken links in journals that I've been reading lately. To someone who has to use Google all the time to get the latest URL for an article that's written in 1999, WebCite is a godsend!
Kevin Lim, a fellow Singaporean doing his PhD at SUNY Buffalo's School of Informatics, speaks with some UB librarians on their use of social tools such as YouTube, Facebook, Meebo, wikis and an interactive search tutorial in information literacy training.
Update
While I was exploring UB's wiki on searching tips, however, it made me wonder why use wikis at all when the library probably isn't going to allow students to edit any content. Even if a student wants to, he or she can't do it because there isn't an edit button. This defeats the purpose of using a wiki whose defining feature is to facilitate collaboration. I imagine a wiki being useful for subject guides where students can post resources that librarians may have missed. UB could have put up a similar page on search tips using their existing content management system. I suspect a wiki was used simply because content can be more easily managed.
Joe Janes, associate dean of the iSchool at the University of Washington gave a remarkable keynote that perfectly captures the state of the library profession during the Internet Librarian conference last week. It beats the "we shouldn't let technology take over us" keynote at the recent NYLA conference anytime.
Here are my favorite snippets of the transcript posted by Erica Reynolds on her blog:
The changing face of reference
“The primary motivation for helping people find information is that there is too much information and people find it difficult to find it—so we should step in to help them.” A (relatively accurate) quote from a librarian from Massachusetts in 1876.
Fast forward to 2007: Now, there is a lot of stuff, and people CAN find it. And there are lots of ways to get help. Reference was developed for a world where people couldn’t find something they needed. Traditional reference isn’t going to work in this environment.
We have to change our thinking about reference. In so doing, it’s worth assuming that everything eventually will be in digital form. For example, Google Book Search’s ultimate goal is to have all the books. All. Not just in English. Not just in America. All. All the music. It’s an ever-more digital world. And we have very different ways of searching all this information—for example, a father sitting with his daughter flipping tv stations—but her goal wasn’t to pick one show, but to watch all the channels at once.
With digitized information, we have lots of ways to get at information—at article level, at stanza level, caption level, etc… horizontal searching and federated searching across everything. That’s a very different information environment. We were trained to find whole things. Now it’s more about finding parts and wholes.
How do we insert reference into this new world? Blogs, wikis, podcasts? Yes. They don’t have to be on your library’s site. Take over other places. We can overtake wikipedia. If you’re not writing Wikipedia articles, don’t bitch about it. (I've been peeved lately by academics who keep bitching incessantly about Wikipedia)
How librarians can fit in
Don’t worry about all the other worlds and information that we’re not working with. Google is doing a good job already. “Stop chasing things you can’t catch.” You can think about this niching as a limiting factor or a focus. Let’s look at it as a focus. We have done different types of reference in different settings before. Levels of service—this is something we’ve always been taught. It’s a recognition of how we fit best in this environment.
Get out of the freakin’ library. Wait. Stay in. You have to be in and out. What you really have to be is somewhere and everywhere. As every library should be. You have to be somewhere—the place for the storyhour, the AA meeting, to have a place to read the paper, the third space, you are a social, community, study, discussion space. AND you have to be everywhere else, too. What that is, is the concept of the library leaking out of the building. The concept of the library is so much bigger than the building it lives in.
For the tendril people-the people who are extremely connected-you have to help them tend the network. Individually and collectively, librarians need to be on these networks –to participate, to show them what can be done, to help. Not in a “hey, the library’s better” kinda way, but just being a role model, and evolving new reference practice. How to do great reference librarianship in these interconnected worlds: I don’t know—the younger librarians need to figure it out—and tell everyone else how. For all those younger librarians who keep hearing “no” –you’re probably right, but be patient. Work with the older librarians. Remind yourself that there are things that are interesting that occurred before 2003. Librarianship has a rich history, and what has happened in the past can teach us now. Work together. It’s not younger librarians against older librarians. Or vise versa. We have to work together.
Finally, for the people who are not information users, leave them alone. You don’t need to chase users.
For all those people who are looking for information, market yourself as a time saver, as a money saver. Save busy people time and money. People don’t think of us as able to do these things. They think of us in little pigeon holes. We have symphonies to give them, but if they only hear one note, that’s all they look for.
Unveil your secret weapon
What do we do about print? For now, it’s our secret weapon, and we have incredible richness and depth in our print resources. (We shouldn’t let it stay secret we should tell people.) In the future, it will be less and less of a strategic advantage. The role of print will steadily decrease. But remember: “Method over material.”
Thanks to Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation and blogger for the O'Reily Radar, I found out about an awesome API created by the NCSU Libraries that exposes catalog data for its developers to create extended library applications. NCSU is already known for its decision to embrace Endeca's information access platform that is also used by Wal-Mart, ABN Amro and IBM.
Called CatalogWS, the API builds upon the idea that the catalog should serve as a platform on which new services can be built, essentially freeing information from monolithic cataloging systems that still exist in many libraries today.
For the technically inclined, "CatalogWS is implemented as a RESTful Web API on top of NCSU's Endeca catalog index. Requests are processed via HTTP GET protocol. Responses as returned in a content-rich custom XML format, or in popular output formats such as RSS and OpenSearch. The API supports a 'style' parameter that enables XSL transformed responses using a supplied stylesheet."
This is a move beyond the “one-size-fits-all” approach to catalog discovery. It makes it easier to reuse and repurpose catalog data outside the ILS/OPAC, and to build catalog interfaces optimized for different use contexts.
So far, several applications have been or are being built with the API, including OpenSearch compatibility, RSS feeds for search terms and a mobile search interface. I think the mobile interface has the potential to become an interesting 3G application in countries where the infrastructure is fully available.
Living in the US for the past three months has done me some good. It made me better appreciate a lot of things I used to have back home, not just home cooked food and other tangible things. It also made me appreciate the cultural diversity that I've been exposed to for the last 28 years of my life.
We know Singapore is a rojak culture (to my American friends, it's a Singlish term that means a melting pot, or mosaic culture depending on how you see it). Up to a fifth of the people in the country are foreigners at any one point, and many of us are so used to seeing foreigners everywhere we go, sometimes even living right in next to us in our public housing neighborhoods.
Before I came to Syracuse, I met with an American professor who got his PhD from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Communication and is now teaching at my alma mater in Singapore. We had an interesting conversation about life here.
"People are going to find you exotic," he said. "Hmm, exotic? You mean along the lines of snake charmers?," I replied. I laughed it off and didn't think much about it until recently.
Last weekend, I was at a local MacDonald's for lunch. A man came up to me and asked me where I'm from. I said Singapore, and he assumed it was in China and greeted me "Ni Hao".
I replied: "Hi, how are you doing? What makes you think I speak Chinese? Singapore is not in China you know?"
"Oh, I didn't know that," he said, looking visibly embarrassed.
I had similar encounters in India and Sri Lanka where I presumably looked exotic to the local people going by the stares I get while walking in the streets. In Japan, I don't get stares of course, but I had a Japanese shop assistant asking me if I was a chugokujin, which refers to a Chinese national.
As Singaporeans, we take diversity for granted, sometimes without realizing it. It has never dawned on me to look at a Caucasian in Singapore and immediately assume he is British. I just didn't grow up thinking that way.
In a globalized world, race is not a very good indicator of one's cultural identity. I could well be a Malaysian, Thai or Indonesian, Chinese by race, and not speak Chinese at all. We have some Chinese Singaporeans who can't speak Chinese. There are American Chinese who can't speak Chinese. What makes that man at MacDonald's think I understand what Ni Hao means?
I know what he means of course, thanks to our bilingual education system. This is a privilege that we also take for granted. In this month's issue of American Libraries, editor Leonard Kniffel remarked:
"Debates over bilingual education and companion library collections is healthy, but we should be asking ourselves why so many children grow up in America speaking only one language. We should all be learning English--and Spanish and Chinese and Arabic as well. The capacity of children to become not only bilingual, but multilingual diminishes with each passing year of their education."
Despite all our rants about Singapore, you have to hand it to LKY for his foresight.
A study commissioned by the Canadian government found that there is no direct relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchases in Canada. If any, P2P file sharing actually increases CD purchasing.
"In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing sub-population suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year."
This study dovetails with what Lawrence Lessig said in Free Culture:
"The idea that free content might increase the value of nonfree content was confirmed by the experience of another author. Peter Wayner, who wrote a book about the free software movement titled Free for All, made an electronic version of his book free on-line under a Creative Commons license after the book went out of print.He then monitored used book store prices for the book. As predicted, as the number of downloads increased, the used book price for his book increased, as well."
What does this tell us about the draconian things content owners do to protect their intellectual property while causing endless grief to legitimate users at the same time? The Internet is undergoing changes, and there is no point regulating any technology in transition. Did anyone think we should have banned the sale of digital cameras because they posed a threat to photofilm producers?
The network information environment today transcends across multiple industries. The present music and movie industries are just examples of the incumbents in the industrial economy who feel threatened. Ensuing battles with continue in software, outsourcing, media, libraries, telecommunications, just to name a few.
How these battles play out, as Yochai Benkler noted, will impact how we come to know what's going on in the world we occupy, and to what extent and what forms we will be able-as autonomous individuals, as citizens, as participants in cultures and communities-to affect how we and others see the world as it is and as it might be.
The Microsoft-Yale project will initially focus on the digitization of 100,000 out-of-copyright English-language books, which will then become available to readers through Microsoft’s Live Search interface. Here are some excepts from the press statement released Tuesday.
"The Library and Microsoft have selected Kirtas Technologies to carry out the process based on their proven excellence and state-of-the art equipment. The Library has successfully worked with Kirtas previously, and the company will establish a digitization center in the New Haven area.
Yale University Library holds unique collections of enduring research value and is digitizing many of its special collections including manuscripts, archival documents, maps, photographs, audio and visual materials, rare works of art, and slides used for teaching and research at the University. Hundreds of thousands of items have already been digitized from the holdings of the Visual Resources Collection, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, Manuscripts and Archives, the Medical Historical Library, and other libraries and collections. Many of these are now available to the global research community beyond Yale."
The technology blogosphere is abuzz with discussions on Google's OpenSocial project, which provides developers a set of APIs to create applications that operate across multiple social networking sites. A leaked press statement that will be released Thursday has indicated that sites such as Orkut (obviously), LinkedIn, Friendster and Marc Andreessen's Ning have signed up to be part of the game. Oracle and software-as-a-service giant Salesforce.com are in the picture too. Some see this as Google's effort to bring pitch Orkut in a better position against Facebook.
The APIs don't require developers to use proprietary markup language like Facebook's FBML. Rather, applications are created with standard HTML and JavaScript-a boon to developers who can easily reuse some of their front end code without having to learn a new language. Notwithstanding, there is a key question that needs to be answered: how will Oracle and Salesforce fit in? What kind of apps are suitable for both consumer oriented social networking sites and enterprise 2.0 platforms? I doubt many IT shops will allow a Friendster app to show up on their internal social networking sites. And even then, there's the security aspect that needs to be addressed.
