UK Library Folk

Limiting Google results to seconds!

philipbradley — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:26:40 -0800

Let's face it - the 'Recent' option on Google results is great, but if you're looking for really recent material, you don't have much control over it. At least, until now. A nice post over at SearchEngineLand explains how you can limit your results to data that Google has added as recently as the last second or so. This is how you do it:

Run your search, and then add &tbs=qdr:X##&tbo=1 right at the end of the URL, with no spaces - let it run straight on. BUT before you try the search, you need to change the X## element, so if you want a search for material added in the last 5 seconds, change that to s5 or n5 for the number of minutes of h5 for 5 hours.

Why It's a Bad Idea to Send Huge Files by Email

philipbradley — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:27:47 -0800

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Why It's a Bad Idea to Send Huge Files by Email. Gmail has increased the maximum attachment size to 25 MB in June, but some people want to send larger files. Daniel (at Google) wrote a thoughtful comment that explains why it's a bad idea to send huge files by email:

People who demand large message size limits rarely understand the limitations of the email transmission. Because of the MIME encoding used when sending binary attachments, your files expand 33% when sent via email. In other words, a 15MB attachment requires 20MB plus the message text, plus message headers. When you carbon copy 20 of your friends & coworkers, a separate message is sent to each. 20MB x 20 = 400MB. That's half a freaking CD. If 5 of those friends are on the same small company email server, downloading those messages saturates the entire bandwidth of their T1 data line for nearly 9 minutes. Because each message has separate headers, it isn't easily cached and gets completely downloaded by each recipient. Compare this to uploading the same attachment to a web server, FTP server, file transmission service like YouSendIt, or video streaming site like YouTube. One copy is uploaded. The download is typically 8-bit so minimal expansion factor. The small business' network can cache the content, so it's only downloaded once then fetched locally from the web caching server. Bottom line, sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive.

Google Image Swirl

philipbradley — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:31:36 -0800

Google is continuing to explore the possibilities of image search. They've recently done work on images and Creative Commons, Google Similar Images, and Google image size search. They're now playing with something they call the Image Swirl, and you can play along by going to the Image Swirl lab page. Now, don't get too excited, because you can't just play around with any old term - but there are about 200,000 terms that you can use. I tried my usual 'Hubble Telescope' search, and this is what I was presented with:

Nice, but not exciting at this stage. However, you can see that behind each image is a stack of others. What Google is trying to do is to sort of types of images, so we have collections of images of the telescope, but also various different types of images that it's taken. Click on a stack, and Google Swirl brings it centre stage thus:

This should actually look a little bit familiar as it's akin to the Google Wonder Wheel that they've had available for some time now. I can continue to click on images and Google will continue to present them to me, while keeping my history available, and this is where we end up with the 'swirl' concept:

I can of course simply click on an image at any point to go directly to it - a mouse cursor over gives me basic information about the image - size and web location.

Swirl is a great tool if you're interested in browsing through a lot of images quickly, and it's also very nice if you want to focus on a particular type of image - searching for buses led me immediately to the option of looking at different coloured buses as well as line drawings. Bing is going to have their work cut out to try and catch up.

Lists of Twitter users; a few thoughts

philipbradley — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:44:55 -0800

The first thing to say is that I said 'lists of Twitter users' not 'Twitter lists'. Now that Twitter has rolled out the lists option to everyone there's a lot of discussion about the basic concept of putting people into lists, yet this isn't new - it's been around for a while.

I suppose the first version is the 'Follow Friday' concept where people can suggest people to follow. All nice and cosy, and a lovely idea, but it just doesn't work properly - it's either just as many people you can put into a tweet, or a smaller number with a brief description of why they should be followed. It's also a very casual system without any archival aspect, so if you're thinking that I'm pushing the Follow Friday too far into the lists concept I'd probably agree with you.

The first Twitter list concept that I came up with was when I started to use Tweetdeck; creating groups of people that I could follow in different areas - UK librarians, US librarians and so on. This allows me to just see the tweets from those people, filter their tweets, search on them and so on. Of course, these groupings are entirely private and not available for anyone else to see or use.

Public listings have been available ever since people started to create directories of Twitter users, such as Wefollow and it's easy to see a collection of librarians for example, either by number of followers or by influence. Easy to follow and people can choose to be on lists or not as they choose.

Then we've got the Tweepml concept which works very well with Tweepsearch to quickly create lists of virtually any type. The members of the list(s) are defined and controlled by the creator, although people can suggest that they should be on specific lists. These lists are designed to be public and shared. The limit of 100 people on a single list was lifted a while back and increased to 250. I've certainly created a couple of these lists, but unless they're kept at the front of people's minds it's all too easy to forget them. Obviously it's not a list of tweets, just of people.

Finally we come to Twitter lists themselves. Anyone can create a list, call it what they want, add who they feel like and let anyone follow the list (or keep it private of course). Once you follow a list you can simply click on the link in the right hand Twitter menu bar and read the tweets of the people in the list. This is something that is causing lots of people lots of problems. I don't think Twitter has been very intelligent about the way in which the lists have been rolled out. For example, I can create a list called 'Stupid Librarians' and put anyone I like onto the list, irrespective of their wishes in the matter. Twitter doesn't inform people that they've been added to lists; the only way that you can find this is to click on the link on your own Twitter page. I was somewhat surprised to find that I was on over 30 lists that people had created (and I have no idea how many private ones). I'd need to go through the entire collection in order to check to make sure that I'm not on a 'stupid librarian' list, which isn't an ideal way to work. Of course, if I was on a list and didn't want to be, the only way (other than asking to be removed) that I could get off a list is to block the creator. This really isn't an acceptable option and requires me to do a fair bit of work. Better would be for Twitter to give me the option of being blocked from public lists, or give me the option of choosing if I want to be on or off a specific list.

Some people think that the list concept makes Twitter more dangerous to use. I think this is something of an exaggeration; I don't agree with one of the basic concepts that it's going to make life easier for spammers. They can send @reply spam at the moment, and I see little to suggest that spammers are targetting specific users or types of users - that's not how spam generally works.

What I do find interesting, and haven't seen anyone talking about yet is the way in which lists are totally changing the way in which Twitter works. The whole following/follower concept might now begin to break down. I can follow a list, and read what people are saying without the necessity of following them. In turn people can follow my tweets easily, without having to become a follower. This doesn't particularly bother me, but then I've never bought into the 'more followers the better' concept. This might make it more difficult for people to get noticed on the system though, and I suspect the importance of particular people will skyrocket. New users will be able to identify key players and subscribe to their lists and lurk, without contributing themselves. To an extent they can do that already - I'm followed by lots of people (and follow back), but they seldom if ever contribute to the twitterstream, and I think the Twitter lists concept is going to make this even easier.

Another key element with the list idea is that, as with Tweetdeck, I can now create my own list of 'favourites', keep it private and just refer to that, rather than my entire twitterstream. So I can just merrily add anyone and everyone now on a one to one basis, but still only follow a much smaller number. Again, this isn't a new concept, But Twitter is now making it much easier, and I think it's devalued the entire concept of followers/following, though it could be argued that it was a flawed concept right from the first person who though they were better than someone else because they had more followers.

I'm not sure that it's going to make me use the native interface any more than I am currently doing - I prefer Tweetdeck for the iPhone and Brizzly for the web interface, and if I'm keen on lists or groups they're easy to create in those resources. Twitter is going to have to work much harder to get me to go back (and see their adverts as a result) than this.

I don't think lists is going to make Twitter more 'dangerous' to use; I don't think it's going to increase spam in any great amount, but I do think that it's putting a very large nail into the basic premise of the service. If this is detrimental to Twitter in the long run I'm not sure; we'll need to wait a while and see how people end up using the list concept.

The Boolify Project

philipbradley — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:10:00 -0700

I've seen a few people mentioning the Boolify Project recently so I thought that I'd take a quick peek. It describes itself thus: "Boolify makes it easier for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search, and by showing them how each change to their search instantly changes their results."

It does this by providing some basic Boolean operators in a jigsaw format, like this:

Results can be seen at the bottom of the screen. If you try and do something that you're not allowed, up pops an error message:

It's fairly basic in that it doesn't allow the use of (..) and there's no NEAR operator, but to be fair, it's designed as a basic tool, primarily for teaching children the absolute basics I think. You can scroll down to the bottom of the screen at any point to see how your search is progressing real time, though I do have some concerns at this point - my librarians -archivist search returns 2,200,000 results on Boolify, but at Google I end up with some 23,300,000 results. Even taking into account my search is run without any filtering, and Boolify uses safe filtering, that's a really big difference. The six results in Google before the first in Boolify are all perfectly innocent, so I'm not sure exactly how Boolify is filtering their content.

However, it's a nice basic tool, which will do the job that's intended of it. I would like to see a few more advanced features to broaden it's value out to older children, but as it stands, it hits its mark.

There's another useful function on the site however, and one that's easy to miss - 'All sides'. This allows users to type in a specific term and provide comparison results between extremes, such as "good" and "bad" or "postive" and "negative", or categories of your own choosing. An image helps explain what I mean:

Having chosen your 'good/bad' or 'positive/negative' options, the two columns below will give appropriate results - a really nice way to introduce children to the different types of data you can find on Google.

All told Boolify is one of those excellent products that sets out to do something and does so very well indeed. If you're a school librarian or a teacher, or even a parent trying to teach search to your children, this will greatly assist you.

Revisiting Google Squared

philipbradley — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:56:06 -0700

Suppose that you need to collect data on English castles, to include an image, description and details on a nearby town. Unless you've got a helpful book to hand (!) it might take a while to drag all of this information together. Then of course you remember that you also want phone numbers, which means you've got to go back and do the searching again. How about British poets, African countries or roller coasters? It's a time consuming and probably in some cases a fairly boring task.

This is where Google wants to help you out, with Google Squared.

The idea is simple - you tell it what you want to find, it creates a matrix filled with goodies based on what it discovers. You can then add in new factors according to taste, and Google will then go off and find the required data and slot it in for you. This turns a 30 minute job into a 3 minute breeze. Or... (pregnant pause) does it?

Let's go through an example - I've chosen English Castles, mainly because it's a subject that's close to my heart. This is the matrix that gets formed as a result of the two word search:

There's actually a total of 13 castles, which is a reasonable number to start me off; I can delete any of them, and add in others. The content is pulled from various resources - Wikipedia, specific castle home pages and so on - the searcher really doesn't have any control over this, so Google really does need to come up trumps here. Most of the time I think it does - I'm getting good initial data about Kenilworth for example, although the Hever Castle content is much more of a sales pitch, but it is pulled from the castle website.

The fourth column is 'country' which seems rather redundant give the nature of search, but it is concerning to see that the Tower of London has been relocated into the United States. To be fair however, a mouseover of that cell does show that the information is regarded as being low confidence, and I'm given three other options:

However, I'm still not impressed with the options available - 'London' would be helpful and to be honest, the clue rather IS in the name.

That's all that Google Squared turns up for me, but it's possible to add in other data options, and this is what Google is offering me:

I think these are reasonable options, and of course I can add my own. Choosing 'telephone' gets Google to fill in 9 cells for me, but these are all listed as 'low confidence' - understandable in the case of the Tower of London, since the number given is that of a named doctor working at Guy's Tower, Guy's Hospital, London. Really not acceptable at all. This is where Google Squared breaks down, catastrophically. I have to go through each cell in turn, checking and double checking, and even though the source of the data is given - I still have to check it all again anyway. Google isn't saving me time at this point - it's actually costing me time, since I reckon that I could find good quality authoritative data quicker myself than going through each option and checking myself.

I tried to add in other data options, such as 'purpose', 'disabled access', 'architectural style' and 'public transport'. Some of these were my own ideas, others were suggestions by Google. All met with total failure - the one which made me laugh the most was Public transport for Kenilworth castle is apparently:

Oh dear.

In case I was just being difficult (always a possibility with me!) I tried some of Google's own suggestions. To say 'laughably inept' is to be on the kind side. Let's take a brief look at their idea of British poets:

Jeremy Reed? The description itself says '...an American professional baseball player'. I have no idea where Google's got that from - a search in their own database doesn't turn this guy up. All that I can think is that in the Wikipedia there's a reference to Jeremy Reed, described thus: "Jersey-born writer Jeremy Reed is a British poet and prose stylist." Perhaps Google pulled that from one place, re-ran the search elsewhere and came up with that. Really, this is about as stupid as pig dribble.

They're not all this bad, and in fact the 'Romantic movies' one is actually quite good. However, none of them are good enough - not even close to it. Suggested columns are hit and miss at best, information is missing in most cases, all the information needs to be doublechecked and in some cases it's so bad a blindfolded senile monkey could do better.

Google - take this away and bring it back when it works please. I love the concept, but the execution is dreadful; you should be ashamed.

Facebook - just HOW rude and patronising can you get?

philipbradley — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 07:01:57 -0700

I was wandering through my Facebook page (as you do) and I happened to look at the top right Suggested Friends option. I was stunned at what I saw:

"She only has 14 friends." WTF do you think you're playing at Facebook? It's not up to you to comment on the number of friends that someone has or has not got - and if this person just wants 14 friends maybe that's all that she wants? That Facebook should be making the point that I or anyone should suggest friends for her is rude and arrogant in the extreme. That attitude that someone is 'less' than anyone else because of the friends that they have or don't have is something I wouldn't expect to see out of a primary school, and I certainly don't expect to see it on a social networking site. "Poor so-and-so, she's only got 14 friends you know" is a disgusting and patronising way to treat your users. I would really suggest rethinking your approach here.

Harvester 42: integrating meta search engines

philipbradley — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:49:00 -0700

Harvester 42: integrating meta search engines. Straightforward multi search engine, covering about 50 different resources divided into 16 different categories. Results are inframe, so you just scroll down the page to see the next frame.

Why I became a librarian

philipbradley — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:46:36 -0700

There's a whole bunch of really interesting posts doing the rounds at the moment based on the 'Why I am a librarian' meme. You can see these over at TheLibraryRoutesProject wiki site, and I've enjoyed reading many of the entries. So here's my version.

I was a fairly serious child - when I was six I wanted to become an archeologist, by the age of eight this morphed, don't ask me how, into becoming a journalist, and by thirteen I wanted to be a barrister. God, I must have been obnoxious! My cousin, older and apparently according to my mother, cleverer than I failed to make it, so obviously I wouldn't either. Consequently a re-think was in order. I'd always used the library from a young age, though my experiences were not always happy with it. I remember one time when I got a book out early in the day, read it and then took it back. This was in the days of the old Brown system and I got a real telling off from the librarian because she had to hunt through all of the tickets to find mine because she hadn't sorted them yet.

This didn't entirely put me off though, and by the time I was sixteen I was determined to be a librarian. Not however because of the usual 'I love books' line. Oh no. Librarians I had discovered could find things. 'If you can find things that other people want, that's a fairly powerful position to be in' was my opinion (which hasn't changed either by the way) and so that was that. I did the usual student working in the college library while I did my A levels, and then took a year out (during which time I learned to touch type, which was one of the most sensible things I've ever done) before going to the Polytechnic of North London to do a degree in Librarianship. I took that course because it meant that I'd be able to stay at home - and in those days, not only did we get grants that we didn't have to pay back, we also had our travelling expenses paid!

The course was dire. It was really, really bad. It was a 3 year course, and in the first year we didn't do anything to do with librarianship. Not a thing. We did some sort of English course, which was interesting, a foreign language (either German or Russian, because 'that's what scientific papers are written in') and maths. I think there was also a bunch of other rubbish in there but conveniently I have forgotten it.

In the second year we did some librarianship. An hour a week of cataloguing with Tony Croghan (who terrified us all, but who was/is a really sweet interesting guy), an hour a week on classification with Derek Langridge, although it was basically all Facet - we did literally no more than a week each on things like Dewey, Bliss, LC and so on. I also had 3 hours a week on local history with Victor Newburg (and it really was about history, bugger all to do with librarianship) and a bunch of other stuff.

Insanely I chose to carry on and do a fourth year, which was an Honours year. I still have no idea why I did that other than it beat working. Consequently by the time I actually became Chartered it had taken me over 6 years. Almost as long as to become a doctor! Insane.

Best thing about the course was that I met Jill, and we married shortly afterwards. I can't hardly recall one useful thing that I got out of the course itself, but I did get on well with the lecturers - David Nicolas, John Eyre, David Phillips to name but a few. There were 50 on my course - 1978-1982 and almost all of them have disappeared. I tried to find 'em via Friends ReUnited, from net searches, and had a little success, but for the most part - vanished! (If you are one of 'em, and you're reading this - do get in touch!).

Of course, I then had to get a job. This wasn't easy, since I didn't know what I wanted to do, so fell into a temp position at the British Council, in their Central Information Service. I loved it there and had huge experience - travelling abroad, teaching, reference work and so on. However, by then I'd seen CD-ROM technology and knew it was going to be big, and I also knew that the BC wouldn't get around to it for years to come. (In fact a decade later I was invited out to Kenya to run a course on implimenting CD-ROM technology!)

I moved to SilverPlatter Inc, a CD-ROM publisher, as the Head of UK & European Technical Support. Keep in mind at this point I knew how to turn a PC on, but that was about it. I had a very steep learning curve, and managed to keep a step or two ahead of the librarians that I was helping. I did this for 5 years, discovering the Internet as I went. I got asked by TFPL to run some training courses on CD-ROM, and this then morphed into courses on the Internet and in the end all my time was spent either working or taking days off to work for myself. Something had to give!

In 1996 I left SilverPlatter and set up as an independent internet consultant, and that's what I've been doing ever since. Teaching, writing, talking about the internet to librarians is a dream job. I've been around the world twice, I've visited about 20% of the countries in the world and had some interesting experiences. (Get me a drink sometime and I'll tell you all about Turkey, Australia, Russia, and my adventures in the Far East. But I'm not writing 'em down, put it that way!)

Am I a librarian? I think so. Being a librarian is not a job, it's a passion and a vocation. Perhaps 'librarian' isn't the most accurate word, I think 'information professional' might work slightly better, but I'm not that fussy. I think I've got a great job - I play around on the net trying out new stuff, playing with it, writing and talking about it, teaching it to other people, and I get paid for it! Just how cool is that? And of course I get to spend time with other librarians as well. Wouldn't want it any other way.

Bing fiascos continue

philipbradley — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:41:23 -0700

I really want to like Bing. Really I do. However, they insist on ensuring that I can regard them as nothing more than also rans in the search game. They are *still* censoring UK results - my martin luther king search still gives me this:

I have asked Microsoft several times for a reason for this. They don't know. Imagine that - Bing has NO IDEA why it's giving the results that it is. You don't get this with other versions - it's just the UK version. However Bing does censor results in other countries for different searches. Try the Indian version for example - a search for 'sex' gives us this:

Bing is blocking *the entire term*. This ineptitude is astonishing; it's only the most basic and amateur engines that work in this way. Wait though, it gets better - much better. A search for 'penis' also gives no results but 'vagina' returns 131 million results. A search in the Image section for the word 'Adult' gives us the message "The search adult may return explicit adult content." No kidding! However, a search for 'vagina' gives us 39,000 results, and while I've not looked through them in any detail, there certainly seemed to be some adult content. I'm not sure if it's madness, incompetence or stupidity that Microsoft is showing, so let's be generous and say that it's all three.

So, what's the latest disaster that Bing is involved with? Why... none other than Twitter. Bing's got an agreement with Twitter to take their 'firehose' of tweets. First point to make is that if you're using Bing you need to be using the US version, since it doesn't work if you're using a country version. Why is this the case? God knows. Microsoft makes such a big play over the country versions, and for why? If you're in India and you want to see porn, use another country version. If I don't want to see the UK censored results, just use the US version. But still, sense and competence really aren't Microsoft's strong suits are they?

So, let's go to the Bing Twitter site which is http://www.bing.com/twitter. First thing that we see is a tag cloud of hot topics on Twitter. This is NOT the same as the trending topics you see in Twitter - there are differences. So clearly Bing is already doing different things to the data that they're getting. Let's try the Windows 7 search as that's a hot topic of the moment. This is what we get from Bing:

Isn't that '2 minutes ago' a bit worrying? Let's look at the Twitter version that I did a couple of seconds after getting this screenshot:

Half a minute ago. That sounds more sensible to me. Moreover, in the time that it's taken me to edit the images, cut and paste and so on, there are another 376 new tweets over at Twitter.
What have I got over at Bing Twitter?

The SAME results, and I'm kindly told that they're now 7 minutes old. I wouldn't mind that much, but there's a Pause button, so that I don't get overwhelmed with the results from Bing. Refreshing the page brings up new tweets, but once again, they're listed as 2 minutes old. Not acceptable Bing, not by a long shot. Now, to be fair, there is that 'see more Tweets' option, and this does give me more results. Nothing more recent than a minute old however. Within that option there's a 'Most recent' and a 'Best match' choice. I'd love to tell you the difference between the two, but all that I get is this:

It's been 'loading new tweets' for the last few minutes. I've not got this to work ever. Maybe it's just me and my browser - maybe the world doesn't like me, but *it doesn't work*.

OK, let's try something different. I'll try an ego search - they're always fun. A search in Bing for @philbradley returns 1 result - from my sister in law posted about 52 minutes ago. Same search over at Twitter? Dozens of results. Same search over at Brizzly (a different Twitter interface), gives the same as Twitter - dozens of results. This happens over and over again. Twitter finds results, Bing doesn't. Of course, it doesn't help that Bing is throwing away content older than a week. Why? I have no clue. Maybe they can't afford the storage space, maybe they never thought to program it in, maybe they're just clueless. Whatever the reason - Bing's Twitter engine is pointless to use for any type of archival work.

What else can I try and do with this search engine? Going back to the Windows 7 search there's an option to see 'top links shared in tweets' which is kinda handy and it's leading me to the CNN site. I'd prefer something with a little more authority, such as a Microsoft site, but if that's not where people are linking, that's not where they're linking.

Of course, it helps if you know what the link is to. Bing is supposed to break open short URLs to tell you where you're going to be clicking, which is a great idea. It looks something like this:

See the (softpedia.com) there? Helpful. However, see the other bit.ly link - the one that they've not broken out? That takes you to a website that's offering some sort of nonsense, and includes pop up boxes and a confusing 'cancel to stay here' kind of message, trying to get me to speak to an 'advisor'. Gee thanks Bing - that's really helpful isn't it. Danny Sullivan found the same thing when he was doing his review of Bing Twitter and I'd suggest you take a look at it, since it's very helpful - according to Bing they told him it was a 'glitch'. Danny found spam, I found something similar, so it's an impressively large glitch.

Look, maybe this is all just me. Maybe I'm just a bit of a bully who doesn't like Microsoft. Let's see what other people think - Karen Blakeman did a review of Bing Twitter recently as well. Her opinion is summed up in her last line: "Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." Don't take our word for it though - go and take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

Google experiments with Image Swirl

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:59:46 -0800

Having made Google Image Options (including colour) and Similar Images available as part of their standard image search, Google are now playing around with Image Swirl in Google Labs. According to Google it “builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface”. In practice it is a combination of similar images and the Wonderwheel.

One of my image test searches is Edvard Munch and Swirl came back with 12 thumbnails of stacked images (12 is the standard number of stacks) :

Click on a group of stacked images and another set of images “swirl” into view in the form of the wonderwheel:

And you can keep on clicking on groups/stacks of images but still keep the “history” of your selections.

I was pleasantly surprised by the clustering or stacking of the images. I thought that by the time I had reached ‘level 3′ of my browsing each stack would be just different versions of the same image or images with similar colour composition. My Edvard Munch level 3 selection, however, came up with a selection of landscapes with different colours. They did, though, seem to have similar ‘patterns’, for examples paths or what could be interpreted as paths as a major component of the image.

Phil Bradley has also reviewed Google Swirl and comments “Bing is going to have their work cut out to try and catch up.” Far too polite, Phil. I’d say “Bing, eat your heart out!”

Google Swirl looks very promising and I shall be monitoring its progress with interest.

BL launches business essentials wiki

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:53:31 -0800

The British Library’s Business and IP Centre has launched a wiki: Business Essentials on the Web (http://bl-business-essentials.wikispaces.com).

The wiki aims to provide business information that is aimed at entrepreneurs and SMEs. Topics covered currently include business planning, grants and finance, marketing and PR as well as industry specific pages. One of the industries listed is “Giftware” and coincidentally I was asked about this during my recent business information workshop. “Our client thinks that there is a single database that will give them all the data they need on giftware” said one of the participants. The bad news is that there does not seem to be a single source: the good news is that this wiki does list associations and web sites of organisations that are involved in the sector. So this wiki has already proved its worth to me.

Anyone can join the wiki community, edit and add a listing; a brave move but I have not yet seen any “vandalism” or spam. If there have been any inappropriate entries then BIPC have been very quick off the mark in removing them.

An excellent starting point for relevant information on setting up and running a business, and highly recommended for SMEs and startups.

Bing integrates Wolfram Alpha and out of beta in UK – allegedly

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:07:30 -0800

Hitting my RSS feeds this morning was the announcement from Bing that their UK version is out of beta. “So what,” I thought. “Doesn’t look any different to me this morning”. But looking at the announcement in full I see that there is a plethora of new services that I can now enjoy. To start with:

“When you search for Football, what kind of answers do you expect to find. Well, I guess it depends on where you are doing the asking, if you are in the UK you probably don’t want to see NFL schedules. You probably mean what we in the US call soccer. Well today, millions of searchers in the UK can rest assured that Bing knows what they are talking about. We are excited to announce today that Bing in the UK is shedding its beta tag. We want to congratulate our pals over in the UK on a huge milestone. You can now use Bing to make faster more informed choices on a daily basis. Oh, and the next Manchester United game is on the 21^st of November at 17:30 GMT (that’s 5:30 p.m. for us Yanks), in case you were wondering.”

My first reaction was that I wanted to be sick: I found this so patronising. We in the UK should be so grateful that Bing has finally realised that we have a life separate from the US and that Bing has taken the trouble to find out what we mean by football. Sorry, but I am not at all interested in football so if this is all you are offering as UK customisation then I nominate you for the #epicfail awards.

But let’s not be hasty. Let’s look at what else they have to offer.

“The daily Bing Homepage image and hotspots are something that now will be localized in the UK, with unique imagery and hotspots.”

At last! The photos on the home page are of landmarks and locations in the UK and not of the Galapagos islands or Mongolia. This morning we had the Angel of the North and then the Avebury stones. The ‘hotspots’ option is now working and if you are interested you can find out more about the subject of the photo.

“Visual Search using visual images and metadata to make search more visual and more compelling.”

Pathetic! For a start there is no visual search on the home page. You have to click on the More option, which takes you to a page where it is listed. They seem to have deleted US stuff and and given us UK politicians under famous people, and Premier League Football Players and Professional UK football clubs under Sports. That is it. Where are the rugby clubs and cricket? Oh, and under ‘More’ we have ‘Yoga poses’. Now I wonder why that is there? Could it be anything to do with the fact that there are only pictures of photogenic girlies in interesting poses that might possibly attract a lot of visitors to the site? Surely not. How about some gorgeous male hunks in interesting poses?!

“More Instant Answers. Get quick response answers and results to searches, such as how is Liverpool doing in the Premiership or which tourist attraction should I take my in-laws to at the weekend?”

Yet more football, but I thought I would try out their own search “How is Liverpool doing in the Premiership”. Bing did not come up with any easy to find information on this (I was assuming that the searcher would want to know where Liverpool is in the League Table). Google, however, had the official site of the premier league at the top of the results, which has a link to the current league table positions of all of the clubs.

Bing results

Google results

“See who or what is being chatted about real-time with a global live Twitter feed with Bing Twitter search.”

#epicfail yet again I’m afraid. You have to know the URL of the Bing Twitter search because it is not listed on the UK home page or under ‘More’. Do not be too disappointed because it is a waste of server space, processing time and your time: see my blog posting Twitter search in Bing and Google

“Looking for the best deals? – There is now an integrated shopping experience with Ciao UK. With Bing you can search the Internet to find the best prices, reviews and local availability.”

Bing didn’t do too badly on this one. We need a new frying pan and it came up with sensible results apart from the Keith Floyd biography “Out of the Frying Pan”. The best link, though, was one of the adverts for John Lewis.

“With insights from our Multimap users, Bing Maps now offers new map styles, imagery and transit integration as well as draggable routes.”

In general the maps are fine. The Bird’s Eye imagery, which is equivalent to Google’s Satellite view, is higher resolution than Google’s and sometime more up to date. The ‘find a business option’ is as incomplete as Google’s. If you want to locate pubs, restaurants, plumbers etc in an area then go direct to Yellow Pages or Thomson Local. The directions for walking from my house to Reading railway station were sensible but it failed when I asked for Manchester Piccadilly railway station to Manchester Business School (Google Maps had no problems). In fact, Bing Maps could not find Manchester Business School in any shape or form. As for “draggable routes” – no sign of them here.

“Bing has been built for the UK to help consumers get to key local sites and services in fewer links by including popular links, search boxes and suggestions within best match.”

If you are interested in football and shopping, then that might be true. It is certainly better than the US-centric stuff but overall still nowhere near as relevant as Google’s results.

Let’s move on to the announcement that Bing now incorporates results from Wolframalpha ( How Many Calories in a Burger? What’s 2^2^2^2^2? Bing and Wolfram|Alpha Have the Answers). This won’t take very long because I could not get it to work. I even tried the examples they give with the UK and the US versions of Bing and Wolfram Alpha is nowhere to be seen in the results. Has anyone managed to get this to work as described or has the integration not actually happened yet?

Having spent most of the morning struggling with Bing’s new features, and in some cases failing to find them at all, I was beginning to wonder if I had dreamt the dozens of announcements that littered my RSS feeds. I double checked and they are definitely there. Perhaps it’s a tech issue? I’m running Windows 7 on my main machine but the results are the same on Windows XP, and it makes no difference whether I run Firefox or IE. So I can only draw the conclusion that yet again Microsoft Bing has made a complete [expletives deleted] mess of everything. We could do with another half decent alternative to Google but Bing is just not in the same league.

Top 10 Business Search Tips – 3rd November 2009

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:11:55 -0800

A group of business information researchers gathered at the London Chamber of Commerce in Queen Street, London for the TFPL workshop – facilitated by yours truly – on key web business resources. The participants were from a variety of types of organisations but they all had a mission to find out what business information was available for free or on a pay-as-you-go basis. We covered not only business information sites but also how to make better use of the advanced search features of the likes of Google and Yahoo.

At the end of the day, the group was asked to come with a list of Top 10 Tips.

1. Biznar http://www.biznar.com/
A service from Deep Web Technologies that searches business databases and resources in real time. A list can be found on the Advanced Search screen. The search is not as quick as Google because Biznar has to visit each site live for each search, whereas Google searches stored copies of web pages. By default results are sorted by ‘rank’ but this can be changed to date, title or author. On the left hand side of the screen the results are automatically organised into folders on topics, authors, publishers, publications and dates, and you can narrow down your search by clicking on these options.

2. Alacrawiki Spotlights http://www.alacrawiki.com/index.php?title=Alacra_Industry_Spotlights
The Alacra Spotlights section (at the top of the menu on the left hand side of the screen) is a good starting point for evaluated sites and information on industry sectors. Note that although it is a wiki only Alacra can edit these pages.

3. FITA http://www.fita.org/
Another good starting point for business information resources. Click on the Really Useful Links in the menu on the left hand side of the screen. The section on Cultural Issues was specifically mentioned.

4. Europages http://www.europages.com/
B2B Directory covering 1.5 million pages from 35 countries. Browse by industry sector or search by keyword. You can further limit (refine) your search by countries, activity (manufacturer/producer, wholesaler, retailer) and workforce (banded number of employees).

5. Wayback Machine – The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/
For pages, sites and documents that have disappeared. Ideal for tracking down lost documents and seeing how organisations presented themselves on the Web in the past.

6. Blogpulse trends http://www.blogpulse.com/
Useful blog search tool that has a trends option, which shows how often your search terms have been mentioned in blog postings over time. This is useful for monitor competitors or industry intelligence to see what are the hot topics and when, and also to monitor what is being said about a product or company. Click on the peaks in the graph to see the postings.

7. Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk/
An excellent starting point for anyone wanting to identify good starting points and quality resources on a wide range of subjects and industries.

8. Repeat your search terms
Fed up with the same old results popping up again and again? Just repeat one or more of your search terms one or more times to see different pages appearing in your results list.

9. Google ‘Show options’
A discrete link near the top of Google search results, it is not immediately obvious what it does. Click on it and a range of additional search options appear in a bar on the left hand side. See my blog posting Google new search and display options for further details.

10. D&B UK small business centre http://www.do-business.net/sbc
Aimed at UK small businesses, this service provides affordable reports on the performance of companies. The competitor and supplier reports costs £7.50 and the customer and partner reports £15. Payment is by credit card. There are sample reports that show what information each report contains. You can monitor up to 50 businesses for free with the D&B tracker and be notified by email when there are significant changes. (You do have to pay for the full report, though). Personal note: I used this service a couple of years ago when refurbishing my house to check up on four double glazing companies on my short list. One of the four was immediately dropped when I saw the report. A few months later it was declared bankrupt.

Top Tips from Advanced Internet Search Strategies

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:21:42 -0700

Here are the Top Tips from the participants of yesterday’s workshop on advanced search (29th October 2009):

1. Creative Commons and public domain images

When searching for images that you can re-use on your web site, in your report or newsletters you need to be sure of what you can and can’t do with them. Rather than chasing after the “owner” of the image, the following tools only have creative commons or public domain images.

Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/ “aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland”.

Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. This page lists the different Creative Commons licenses and enables you to search for images with a particular license.

Morguefile http://www.morguefile.com/ A relatively small collection of images but good quality, high resolution.

Most images on US government web sites are public domain. A few are not but these are clearly labelled with copyright statements. All of NASA’s images are also public domain.

Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/. Be careful with this source. There are disputes over the copyright of some images, notably photographs from the National Portrait Gallery. Before using any images from this site look at the whole of image’s page to see if there could be problems. For example see Charles Abbot, 1st Baron Colchester by John Hoppner.

2. People search tools, for example LinkedIn, 123People.com, Whoozy.com

3. Google Customised Search Engine http://www.google.com/cse/. Create your own Google search engine that searches only the sites that you specify. Great if you are always searching the same sites day after day, or want to provide your users with a search tool covering a specific topic

4. “Show options” near the top of Google search results. It is not immediately obvious what it does, but click on it and a range of additional search options appear in a bar on the left hand side. See my blog posting Google new search and display options for further details.

5.Tripleme http://www.tripleme.com/ to display results from Google, Yahoo and Bing side by side. There is also a deduplicate button .

6. Google Squared http://www.google.com/squared/ Described as “fascinating” by one of the participants. This attempts to put information from the pages in your results list into a table. It is by no means perfect but has improved greatly since its introduction. Everyone agreed that it is “one to watch”. For some examples here are a few I prepared earlier: Volcanoes, Ducks and Royal Dutch Shell (to which I have added some competitors). I have left some of the wrong and questionable data in.

7. Geograph http://www.geograh.org.uk/ This was mentioned in number 1 but was singled out as a quick and easy way of finding Creative Commons images of locations, buildings and landmarks in the UK.

8. Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/. Singled out because of the “Trend this” option which displays graphically how often your term or terms have occurred in blog postings over time.

9. Wolframalpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/ Despite my own clearly stated reservations about this tool, it was nominated for mathematical calculations and chemical structures. At least it shows that the participants were of independent mind and not to be swayed by my prejudices!

10. Exalead’s Chromatik, which is part of the Exalead Labs experimental area. This enables you to search image tags by keyword and then select one or more colours that you want as major components of the image. Although Exalead does now have a colour option in its main image search it is not as sophisticated as Chromatik.

Workshop: Advanced Internet Search Strategies 29th October

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:20:48 -0700

If you have booked a place on my advanced search workshop taking place this week in London on the 29th, you should by now have received confirmation, joining instructions etc. via post, fax, or email (or all three!). If you have not yet received anything from me contact me straight away via email, phone or fax. Details are at http://www.rba.co.uk/about/contactkb.htm

Microsoft Academic Search – don’t get your hopes up

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:26:50 -0700

Microsoft Academic Search has been made a public beta. Before you get too excited this is not Academic Live resurrected. This is a project from Microsoft Research Asia and although the help screen says “Find top scientists, conferences, and journals in a specific field” it only seems to cover computing and the Internet.

The visual explorer is interesting – you need to install sliverlight – and the Advanced Search is reasonable, but if like me you were expecting a worthy competitor to Google Scholar you will be disappointed. But if you are interested in conferences and papers on computing and Internet technologies then give it a go.

Twitter search in Bing and Google

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:33:54 -0700

Bing and Google have both announced that they have done a deal with Twitter that enables them to offer ‘real time’ Twitter searches. The Bing service is live now at http://www.bing.com/Twitter/. SearchEngineWatch has an overview of the service at Bing.com/Twitter: A Visual Tour. It looks impressive but as is so often the case with Bing the reality does not live up to expectations.

I have just returned from a conference on chemical information held in Sitges – hashtag #icic09. This should be an easy one for Bing Twitter to handle I thought. Silly me. Up came “We did not find any Twitter results or links for icic09″. I tried it with and without the hashtag – still nothing. And yet both search.twitter.com and www.twazzup.com had no problem finding tweets from the conference.

Bing Twitter results on #icic09

Twazzup results on #icic09

It also appears that you cannot search on a username. I then compared the results of searches on keywords and names that I knew had been tweeted at the conference: chemspider, chemspiderman, David Walsh, semantic mediawiki, markush. Nothing! It seems that the whole conference has been boycotted by Bing Twitter. I did begin to suspect that the service is not really up and running but searching on Nick Griffin came up with plenty of results and it found a tweet from one of my Twitter network about chickpea curry that had been posted a few minutes before.

There is something seriously wrong with Bing Twitter. Until they fix it and can present credible results I recommend that you give it a miss.

So what of Google’s offering? It isn’t live yet but there is useful discussion and comments on Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter. The main question for us as searchers is whether or not the Twitter search will be integrated into the standard web search or made available as a separate option. Tweets are already included in the web search as I discovered when I did a search on icic09 but they are spread out amongst the results. It would make sense to have a separate search tool such as Google’s Blogsearch. Another option would be to incorporate it into the side bar under “Show options” (See Google new search and display options).

Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As for Google Twitter, we shall just have to wait and see.

Presentation: Internet Search – a challenging and ever changing landscape

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:25:07 -0700

CILIP in the Thames Valley, 6th October 2009, Great Expectations, Reading

The presentation I gave to CILIP in the Thames Valley on 6th October is now available in a number of locations. At least one of these should be accessible through your firewall!

PowerPoint presentation – RBA web site
Slideshare
Authorstream
Slideboom

Some of the slides have annotations from my blog and new comments so make sure you check out the notes to the slides. Many of the slides are screen shots so they won’t make much sense without the notes or unless you were at the live presentation.

Google new search and display options

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:02:28 -0700

Some of you may have spotted that Google has introduced some excellent new search and display options. Many of you probably have not – the link to them is very discreet, almost as though Google does not want you to find out about them. Carry out a standard Google search and to the left just above your search results you will see a “Show options” link.

Click on ‘Show options’ or the plus sign and additional search and sort options will appear to the left of your search results.

At the top of the list you can choose to limit your search to videos, blogs, forums or reviews.

Below that are options to restrict your search to “recent results”, the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year or to your own specific date range. Not surprisingly the past hour, 24 hours and week pull up mostly blog postings and news articles. “Recent results” seems to pick results that go back about a couple of months.

As soon as you select any of the time options apart from the specific date range, additional options to sort by relevance or by date appear but the date option only sorts with most recent first. For some inexplicable reason sorting by date disappears if you want to specify your own range of weeks, months, or years; results are automatically sorted by relevance.

A word of warning about Google’s date sorting: the “date” of many of the web pages bears no relationship whatsoever to the real date of publication or when the content was actually written. In these cases Google is using the date and time stamp assigned to the page by the hosting web server. Most web sites have been revamped and reloaded at least once in their lifetime and some pages are dynamically created at the time of search. The dates of blog postings and news articles are a little more reliable, although there too you can find anomalies.

If you want to quickly identify articles that fall within a specific time period you may be better off selecting the Timeline but this seems to only include articles from Google Current News and Google Archive News. Also, the list of results below the Timeline graphic does not include every year. You have to click on the bar representing the required years and only then are all the articles displayed.

Related searches is obvious: this comes up with alternative search strategies that you might want to try. For me they would be far more useful displayed at the top of the standard search results rather than being hidden under “Show options”.

The Wonder wheel is difficult to describe in words as it is a clustering and visualisation tool combined. Click on a link on the first wheel and a second pops up with a different set of clustered links for you to follow. Try it and see if it works for you.

“Images from the page” adds thumbnails of images found on the page next to the text entry in your results list.

The “More text” option gives you a larger extract from each of the pages in the results list making it easier for you to decide which are most relevant for your needs.

And if you are fed up with seeing shopping sites in your lists or perhaps want more, Google has thought of that as well. Simply click on “Fewer shopping sites” or “More shopping sites”. This works very well and reminds me of Yahoo’s Mindset experiment that allowed you to move a slider bar between research and shopping to change the emphasis of the results. Sadly, Yahoo never incorporated it into its standard search and abandoned the project a while ago.

Overall, Google has come up with a winner here. I would not want to use every option for every search so having a bar from which you can easily select and combine them is a great idea. It is a pity that Google has not made the additional options more obvious.

Internet Search: a challenging and ever changing landscape

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:51:23 -0700

CILIP in the Thames Valley evening meeting

Date & Time: Tuesday 6th October 2009, 1800 for 1830 hrs
Location: Great Expectations, 33 London St, Reading

Google threatens to go hyper with its “caffeine” search. Bing is taking over Yahoo. Image search options are expanding: creative commons, colour, similar images. More specialist search tools for the “hidden web” are emerging and Web 2.0 is now an essential part of the search mix. Karen Blakeman will look at the new services that are being pushed out by the major search engines and the alternatives.

This is a free event followed by free refreshments and networking opportunities with colleagues.

An invitation is extended to anyone with a professional interest in the topic

Contact: Norman Briggs, nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk to advise attendance for catering purposes.

CLSIG Web 2.0 blog postings

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:33:49 -0700

If you weren’t able to attend the CLSIG Web 2.0 debate on September 17th there are two blog postings so far of the event:

CLSIG Seminar: Web 2.0 – the truth behind the hype « Organising Chaos

The Running Librarian: Web 2.0 – the truth behind the hype

Added after above posted to blog:

VIP LiveWire: Web 2.0 – hype and truth

CLSIG Web 2.0 slides and screenshots

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:11:20 -0700

Web 2.0 – the truth behind the hype. Evening meeting held at Hamonds LLP, Devonshire Square, London, EC2M 4YH. Speakers: Phil Duffy, Karen Blakeman

The slides and screenshots that I showed at yesterday’s CLSIG evening meeting as part of the Web 2.0 debate are now available in various places:

PowerPoint presentation on my own RBA web site
Slideshare
Authorstream

As usual, they are mostly screenshots so won’t make much sense unless you were there to hear the discussion.

Autumn Workshops – London

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:52:51 -0700

My autumn workshop and seminar schedule is now available at http://www.rba.co.uk/training/. I am running 6 workshops under my own “banner” in London at InTuition House, Borough High Street. (I had good feedback about the venue from those who attended sessions earlier this year).

There are the three “usual suspects” which always prove popular:

Market Research on the Web, 28th October

Advanced Internet Search Strategies, 29th October

Key Business Resources on the Web, 17th November

I am also running a workshop on Web 2.0 and Social Media in the Workplace on 4th November.

There are two new half day courses that have been requested by several people. Introduction to Mashups is being held on the morning of Thursday, 5th November and in the afternoon on the same days is Getting Started on Twitter.

Full details of the workshops and booking forms can be found via the RBA Training page.

Searching for images by colour

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:00:31 -0700

This is not a frequently asked question on my workshops but when it is raised by one of the participants it generates a great deal of interest amongst the rest. So far I have come across three that I would recommend trying.

The first is Exalead’s Chromatik, which is part of the Exalead Labs experimental area. This enables you to search a selection of Flickr images by colour and optionally by keyword. You first select one or more colours or hues from a palette which are added to a bar below the palette. You can adjust the proportions of the colours in the photos by moving the separators between the colours in the bar. Luminosity can be toggled between bright and dark, and saturation between colourful and grey levels. The last option in the list is to search for specific images using keywords (I assume this searches the titles, tags and descriptions associated with the Flickr images). The implication is that once you have selected your colours you can then limit your search to particular objects. In practice, if you search for colour followed by keyword, Chromatik ignores your colour choices and searches only on your keywords. If, for example, you want to search for apples of a particular colour you must first search on apples and then pick your colours.

It pays to keep the number of colour choices to two or three, even if you require very specific colours, as this will give you a wider range of images to choose from. When the thumbnails are displayed you can hover over the best match and select “show images with same colors”. Click on an image and it is displayed full size, but in order to see further information about it you have to right click and select properties. This will give you a URL for the original image on Flickr but only for the image itself. It does not take you to the “full” Flickr page for the photo, which means that you cannot check ownership and copyright.

The second tool is Multicolr Search Lab from Idée Inc. This uses “10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr”. As with Chromatik you select colours from a palette. You can select up to ten colours and click on the same colour several times if you wish to increase its prominence in the photo. Unfortunately there is no keyword search. On the plus side, if you find an image you like simply click on the image to go straight to its page on Flickr where you can double check the copyright situation.

And of course there is Google’s image search. Carry out a search on your keywords in Google images and above the results there is an option to select a colour. There are only twelve colours from which to choose and you can only select one but it works well enough. If you want to search only Creative Commons images then carry out the first stage of your search in the Advanced Image Search screen and select the appropriate option from the Usage Rights menu.

Brighton & Hove bus times on iPhone

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:54:34 -0700

Nice one Brighton & Hove, and I am not being sarcastic! According to the Local Government Chronicle Brighton & Hove City Council claims to have the first iPhone bus app. It has launched a free real time bus time information app created by one its residents, Rick Thompson, and which updates automatically to show live bus times across the area’s network.

My own local bus service, Reading Buses, is just a couple of steps away. Most of our bus stops, even over “the river” in Caversham, have displays telling you when the next 2-3 buses are due to arrive so the data obviously exists. They just need to make that data available to someone like Rick.So how about it Reading Buses?

Google compiles industry stats for the UK – sort of

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:33:25 -0700

Google has launched a new page that pulls together industry stats for the UK. Google – Internet Stats, which is biased towards information on electronic and online services and products, gathers data from third party vendors many of which are priced. A list is available at the bottom of the Internet Stats page. You can, though, submit your own “killer fact”. All submissions are vetted by Google.

There are five categories: Technology, Macro Economic Trends, Media Landscape, Media Consumption and Consumer Trends. Each section has further sub-categories.

This is not the answer to a market/industry researcher’s prayer. The number of statistics is very limited and the search option only searches within the browsable statistics on the landing page. Do not expect to be able to search for and find data on, for example, UK chocolate consumption! If your query falls within one of the listed categories you may be in luck.

Exactly where Google is going with this and why they have introduced it is not clear. This is a UK-only initiative at present and there is no link to it from either the .com or .co.uk main Google search pages. Neither is it listed in Google Labs. Even the official announcement on “Google Barometer: New! Internet Stats all in one place” gives very little further information.

Thanks to Barry Schwarz, Search Engine Land for the alert.

Getty Images wins £2,000 over unauthorised web use of photo

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:26:27 -0700

If nothing else, this is a good example of what can happen if you fail to check the rights associated with photographs and images found on the web, and then use them for your own commercial purposes. Some people refuse to accept that just because an image is on the web does not mean that you can do what you want with it. If you do not want to pay for an image, there are plenty of sources of public domain and Creative Commons images but even then there may be conditions and some restrictions on their use (see my posting Free-to-use images might not be).

In this particular case, a removals firm used a Getty photograph on their web site without paying for it. Getty found out about it because it uses tracking technology to detect the unauthorised use of pictures.

You have been warned!

gov.uk security stupidity nothing new

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:25:32 -0700

Those of you who have been following the comments to my earlier blog posting (Please Use Firefox 2 or IE 6) or my Twitter tweets might be interested in an item I wrote for my newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room, July 2002. Entitled “Inland Revenue’s Cookies Fail Crunch Test” – sorry about the awful pun – it suggests that gov.uk seems to have learned little about security over the last 7 years:

In the UK, it is that time of year when we suddenly realise that we have only a few weeks to complete our tax forms and deliver them to the Inland Revenue. I, says she rather smugly, have already done mine but not online as the UK government continually exhorts us to do. I did have a go last year but the Web site kept crashing and after four attempts I reverted to the good old-fashioned paper form. This year I did not even consider the online route, which is just as well because the service had to be temporarily withdrawn following a security breach.

A problem with cookies allowed users of Inland Revenue’s online self-assessment tax form to see other people’s tax details. An official statement explained: “The way in which the ’session cookie’ identifying the user was managed meant that it could, in certain rare circumstances, be presented to another user.”

It seems that Inland Revenue’s site allocated the same cookie to more than one user because they were using IP addresses to identify users. Many Internet users, and especially those accessing the Internet from home, use ISPs with dynamic IP addressing: that is the ISP allocates a different IP address to a user each time they access the Net, which means that the same IP address may be assigned to several different users in quick succession.

The Inland Revenue said that examination of activity logs suggested that the web site had compromised the privacy of 47 of the site’s 28,679 users and there were 665 for whom the possibility could not be eliminated.

The problem has now been fixed and the site is back up and running, but I for one am not reassured.

For the Inland Revenue’s side of the story see: http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/news/sa_online.htm

Inevitably, the URL in the final sentence no longer works but you can still view a copy at http://www.archive.org/. Copy and paste the whole URL into the Waybackmachine Take Me Back box, and on the list of results click on August 2002. Alternatively, http://web.archive.org/web/20020804140436/http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/news/sa_online.htm should take you straight there.

Please use Firefox 2 or IE 6

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:00:04 -0700

This would normally fall into the “I don’t belieeeeve it” category had I not already heard of the problems endured by UK central and local government departments in trying to move on from Internet Explorer 6.

Out of curiosity I decided to see what pittance I might receive from the state when I retire so tried the advertised http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/. First of all I could not just use my existing username and password for the government gateway service to use the pension forecasting service. That’s fair enough. I appreciate the additional security level but then I had to wait two weeks for an activation code. This morning it arrived, I “activated” my account and attempted to log in. In a flash, a “Technical Error” page popped up with error and error ID codes, and instructions to phone them for help.

What followed has left me stunned.

“Are you using Firefox or Internet Explorer?” the nice lady asked.

“Firefox”

“Which version?”

“3.5.2″ I replied

“If you want to use Firefox, you’ll have to go back to version 2″

A few seconds of silence followed and then I asked if I could use IE 8. No, was the answer, it had to be IE6 or possibly IE7. Google Chrome? Not compatible. Opera? She wasn’t sure but if it was the latest version then no. Safari? Er..probably not. She explained that they haven’t security tested the latest versions of the browsers and Chrome is definitely out.

It is pathetic, stupid and irresponsible. We are all exhorted to keep our browsers up to date as part of our online security measures but the UK government is encouraging us to do the opposite. We are encouraged to file our tax returns online and use the government web sites to obtain information about our entitlements, but to do so we have to use browsers from the stone age. It does not fill me with confidence. Quite the opposite, I am beginning to feel seriously paranoid regarding the security of gov.uk sites.

So have I got my pension forecast? Once I had stopped haranguing the poor lady on the help desk I was transferred to another department, my personal details were taken, and I was told my forecast would be in the post in about 10 days. So much for fast, efficient e-government!

I am still sitting here gobsmacked and wondering if I dreamed the whole thing. I think, after all, that this has to be filed as a Victor Meldrew moment.

Time To Experiment With Dbpedia?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:59:59 -0800

A the recent CETIS 2009 conference I attended a session on “Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global Graph” facilitated by Adam Cooper. There was a feeling that the initial discussions had perhaps focussed too much on detailed technical aspects about Linked Data, and had failed to address the interests of the senior managers present, who were more interested in what Linked Data could do, rather than whether, for example, RDF should be a mandatory requirement of a Linked Data service.

After the coffee break there was a discussion of ways in which Linked Data could be used in an educational context. One suggestion I made was that as DBpedia (an RDF representation of the content of Wikipedia) provides access to a large amount of Linked Data we should be exploring ways in which we can make use of DBpedia to provide examples of what Linked Data can provide. After all if the data is available shouldn’t we be using it to support advocacy work rather than trying to seek funding to create Linked Data resources?

I was told that DBpedia provides access to structured text boxes in Wikipedia entries, such as the factual entries for Universities (as illustrated).

Could, I wonder, this information be used to demonstrate how such Web pages can be processed as entries in a database rather than just text to be displayed for reading?

So I started experimenting with the DBpedia Faceted Browser.

In the search box I typed “University” and found there were 9,490 entries. After selecting this search option I was then presented with a number of pre-programmed searches such as Country (193 entries for the UK) and City (60 entries for London), I could also search for universities which were established in a particular year (or range).

Searching for universities founded in 1966 I found there were 107 results, including the University of Bath, as shown below.

Can we do more, I wonder, with the RDF data which is already available in DBpedia?

Can we use this example to demonstrate the importance of data as opposed to a HTML representation of data designed for viewing?
Can we develop of queries which people may find useful?
Can we think of data about institutions which could be stored in Wikipedia to allow further queries to be answered?

I also wonder whether it would be possible to go beyond running queries based on the content of the University entries in Wikipedia and explore related pages.

An opportunity for experimentation, perhaps?

Posted in Linked Data

UCISA CISG Talk on “What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?”

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:19:37 -0800

About My Talk at the UCISA CISG Conference

On Friday 20 November I’m giving a talk on “What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?” at the UCISA CISG 2009 Conference.

I’ve written my slides and uploaded them to Slideshare (and embedded them at the bottom of this post. But slides on their own don’t really convey the message and if I want the talk to be truly open providing a Creative Commons licence for the slides and giving permission for my talk to be recorded or videoed isn’t enough – I should summarise my talk and allow (indeed encourage) comments to be made. This I will do in this blog post (which, incidentally, should also provide a more accessible alternative version to the talk and the slides).

The Talk

Background

I have spoken at previous UCISA Management conferences:

UCISA 2004 Management Conference: where I gave a plenary talk on “What Can Internet Technologies Offer?”. In this talk I introduced a set of technologies now known as Web 2.0.

UCISA 2006 Management Conference: where I gave a plenary talk on “IT Services: Help or Hindrance?”. In this talk I argued that IT Services needed to engage with Web 2.0 otherwise they might find themselves marginalised.

UCISA 2008 Management Conference: where I gave a pre-recorded video contribution to talk on “Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants: IT Services are Dead, Long Live IT Services 2.0!”. In this talk I argued that IT Services need to reinvent themselves.

My views have developed over time:

IT Services need to understand Web 2.0 and not dismiss it as a ‘trendy marketing term’ [2004]
IT Services need to engage with Web 2.0 services (IT Services as visitors) [2006]
IT Services need to embrace Web 2.0 services (IT Services as residents) [2008]

I now feel that institutions will need to embrace Web 2.0 & rethink their roles (HEIs as residents).

Political Drivers for Change

The political drivers to such changes have been articulated in “The Edgeless University” report and the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report. In addition the higher educational sector also needs to be able to respond to the recent Mandelson report as well as the current economic climate which underpins all of these reports.

Against this background of radical changes across the sector we have Web 2.0 and the Social Web which appear to promise many potential benefits to teaching and learning and research. But there are also many challenges.

The MIS Sector

How might MIS managers react to these changes? If we were to ask the user community for phrases which might characterise the sector we might find words such as “control”, “security” and “policies” appearing. We might expect “Prince2″ but not “Agile development” and “risk averse” but not “risk taking”.

But such characteristics are to be valued for those involved in providing many of the back-end services in our institutions – please, let’s not have an ‘always beta’ approach to salary systems or our pension schemes!

Such characteristics were identified at the UCISA CISG 2008 conference in which Alison Wildish and John Howell and “Can web services and CIS work together in harmony when it comes to the web?“. But rather than revisit that talk, which argued for greater collaboration across groups such as MIS and Marketing departments within the institution I want to explore how such departments need to change in its engagement with a Web 2.0 environment (such as ‘the network as the platform’) and a Social Web environment (in which members of the institution are openly sharing their resources and interests with others).

The Social Web

Some may feel that Social Networking services are only used by students and young people and have no relevance to those involved in this provision of services across the institution. But we do find that senior managers and UCISA stalwarts, such as Chris Sexton and David Harrison are prolific users of Social Web tools such as blogs and Twitter. Chris Sexton’s Twitter id @cloggingchris reveals her hobby (clog dancing and related folk activities) – and it was via our shared interests in rapper word dancing that Chris and myself got to know each better both personally and professionally, through our discussions on our blogs and via Twitter.

So yes, the social dimension is important to enhance our professional activities – after all there is a conference dinner at the UCISA CISG 2009 conference which fulfills this role. Perhaps the main difference between the online and physical social activities are the lack of formality in the former (unlike the UCISA conference, a black tie or kilt are not expected in the Twitterverse!).

“Web 2.0 Changes Everything”

In May 2009 Andy Powell on the eFoundations blog argued that “if Web 2.0 changes everything, I see no reason why that doesn’t apply as much to professional bodies and universities as it does to high street bookshops“. David Harrison was in broad agreement:

“There is a little doubt in my mind that Web 2.0 will eventually change everything in respect of university education … what makes the current situation different is the emergence of communication & collaboration tools that easily & transparently transcend the organisation. The Web 2.0 university will be one therefore that consumes, collaborates and communicates – some are better placed to build such a model, others not.“

What might be the drivers of such change, I asked recently. Some may feel that a combination of the economic crisis and global warming may force institutions to radically reappraise the well-established approaches to events across the sector, but that’s a topic for another post and another talk.

In this post and in my talk I will consider three aspects of the changing networked environment which I feel are significant drivers for change within the sector: Cloud Services, the Social Web and Openness.

Cloud Services

When I gave a talk on “IT Services: Help or Hindrance?” at the UCISA 2006 conference I used the potential of Web-based email services (such as Hotmail and GMail) as a threat to IT Service departments, arguing that IT Service departments needed to be more flexible and agile, otherwise the user community would abandon the centrally-provided services. But Michael Nowlan, who was Director of the Information Systems Services at Trinity College Dublin, interpretted my talk differently – why don’t institutions simply buy into such services. And that is what Trinity College Dublin did, followed by an increasing number of UK institutions, most notably Sheffield University.

On her blog, Chris Sexton has regularly kept colleagues and the wider community informed of her thoughts on institutional use of Google as an email provider. In April 2009 she summarised institutional use of “Google for students” and earlier this month she suggested that it is “Now to sort out staff mail….“.

Chris also recently reported on a session at the Educause conference on “Cloud computing – Hope or Hype?“. Chris concluded:

“I went in firmly on the “hope ” side but tried to listen objectively, and I must say my mind wasn’t changed! The “hype” arguments came over as defensive and ill informed. She made a big thing of it just being a cost cutting exercise, but in the current financial climate I couldn’t see what was wrong with that!“.

I’d go along with that. Institutional engagement with Cloud Services is, for me, simply the latest approach to service provision which the sector is engaging with. I would hope that there is a community-wide involvement in negotiations, but this is no longer the radical solution it seemed back in 2004.

Services For The Individual

Like myself, Chris Sexton is using a blog service which is in The Cloud. Chris’s blog is hosted on Blogspot whereas mine is on WordPress. But rather than the hosting issues (bother services are well-established and mature) for me the more challenging issue is the individual autonomy to provide a professional service. Yes, there are issues about trust, quality and sustainability of the content. But for me, this is similar to the trust which my organisation places on me when I give talks – and similarly UCISA will have expectations that I will act in a professional manner when I give my talk. Both my talks and my blog posts will have personal idiosyncrasies – but in our sector we tend to prefer such approaches to the corporate droids!

As use of such externally hosted services continues to grow we will need to develop policies and share best practices, but, again, this is nothing new.

‘Core’ and ‘Chore’ Services

Whilst I have been exploring ways in which the Social Web can be exploited by professional in the sector, David Harrison and Joe Nichols at Cardiff University have been developing an institutional model for understanding the relationships between in-house and externally-hosted services. David has distinguished between chore and core services. This approach was presented at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 event in a talk entitled “Servicing ‘Core’ and ‘Chore’: A framework for understanding a Modern IT Working Environment” and summarised in a blog post on the IWMW 2009 blog.

The Need for Openness

Moving on from the provision of the services we need to address the openness of the content. The initiatives within the sector to provide open access to research publications are well-known and we are now seeing initiatives to provide open access to research data and open educational resources (OER). But what about our institutional data? Is this still being held in institutional silos, making reuse difficult and costly and thus inhibiting development, innovation?

The JISC-funded MOSAIC competition provided an opportunity for developers to demonstrate innovative approaches to making use of library circulation data provided by the University of Huddersfield. And yes, privacy is something that needs to be considered – and in this case the data was anonymised before being made available and the APIs published.

This is surely an area in which our sector should be actively engaging with – perhaps regarding data as something that should be made open unless there are valid reasons not to do so, unlike the current position in which institutions keep data closed unless required to.

A move towards greater openness may result from the government responding to public pressure for greater openness. We have seen public pressure to provide transparency for MP’s expenses. And Tony Hirst, a lecturer at the Open University has provided a wide range of examples of how such data, once published, can be reused. Should not the higher education sector, as publicly-funded organisations with expectations of liberal values and transparency as well as a well-established tradition of innovation in IT, be seen to be leading this drive towards greater openness. And shouldn’t UCISA and groups such as UCISA CISG, be taking the initiative in their role as the custodians of such institutional data?

A Risks and Opportunities Framework

Yes, there are risks. But there will be no opportunities for innovation and change without an element of risk-taking. JISC infoNet has developed a Risk Management infoKit and, as described in papers on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” and “Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services” UKOLN is developing a risks and opportunities framework to support decision-making processes in the selection and use of Social Web services.

Conclusions

My talk is entitled “What If Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?”. And yet, reflecting on my slides, I feel I’m simply suggesting a more open approach to use of IT within the sector – with a risk-management approach being taken to use of third party services and a willingness to make institutional data open for reuse by others. I hope this is not felt to be threatening – rather I feel it is a reaffirmation of the IT Services long-standing tradition of embracing IT developments and the higher education sector’s even-longer standing tradition of embracing social change.

What do you think?

Posted in Events, Web2.0

Topsy – and Who is Tweeting About You

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:14 -0800

It was via a referrer link on a post on the Open Culture blog that I came across the Topsy service (isn’t serendipity wonderful). This service describes itself as “A search engine powered by tweets“.

Here’s an illustration of the service, using a search for ‘JISC’.

Of course the first thing you are often tempted to do when you see a search box is to type in something of interest to yourself and, if the service seems of interest, you might also search for information about one’s peers. So here’s a summary of my findings.

Search	Nos. of tweets in month	Top Twitterer
JISC	563 tweets	@jisc (14 links).
UKOLN	164 tweets	@briankelly (17 links).
CETIS	242 tweets	@markpower (11 links).
Eduserv	184 tweets	@andypowe11 (18 links).
MIMAS	423 tweets	@copac (9 links)
EDINA	140 tweets	@freelistminn (27 links).

I believe the information is based on the search string, either as text or as part of a URL in a link (following expansion of a shortened link). Note, by the way, that as the first set of results for ‘EDINA’ refer to a place in the US rather than the JISC-funded service, the findings for EDINA have been discounted.

This time using the MIMAS service as an example I have explored what additional information the service can provide. A screen shot of information on tweets which provide a link to the MIMAS home page is illustrated.

It seems that the relaunched MIMAS Web site was mentioned on Twitter, not only by MIMAS staff but also by ‘influential’ Twitterers such as @branwenhide .

Posted in Twitter Tagged: Topsy

Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:44:41 -0800

The W4A 2010 conference has announced its call for papers. The theme for next year’s event, which will be held in Raleigh, USA on 26-27 May, is “Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?“.

The context to the conference is described by the organisers:

However, this expansion [the revolution in the information society] faces unprecedented accessibility challenges. Even the word “accessibility” needs a new definition for people in the developing regions. How can someone who is illiterate or barely literate access the Web? In some cases, a language may not even have a written form. The affordability of the technology is also a challenge, while access is constrained by low computational power, limited bandwidth, compact keyboards, tiny screens, and even by the lack of electric power. All of these constraints compound the problems of access and inclusion.

How will the research community respond to the theme: Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems? My fear is that we will see papers which describe either a failure of WCAG guidelines to be implemented to any significant approach (with a call for greater advocacy) or research-based solutions which are unlikely to have any significant impact. I’m basing these speculations on my involvement in previous W4A conferences – indeed I can recall asking one presenter who described an assistive technology solution which had been developed for the FireFox browser whether he felt the tool was likely to be used to any significant extent. Afterwards I was approached by two participants who worked for public sector organisation in New Zealand who felt that I raised a very pertinent question – especially as access to their service (I think it was the tax office) by FireFox users was close to zero.

Now it may be felt that deployment issues aren’t relevant for a research conference. But if the topic is “Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?” then surely it is imperative that achievable solutions to the (possibly) common problems are addressed.

I would also hope that the WAI model is not unquestionably accepted as a solution to what problems are being identified. As I’ve described in several papers (and discussed in several blog posts) although the WAI approach based on guidelines for Web Content. Authoring Tools and User Agents may provide a useful managerial tool for organising WAI work activities, this approach does not necessarily provide a suitable solution for the deployment of richly accessible services in many use cases. Previously myself and my co-authors have described approaches for enhancing accessibility in areas such as accessing to e-learning and cultural resources and addressing accessibility when limited budgets are available (the WAI guidelines seem to provide no advice on how to approach this challenge which is likely to affect many organisations – with the default approach being taken in public sector organisations being one should not provide a Web-based service if it can’t be made accessible to everyone).

What new challenges will be faced by people in developing countries, I wonder? As well as the expected resourcing issues I suspect there will be differing priorities given as well as differing definitions of disabilities. Will the Web adaptability framework we described in our most recent paper provide the flexible needed to encompass the needs of developing countries? I don’t know – but I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has an interest in this area who might be willing to contribute to a paper for W4A 2010.

Posted in Accessibility

“Web 2.0 Will Change Everything!” But How?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:09:54 -0800

Back in May I wrote a blog post entitled “Not Your Father’s IT Innovation!“. My post referred to Andy Powell’s thoughts on “The role of universities in a Web 2.0 world?” in which he suggested that “if Web 2.0 changes everything, I see no reason why that doesn’t apply as much to professional bodies and universities as it does to high street bookshops“. These posts were written a few days after the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” Report [was] Published“.

I had intended to write a follow-up post to Andy’s closing comment in his post asking “If Web 2.0 will change everything, then how?” but got diverted. Six months later (and doesn’t six months go quickly as you get older!) I want to revisit the question – my motivation for doing this is that I have been invited to speak at the UCISA CISG conference later this month and the title of my talk is “What if Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything?“.

But how might Web 2.0 change everything – as opposed to being another IT innovation which, over the years, the sector will successfully embrace as has happened in the past (e.g. the move away from mainframe computers to minis, workstations, standalone PCs and networked PCs; the move from IT to support research activities to supporting all aspects of University businesses; etc.)?

And before seeking to predict how such changes might affect University businesses there is a need to explore which aspects of Web 2.0 might act as the key drivers to radical changes with the sector. Some thoughts on aspects of Web 2.0 which could “change everything” :

Network as the platform: The importance of services in ‘the Cloud’ may be felt to be of great significance to some. But does the location and governance of a service really matter to the institution (as opposed to existing service providers within the institution)? Perhaps if networked services which provide mission-critical functions were to fail this could result in significant negative changes for the sector. But isn’t that an issue of monitoring the viability of one’s service providers and ensuring migration strategies are in place – after all we are familiar with take-overs and companies failing.
Social networks: Perhaps the importance social networking will be the key driver for Web 2.0 changing everything. This is an area which is, in some respects, new to the sector and encompasses ‘network as the platform’. Some may feel that a negative aspect of social networks could be the time wasted in developing and maintaining social networks and relationships. But others, including myself, feel that such social networking activities can help to strengthen professional links and engage in activities not previously felt possible.
Out-sourced digital identity: A topic frequently discussed on the JISC Access Management Team blog is digital identity management. The institution has traditionally managed the digital identity and access rights for staff and students (and guests) within the institution. But now students are arriving at the institution with their own email accounts and accounts on social networking services, perhaps with well-established communities. And staff, especially at a time in which long-term contracts can no longer be expected, may wish to avoid making use of an institutional digital identity which will disappear if they leave the institution. But does ownership of my digital identity, whether by my institution or a third party service (or, perhaps, by the Government), really change everything from an institutional perspective?
New modes of learning: Might we find that the Social Web provides new and more effective ways of learning? This, to me, could be significant as if the evidence suggests that this is the case there would be pressures on the institution to change its approaches to leaning and teaching. But in this area I am speculating. Are people suggesting that this may be the case? Is there evidence to suggest that a Web 2.0 approach to learning could result in a radical transformation in approaches to learning and teaching?
New modes of research: The use of Web 2.0 approaches, such as the Social Web, to support research, perhaps to facilitate inter-disciplinary work and enhance professional relationships is an area in which I feel Web 2.0 can provide significant benefits. A recent post by Frak Norman entitled ”Social networks – are they useful or pointless?” cited a blog post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog that points up the failure of social networking websites to gain many converts in the scientific community. Although, in response to the blog post, Frank admitted to be a ‘true believer’ we do need to ask whether significant takeup of social networks by the research community would really ‘change everything’. Hasn’t the research community often been willing to explore the potential of new technologies (often causing tensions with IT service department who may nowadays prioritise delivering stable mature services to mass audiences).
Reluctance to travel: We are all very aware of the need to address environmental issues. Institutions will be exploring ways of reducing their carbon footprint and the JISC’s Greening ICT programme aims to support work in this area. One approach to supporting such initiatives might be to make use of the collaborative and communications features of Web 2.0 services in order to minimise the amount of travel needed across the sector. We are already seeing increasing numbers of ‘amplified events’ being provided within the sector, which can both help maximise the impact of and benefits of engaging with such events and reducing the carbon footprint for those who participate remotely. The delivery of online-only events provides another example of how Web 2.0 technologies can potentially deliver environmental benefits. If in ten years time the amount of travel taken by members of the community were to drop significantly, to be replaced by online activities, this might be regarded as ‘changing everything’.
Lack of funding: In light of expected cutbacks in government funding perhaps there will be a cutback in investment in development work in the sector and a greater take-up of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services. Is this case the driver is the lack of funding and use of Web 2.0 may provide a response.
Always beta: Could the ongoing development of services typified by the ‘always beta’ slogan have a significant role to play in significant changes? I don’t think so – after all early adopters in the sector have often helped to drive changes, as was seen in the early 1990s when the Web started to appear in many of our institutions through the initiatives of the early adopters, perhaps circumventing institutional policies on Campus Wide Information Systems.
Culture of openness: Might the Web 2.0’s culture of openness be responsible or significant changes? Moves to open access and open data have been encouraged by the ease of access to resources provided by the Web and we are now seeing initiatives to provide access of Open Educational Resources (OER). A possibility, although whether people will make use of OER resources to any significant extent is still unproven.
Generational changes or other binary divides: Marc Prensky’s view of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants has been questioned with Dave White suggesting the need to consider “Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’”. Could, I wonder, the expectations that Web 2.0 will change everything be hindered by differing perspectives and priorities being placed by those who have expectations of working and learning in a social networked environment and those who regard this environment as a tool to be used in clearly defined circumstances? And might the environment be affected not by Web 2.0 per se but by Web 2.0 as a battleground? After all if we are talking about radical changes across the sector we should expect to encounter resistance and disagreements.
Blogs, wikis, social sharing, …: Might the core Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis and social bookmarking and other social sharing services) be instrumental in radical changes? I think not – I think we now understand how such technologies can be used within the sector.
Syndication technologies: I also think the ways in which content can be syndicated and reused across differing environments and devices is now understood and will simply be more widely deployed as existing technologies are upgraded to provide further support for such syndication technologies.
Mobile access and always connected: Perhaps the expectation is that much greater use of mobile technologies, so that users can always be connected, will be responsible for the higher education sector being transformed in the way that Amazon is felt to have transformed the book selling market place.

I suspect that the radical changes, which have been acknowledged in the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” and “The Edgeless University” reports will be a result of a complex interplay between these (and other) factors. (Of course we haven’t identified whether the radical changes which these reports suggested the sector needs to respond to will be for the better or worse – Tara Brabazon, for example, has argued that “The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded: Dissent in the digital age“).

But returning to the question I have raised – if we feel that ”Web 2.0 will change everything” how will such radical changes take place? And was the comment made at one of the meetings organised by the authors of the ”Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report that “This seminar feels a bit like sitting with a group of record industry executives in 1999” valid?

Posted in Web2.0 Tagged: UCISA

Influence a National Service – In 140 Characters

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:47:10 -0800

How long might it take to influence a national service?And what approaches would you take if you wished to do this? Well let me give an example of how Twitter can be used.

On Thursday 5 November 2009 Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) asked Joy Palmer a question about the RSS feeds provided by the COPAC service:

@joypalmer while you’re there ;-), any idea why copac rss results list only a fraction of the html results?

Joy, manager of the JISC-funded COPAC service, responded:

@psychemedia had to check on that one! rss only displays new items for that search (2 weeks).http://copac.ac.uk/faq/#rss

to which Tony asked for the reasons for the policy:

@joypalmer What is reason for that policy? is there a way of getting all books in the feed, other than by scraping?

Joy asked for examples of what was needed:

@psychemedia curious to know why wld you want all of them? i.e. what use case are you thinking? tis something we cld address if strong case

I spotted this discussion and contributed with an example of why I feel that RSS should be used for much more than just news alerts:

@joypalmer For me RSS is useful as a generic syndication format & not just for alerting. e.g. see http://bit.ly/XhWaw

Success:

@psychemedia @briankelly Sold. we’re moving to new hardware right now. Will add to the to-do list for Jan.

A nice example providing evidence of how Twitter can provide benefits in the workplace. But as well as ensuring that a richer set of feeds will be developed for reuse by third party developers I thought this example was also interesting in showing that despite the advocacy for service to provide RSS, there’s still not a widespread understanding of the reasons why a comprehensive set of RSS feeds are needed. Is this, I wonder, due to the fans of RSS simply pushing for deployment of RSS but failing to make the case for how RSS should be used?

Posted in Twitter

An Opportunity to Open Up Institutional Data?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:53:36 -0800

It was while I was waiting for the bus home last night and skimming though the afternoon’s tweets that I noticed here had been a lot of activity around Lord Mandelson’s announcement of a major modernisation of England’s degree system. Alan Cann’s tweet, in particular, caught my eye:

RT @1994group Not all unis are the same – UK cannot sustain 140 unis & expect them all to succeed at the same level in the same tasks.

What? Was this an official announcement that 140 Universities aren’t sustainable? Will mine be one to go? Following links through to the 1994 Group statement which “welcomes Government’s Higher Education Framework” I discovered that this wasn’t a sensationalist headline or a result of a truncated Twitter summary. No, as the statement said:

“Not all universities are the same – the UK cannot sustain 140 full service universities and expect them all to succeed at the same level in the same tasks. Diversity and differentiation of task and mission underpins the excellence of the UK HE system.”

Conditioned as I am to reading gloomy predictions of the future in the public sector I misinterpreted the clause “the UK cannot sustain 140 full service universities“. The statement would probably have been less open to misinterpretation if it had simply said “the UK cannot expect all 140 universities to succeed at the same level in the same tasks. Diversity and differentiation of task and mission underpins the excellence of the UK HE system.” I would endorse this view.

But if universities aren’t expected to carry out the same range of tasks, what commonalities should there be? After all, if the institutions have little in common, what is the point of sectoral agencies such as HEFCE and JISC? Clearly there are many areas in which the sector benefits from sector-wide funding and policies, many of which are outside the scope of this blog. But I was particularly stuck by the comment that

“The 1994 Group has consistently called for more transparent and accurate information around the student experience to be provided. There is a need across the sector for a wider availability of data and information to better inform the decisions of applicants at all levels, and to help HEIs identify problem areas and work to enhance aspects of the student experience“.

Ah! Is this open data we are talking about? Is this about allowing others to access, reuse and interpret our data? This is an area in the research community, with passionate advocates such as Professor Murray-Rust, have been arguing for opening up our research data. We have also recently seen the benefits to be gained by providing access to library circulation data, encouraged by JISC funding of the MOSAIC project (Making our shared activity information count). And of course we will all be aware of the significant work being carried out across the JISC community in the areas of open access and open educational resources.

And yet, despite such high profile activities in exploiting the benefits of openness we still see arguments being made which appear to stifle further initiatives in this area. Back in 2004 I encouraged IT Services to set a leading role in embracing openness: “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!” – but in revisiting that suggestion recently I see responses such as there is “no culture in UK HE of sharing material like this” and “concern[s] over … ownership“.

But if IT support staff seem reluctant to engage in sharing support materials (and I should add that I am also unaware of similar initiatives in the Library sector) perhaps the drive should come from those working in MIS departments. After all they will manage the large databases which could be opened up. And the MOSAIC project has experiences in how data can be anonymised to avoid the understandable concerns regarding privacy and data protection.

Are any institutions opening up access to such data? Although I appreciate that the 1994 Group’s statement that “There is a need across the sector for a wider availability of data and information to better inform the decisions of applicants at all levels” could just be a call for more funding or for better access to data from government agencies (OS maps, perhaps?). But if you work at one of the 1994 Group institutions (University of Bath, Birkbeck University of London, Durham University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, University of Exeter, Goldsmiths University of London, Institute of Education University of London, Royal Holloway University of London, Lancaster University, University of Leicester, Loughborough University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Reading, University of St Andrews, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Surrey, University of Sussex or the University of York) mightn’t this provide an opportunity to initiate discussions about opening up institutional data?

Posted in openness

Talk at Edspace Event, University of Southampton

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:01 -0800

I have been invited by the JISC-funded Edspace project, based at the University of Southampton to give a talk at an event on “Traditional educational repositories v. Web 2.0 resource sharing” to be held on Wednesday 4 November 2009. I have been asked speak on “the future for educational resources and services on the Web” – a rather grandiose topic, I think! I’ve entitled the talk “The Future for Educational Resource Repositories and Services in a Web 2.0 World” as its the Web 2.0 aspect I feel is important (and reflects my area of expertise – I don’t claim to have anything particularly significant to say on the repository side of things).

I’ll be saying that many of the technical aspects of Web 2.0 are now mainstream – and indeed the Edspace’s Edshare service provides RSS feeds, tag clouds, embed functionality and ‘cool URIs’.

But the term Web 2.0 also covers the network as the platform and a culture of openness. The issue of openness of educational resources is being addressed in, for example, the JISC OER programme and although I personally seek to ensure that my content (such as blog posts, slides and papers) are available under a Creative Commons licence I know that there are added complexities in the area of educational resources – so I’ll not focus on the openness issue.

Instead I’ll raise the question of the network as the platform in the context of the futures for educational resource repositories. I’ll suggest that as experts predict further cuts in the public sector, including higher education, wouldn’t it be appropriate for our repository services to be hosted in the cloud? And the concerns which tend to be raised (sustainability, reliability, legal issues, etc.) are implementation details which do need to be addressed – but these aren’t the important policy issues.

The slides I’ll be using are available on Slideshare (in the Cloud(!) although a master copy is also held locally) and is embedded below.

Posted in Events, Repositories

Policies on Drugs, Open Standards and Web Accessibility

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:40:34 -0800

Over the weekend we’ve been hearing about the squabbles between the Government and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council, argued that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco and that it was upgraded by the Government to Class B against the council’s advice – for political reasons. In response, as described on the BCC News, the Home Secretary “Johnson defends drugs row sacking“ saying that Professor David Nutt went against a long established principle by straying into politics.

An example of a political expediency taking precedence over evidence, surely? After all, we can predict the headlines in papers such as the Daily Mail if the Advisory Council’s recommendations had been accepted by the government.

But if we feel that evidence and the need to acknowledge the accompanying complexities should outweigh an approach based on simple slogans would such an approach also be used in the context of IT development work?

This thought came to me earlier today after reading a tweet from Wilbert Kraan which stated

“RT @PeterMcAllister: EU wants to get rid of open standards: http://is.gd/4KMUi (via @brenno) Leaked draft: http://bit.ly/2tTN7X #EUopenS“

The accompanying blog post , headlined “EC wil af van open standaarden“ begins

“De Europese Commissie schrapt in stilte open standaarden voor interoperabiliteit. Het draait nog slechts om ‘open specificaties’, waarbij patenten en betaalde licenties geen taboe meer zijn.”

Friends on Twitter have responded to my request for a translation and suggest that the post on”The European Commission silently scraps interoperability standards” begins with the view that:

“The EU has quietly changed its view on open standards and no longer sees patents and paid licensing as taboos”

The EU has changed its mind on open standards? That sound intriguing! So I’ve skimmed though the ”European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (version 2.0)“ document (PDF file) – which, I should add, is clearly labelled as a work in progress.

This report is of interest to me as I recently gave a talk at the ILI 2009 conference entitled “Standards Are Like Sausages: Exploiting the Potential of Open Standards“. In the talk I described how my early work in promoting open standards (which date back to my contributions to the eLib Standards document back in 1995) can, in retrospect, be seen to be naive. Over the years I have found myself recommending open standards, especially those developed by the W3C, which have failed to gain significant acceptance in the market place. And, just as, the Daily Mail knows it is safe to promote a zero tolerance approach to drugs to its core audience, I was also aware that promoting open standards is a safe thing to do in a public sector IT development context. But over the years I have begun to realise that such recommendations need to be informed by evidence – and if the evidence is lacking there may be a need for a more refined approach, rather than a continuation of the “One final push” approach.

These views also apply in the context of Web accessibility. I have argued for several years that an approach based solely on technical conformance with a set of accessibility standards, which fails to acknowledge the diversity of use cases, definitions of accessibility, limitations of relevant tools available in the market place and the resource implications of conforming with such flawed approaches, is the wrong approach to take.

In light of this I was very interested in what the EU’s draft document on the European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services had to say.

What did I find in this document about the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which aims to promote and support the delivery:

1.5.1 The Political and Historical Context of Interoperability in the EU:: I welcome the section which acknowledges that political and historical issues have a significant role to play in enhancing the delivery of interoperable services.

2.2 Underlying Principle 1: Subsidiarity and Proportionality. This section goes on to add that “The subsidiarity principle implies that EU decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen. In other words, the Union does not take action unless EU action is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level“. It the context of IT services, I see this as endorsing a user-focussed approach to development work, rather than the centralised imposition of solutions. Section 2.3 Underlying Principle 2: User Centricity reinforces this approach.

2.4 Underlying Principle 3: Inclusion and Accessibility. This section goes on to add that “Inclusion aims to take full advantage of opportunities offered by new technologies to overcome social and economic disadvantages and exclusion. Accessibility aims at ensuring people with disabilities and the elderly access to public services so they can experience the same service levels as all other citizens.“

We then read that “Inclusion and accessibility usually encompass multichannel delivery. Traditional service delivery channels may need to co-exist with new channels established using technology, giving citizens a choice of access.” Hurray – we’re moving away from the WAI perspective that suggests that all Web resources must be universally accessible to all, to an inclusive approach which endorses a diversity of delivery channels!

2.10 Underlying Principle 9: Openness. This section goes on to add that “openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and to stimulate debate within that community of interest, having as ultimate goal the advancement of knowledge and the use thereof to solve relevant problems. In that sense, openness leads to considerable gains in efficiency.” I’m pleased to see this emphasis on the benefits of openness of content and engagement endorsed in the document.

This section than states that:

Interoperability involves the sharing of information and knowledge between organisations, hence implies a certain degree of openness. There are varying degrees of openness.

Specifications, software and software development methods that promote collaboration and the results of which can freely be accessed, reused and shared are considered open and lie at one end of the spectrum while non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the “not invented here” syndrome, lie at the other end.

The spectrum of approaches that lies between these two extremes can be called the openness continuum.

We are seeing an appreciation of complexities and a “spectrum of approaches [to openness]” rather than a binary division which is promoted by hardliners.

2.12 Underlying Principle 11: Technological Neutrality and Adaptability. This principle leads to “Recommendation 7. Public administration should not impose any specific technological solution on citizens, businesses and other administrations wh n establishing European Public Services.” Having acknowledged the needs to be user-centric and to encourage openness, whilst recognised that there may be a spectrum of approaches which need to be taken, the document spells out the implications that specific technical solutions should not be imposed.

Chapter 4 of the document introduces four Interoperability Levels, as illustrated.

Although not depicted in the diagram for me this indicates the team for the technical discussions and decisions about interoperability need to be formed within the context of political, legal, organisation, and semantic considerations. Surely self-evident when stated like this, but not when we hear mantras such as “interoperability through open standards” being promoted at a policy level which can lead to discussions taking place in which other considerations can become marginalised.

Has the ”EU quietly changed its view on open standards and no longer sees patents and paid licensing as taboos“. Or might we suggest that the “The EU is now taking a pragmatic approach to the relevance of standards in ICT development. It now feels that the technical considerations need to be placed in a wider context“?

Posted in standards

The Third Anniversary of the UK Web Focus Blog

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:00:01 -0800

The UK Web Focus blog was launched on 1^st November 2006. A year ago I summarised how the blog had developed in its first two years. In this anniversary post I will document some statistics (so I have a record of the current status) and briefly reflect on the content of the blog and how the way I use the blog has developed over time.

Since the blog was launched I have published 630 posts, an average of 210 per year (4 per week). There have been 2,814 comments published (and a very large number of spam comments blocked by Akismet – currently reported as 146,475 spam comments but as I reported in June 2008 that there were A Quarter of a Million [spam comments] and Counting these figures are misleading (for some reason Akismet reset the count to zero at some point).

As I did last year, I have created a PDF file of the posts in order to provide an indication of the total number of pages I’ve written. To date it seems I’ve written 620 pages (although note that this includes images which are displayed at full size in the PDF – with the images displayed at the correct size the PDF file comes to 450 pages) and over 328,000 words. A typical blog post is therefore about 2/3rd of a page long or about 500 words. Note that access to the PDF resource is available on Slideshare and is embedded at the bottom of this post.

When I set up the blog I did wonder whether it would be sustainable, how I would find the time to write and what I would write about. I also thought about the issues of publishing without any the support of any editorial processes to advise on both the quality and writing style and the appropriateness of the content.

I discovered that I have writing blog posts enjoyable, useful and need not take too much time to write. How useful the posts are for readers is something I’ll not address in this post!

Over the three years I have found that I am using this blog as my open notebook, as a means of writing down ideas and thoughts which otherwise I may forget about. These ideas may be incorporated in my other work activities such as my presentations, publications and papers.

Over the past year of so I have also contributed to a number of additional blogs which provide more focussed dissemination channels including the JISC PoWR blog, the IWMW 2009 blog and UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog.

I am now finding that, with over 600 posts published on the UK Web Focus blog, I can’t recall all of the things I have written about! As the built-in search engine for the blog isn’t great I am wondering whether I should be making use of some additional tool in order to find content on my blog. I guess my problem isn’t ‘discovery to delivery’ but discovery of content which is already available at a known location. Any suggestions?

Posted in Blog

Forecasting Trends Backwards

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:27:38 -0700

“Forecasting for the Future” was the title of an article published in the recent issues of the JANET Newsletter (No. 9, September 2009 – PDF format). It won’t surprise people that the byline for the article was positive about the future: “Outlook – sunny, with a good chance of videoconferencing“.

To be fair, the byline was a play on words of the topic of the article, which described use of the JANET Video Conference Service (JVCS) at the Met Office. The article concluded with a quotation from Tim Marshall, JANET CEO:

“The Met Office videoconference programmes are an excellent example of how the JANET Videoconference Service makes sense not only in terms of delivering excellent educational content and cost savings, but also through its real contribution in reducing our customers’ carbon footprint“.

Such optimistic views of the benefits which technologies promise to deliver are, however, being criticised. In a post entitled Postdigital: Escaping the Kingdom of the New? Dave White introduced the ‘postdigital’ concept, a topic he revisited after co-facilitating (with Rich Hall) a post-digital F-ALT session on the opening night of this year’s ALT-C conference. As Dave described in that post, in the session (which I attended) the participants were invited to debate a series of statements which were designed to provoke post-digital thoughts, including:

Learning technologists are obsessed with technology more than learning, which is why elearning will never make the mainstream.
We are purveyors of the worst kind of spin: ‘This new thing will solve all your problems’.

But how might we go about challenging such ‘technological determinism’ (which, of course, goes beyond the e-learning community)? Inspired by the F-ALT session and further brief discussions with Dave, an approach I took in a panel session on “Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals” at the recent ILI 2009 conference was to take as the starting point the optimism felt towards various examples of today’s technologies and to travel backwards in time, and attempt to give plausible reasons why today’s exciting technologies will not be around in the past.

This was an idea I got from a BBC 4 programme back in 2007 which I described in a post on “The History Of The Web Backwards“. And following the postdigital discussions it occurred to be that the approach might be worth revisiting.

The night prior to the panel session I described the idea to a number of fellow speakers including Tony Hirst and Peter Murray-Rust. Tony was full of enthusiasm for the idea and, as he often does, came up with new ways in which we could use this approach (e.g. looking at a variety of expected future trends and how we got there from the present). And a few days later Tony alerted me of a YouTube video which took a similar approach:

After I had given my brief presentation, which I had published shortly before the conference, Peter Murray-Rust did wonder whether such Radio 4 humour would be understood by an international audience. And I did notice that some of the tweets about my talk had failed to pick up on the humourous intent of my presentation. To summarise what I said (or meant to say) with respect to the demise of Twitter:

Today many people are exploiting the potential of Twitter to help them find resources they are looking for. Indeed last night I tweeted that I was looking for a good pub to go to and my Twitter community helped me in my information searching task – and because they knew me, they knew to suggest a good real ale pub and not a trendy wine bar. An Ask-A-Librarian service wouldn’t be aware of my personal preferences.

But, as we travel through time backwards, we need to ask “Why did twitter die off in the early part of the century?”

The answer is obvious. Twitter doesn’t scale. As more and more people asked such questions, the Twitterverse became clogged. “It’s similar to email spam” people felt and started to cancel subscriptions to the service.

And of course although I can benefit, as an early adopter, from having large numbers of followers, many people will have only small Twitter communities, and so won’t gain the benefits which I have. So Twitter is inherently undemocratic and professions such as Librarians, with their commitments to social inclusion, were amongst the first to move away from such undemocratic technologies.

The demise of Twitter was eventually accepted by all. And in the new environment of the latter part of the twentieth century, people met in pubs with their real friends. The term ‘virtual friends’ was felt to be on par with ‘imaginary friends’ – something you grow out of. And to mention the ‘followers’ you had would result in strange looks and suggestions that you should seek psychiatric help!

Funnily enough, although I am aware of reasons why people are sceptical about Twitter and why some Twitter fans feel that the service may eventually be replaced by an open source or distributed alternative service, it wasn’t until I gave the talk that I used the “Twitter is inherently undemocratic” argument. So using the device of seeking to give persuasive reasons why technologies disappeared as we travel backwards though time did give me some fresh insights.

Why then, did video-conferencing, which had such a bright future in 2009 die out?

Although popular at the high of the environmental concerns in the early years of the twenty-first century subsequent research by sociologists revealed that academic and librarians preferred face-to-face meetings. Further research revealed that most conference participants can’t remember the details of talks given at conferences, which made people question why one should use networked technologies to access talks which are quickly forgotten. Rather than computer networking, people networking (including plotting, politicking and such skull-duggery – as well as opportunities for sexual relationships) were found to be the real reason why people travel to conferences, although for some strange reasons, such issues were not identified in the user needs gathering exercise.

Might this have an element of truth?

Posted in General, Twitter Tagged: ili2009

Viewing a WordPress Blog on a Mobile Device

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:33:29 -0700

WordPress, in a post somewhat confusing entitled “The Hero Is In Your Pocket“, have recently announced that they have “launch[ed] a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone“.

The new theme is now enabled by default on blogs, such as this one, which are hosted by WordPress.com. And yes it does make blog posts much easier to read as the mobile interface has a less cluttered interface which, although unlikely to provide significant usability problems on a typical desktop computer, can be irritating on a mobile device, such as a iPhone or iPod Touch (which was used to capture the image of the blog which is illustrated).

Best of all is that this enhanced interface has been provided without the need for me to do anything – no software to be upgraded or new themes to install.

Posted in Blog, Gadgets

Opening Up Institutional Training Resources

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:32:20 -0700

I’m now back from a few day’s at Aberystwyth University, where I had been invited to speak at the launch of the HEFCW-funded Gwella project and to give a seminar on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments“.

As this involved a long train journey I also sought to maximise my time in Aberystwyth by participating in a regional meeting for Welsh Web managers. During the brief summaries of areas of work which the members of institutional Web management teams had been involved in I noticed that a number of the institutions were involved in the delivery of training in use of Terminal 4’s Content Management System. But why, I wonder, are institutions still developing their own training resources? As the meeting took place at the start of the first international Open Access Week I did wonder whether an institutional move towards (or commitment to) open access for research publications and research data shouldn’t be complemented by an institutional commitment to providing Creative Commons licence for institutional training resources. And shouldn’t Information Services departments and Libraries be taking a leading role in this area? After all it is staff in the IT Services departments who will be well-placed to develop the technical infrastructure to provide access to such resources and Library staff who can advise on access mechanisms, use of metadata, etc.

This suggestion is not new – back in 2005 I presented a paper on “Let’s Free IT Support Materials!“ at the EUNIS 2005 conference. But it is probably timely to revisit this subject, not only due to links with the Open Access Week but also the related interests in open access for learning resources, as described recently in an article entitled “Get it out in the open” published in The Times Higher.

Now I’m not saying that the availability of open training resources, which might include podcasts and screencasts as well as more conventional training resources, will necessarily always be used – perhaps trainers and user support staff will continue to prefer to use resources they have developed themselves. But if that is the case, then what is the point of services such as JORUM and funding initiatives such as JISC’s Open Educational Resources programme? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to the community in general if more people were involved in such debates?

Posted in openness

RSS Feeds For Welsh University Web Sites

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:11:59 -0700

RSS Usage On Welsh University Home Pages

Last year I published a blog post which provided a summary of usage of RSS feeds on Scottish University home pages. The survey was carried out in July 2008, shortly before the IWMW 2008 event was held in Aberdeen. The aim was to collate evidence on the extent to which best practices in institutional use of RSS were being implemented in Scotland and to facilitate discussions on reasons why best practices may not always be being implemented and ways of addressing such barriers.

As I will be visiting Wales shortly I thought it would be useful to carry out a similar survey of the 12 Welsh Universities.

The Findings

The findings, based on a manual survey carried out on 21 August 2009, are given in the following table.

	Institution	No. of RSS Feeds	Comments
1	Aberystwyth University	0
2	Bangor University	0
3	Cardiff University	0
4	Glamorgan University	0
5	Glyndŵr University	4	RSS feeds for news, sports news, Careers centre news and Student news.
6	Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama	0
7	Swansea University	0
8	Swansea Metropolitan University	1	RSS feed for news.
9	Trinity University College	0
10	University of Wales Institute, Cardiff	0
11	University of Wales, Lampeter	0
12	University of Wales, Newport	0

It appears that only two Welsh institutions are providing RSS feeds which can be found from the home page (16.67%).

Revisiting Community Surveys

Last year’s blog post on RSS usage on Scottish University home pages discussed possible reasons for the low levels of usage, and I don’t intend to revisit that discussion as I suspect the same reasons will be valid for both communities. I should also add that Tony Hirst has developed a tool for dynamic discovery of auto-detectable RSS feeds for all UK University home pages, which currently reports a total of 48 out of 133 institutions (36.1%).

So rather than discussing the specific example of RSS feeds across a sector, I’m more interested in ways in which a sector (or interested and motivated individuals within a sector) can provide similar (factual) surveys which can help to support discussions and, perhaps, inform policies.

Liz Azyan has compiled lists of UK Universities usage of YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace. But, as can be seen from the list for MySpace usage, it is not always easy to provide complete coverage and there are likely to be difficulties in ongoing maintenance of such resources. Would it be useful, I wonder, for the Welsh Web management community to set up a wiki to keep a record of trends within their own sector? This is something I will explore at a meeting of Welsh institutional Web managers at the University of Aberystwyth on Monday.

Posted in General

Top Technology Trends – For The Twentieth Century!

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:54:07 -0700

Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals

Later this week I’m taking part in the Internet Librarian International (ILI) Conference in London. In addition to running a workshop and giving a talk on standards I’ll also be taking part in the closing panel session on Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals.

What should I say, I wonder? Should I talk about the importance of social tools for resource discovery, using Twitter as an example of a tool whose success was unexpected. Or shall I try and quickly gain an understanding on Google Wave and talk about its potential relevance to information professionals.

But doesn’t this approach simply repeat the technological determinism which the postdigital advocates point out has continually failed to deliver on its promises.

Instead I’m intending to take today’s environment as the starting point and explore how technological developments promise to take us towards a better world – in the 1990s.

Today’s Networked Environment

How can we summarise today’s environment, which provides the starting point for a journey towards the past? Let’s mention a few examples.

Twitter: It might be appropriate for event aimed at the Library community to begin by talking about the success of Twitter, not only for providing community support but as a mechanism for resource sharing and resource discovery – yes, Twitter now seems to be a very effective tools for sharing links with one’s friends and colleagues.

Lightweight development: We now hear developers being critical of large-scale funding initiatives, preferring instead small amounts of funding to support rapid development work. The JISC’s recent Rapid Innovation Grants provided an example of a funding body recognising the benefits of such an approach.

Barcamps, Bathcamps, Hackfests, …: Proponents of light-weight development approaches also feel that meeting up with like-minded people, perhaps at weekends, can be a useful way of supporting one’s professional activities (and in the case of the recent Bathcamp, the weekend away also involved camping!)

Crowdsourcing: Examples such as the crowdsourcing of the digitisation of MP’s expenses claims, Galaxy Zoo, reCaptcha and other examples provide further illustrations of today’s networked environment, in which enthusiasts, who need not be developers, can achieve benefits which previously may not have been felt to be achievable without significant expenditure.

There is, of course, a political and social context to this technical environment – and, especially, for those working in the public sector, the context is the gloomy economic situation, an expectation that things will get even worse and a likely change of government in the near future.

Looking Forward to the 1990s

Let’s assume that, due to a malfunctioning (time) portal, we, like Benjamin Button, find ourselves being taken backwards in time, in our case towards the 1990s. How might the networked environment I have summarised above develop? Here are my predictions:

Twitter: The sceptics who argued that Twitter doesn’t have a sustainable business model will be proved correct. The Twitter service will die and, despite an attempt by Facebook to provide a simple type of service using its Status updates, the concept of ‘micro-blogging’ will disappear. The resulting productivity gains will be instrumental in helping the Twittering nations to move out of the global recession.

Lightweight development: The limitations of lightweight development approaches and simple (some say simplistic) formats such as RSS become apparent and, despite providing interesting exemplars, fail to provide an infrastructure for serious significant development work. ‘Enterprise development’ becomes the new ‘lightweight development’ and large-scale Content Management Systems become the popular with organisations facing pressures from their peers to deploy such technologies.

Barcamps, Bathcamps, Hackfests, …: The growth in large-scale enterprise development environment (accompanied by pressure from friends and families to achieve a more healthy work/life balance) brings to an end the culture of the amateur hacker and events such as barcamps, bathcamps and hackfests.

Crowdsourcing: The importance of the professional in the development of high quality networked services goes beyond the developer community. The failure of amateurs to provide the required levels of quality for digitisation, metadata standards, etc. results in an appreciation of the merits of the professional. Librarians and related information professionals become critical in the development of sustainable networked services.

Of course, as with many technological predictions, this vision of the 1990s is an optimistic one. Not only does the demise of social networks lead to an emphasis on real-world friends and relationships, but the political and economic environment will also see tremendous improvements – indeed I predict that in 10 years, or possibly 12 years time (say 1997), we will be very pleased with our political and economic situation and positive about the benefits that the future will bring.

Postscript

This post was influenced by the post-digital session which Dave White facilitated and Rich Hall as part of the fringe (#falt09) activities around the ALT-C 2009 conference. In a blog post about the session Dave White felt that “After the fringe session I was even more convinced that the post-digital was a useful concept but that we hadn’t found the right way of expressing it yet.“

John Maeda has described how “Recently I have had the sense that no matter what new digital territory may arise, we end up where we first began – back in an infinite loop. My instinctive response to this personal perception has been to proclaim a new effort to escape to the post digital . . . which I am certain lies in the past.”

Can we gain a better appreciation of our perhaps naive expectations of the benefits of technological developments by, as John suggests, looking back into the past?

Posted in General

Twitter Event Hashtagging Strategies

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:01:59 -0700

Background

In a recent post on the eFoundation’s blog Andy Powell wrote about “Flocking behaviour – why Twitter is for starlings, not buzzards“. Based on the statistics I had provided for use of Twitter at the recent ALT C 2009 conference Andy picked up on the use of two tags (#altc2009 and #altc09) and pointed out that “if you don’t tweet using the generally agreed tag you are effectively invisible to much of the conference audience“.

I agree – so there’s probably a need to agree on hashtagging strategies for events, which I’ll explore in this post. And I’ll use this as an opportunity to consider what hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010).

Issues To Consider

What are the issues to consider when selecting a hashtag for use at an event?

Being brief: The initial requirement is that as tweets are limited to 140 characters, hashtags should be brief in order to maximise the amount of content that can be containing in a tweet about an event.
Avoiding problems with non-alpha-numeric characters: It may be felt desirable to avoid use of certain non-alphanumeric characters which may cause problems in some Twitter clients. For example, the hashtag #clip2.0 was initially suggested for an event on the relevance of Web 2.0 technologies for the CILIP organisation and CILIP members. However Twitter clients seem to truncate hashtags containing a full stop, so the hashtag #cilip2 was used. Similar problems have been observed with use of a dash (-) as illustrated in the display of a tweet in the TweetDeck client. In addition there was a complaint that use of an underscore (_) in the #cilip_lams event caused usability problems, especially on mobile devices. The advice would seem to be stick with alphanumeric characters in hashtags.
Avoid numbers at the start of hashtags: Hashtags which begin with a number (e.g. #2009foo ) are believed to cause hyperlinking problems in some clients.
Should you be consistent with other tagging services?: Although those who make intensive use of Twitter may feel that the first two points are all that need to be considered when formulating a hashtag for an event, there may be an argument for being consistent with recommendations for tags using in other environments such as other Flickr, YouTube, etc. These services do not suffer for the length constraints imposed by Twitter and so can provide more flexibility. There may be an argument for using a Twitter-safe hashtag in these other services, but what if these other services are the more widely-used services (e.g. events with an established use of Flickr)?
Should the year be included?: Many of the events I’ve attended or followed on Twitter have included the year in the hashtag (e.g. #iwmw2009, #altc2009 and #solo09) but some have not (#alpsp and #cilip_lams). Does the year have to be included, especially as the tweets will be readily accessible via the Twitter search APIs for only a short period? But might a decision to save space by omitting the year cause problems if the Twitter API changes or other tools are used? And might this cause additional confusions with tags for which date encoding may be useful.
One hashtag or several?: If there are multiple events associated with a main event (e.g. pre-conference workshops or fringe events) you will need to consider whether to recommend use of the main event hashtag for these peripheral events or to suggest an alternative hashtag.
Branding issues: There may be pressure to ensure that an event hasthtag provides the correct branding for the organising bodies. The hashtag for the CILIP’s Umbrella 2009 conference, for example, was #cilipumbrella.
Multi-lingual issues: Welsh institutions may need to consider use of bilingual tashtags. Note, for example, that for the CILIP Wales 2009 conference the conference hashtag was cilip-cymru09. I should add, however, that I haven’t any experience of the implications of use of non Latin characters (ironically, as Im (sic) typing this sentence on a Croatian keyboard and cant find the single quote character!)
Being memorable: Perhaps because I’m getting older I am finding it difficult to remember random strings of characters – so I wouldn’t appreciate a tag such as #xuj740n9 (having to re-authenticate a username and password with a similar pattern can also be irritating). I found the hashtags used for the recent Oxford Social Media Conference (#oxsmc09) and Science Online London (#solo09) events easy to remember as the conference names themselves were memorable.
Being different: Having an event hashtag which could clashes with other hashtags is likely to lead to confusion.
Avoiding ambiguities in the characters: Many years ago I was an information officer and I was very aware of the need to avoid confusions between characters such as 1 and i and o and 0 (in some fonts these many be indistinguishable). Note that this may be very relevant for events held next year. The (fictitious) Input Output’s annual conference hashtag #io10 could be particularly confusing depending on the font used on your computer.
Being timely and promoting the hashtag effectively: As mentioned recently, it is important to finalise a hashtag in advance of the event and to ensure that participants and other interested parties are aware of the official hashtag for the event. In many cases participants are likely to tweet about an event prior to the event, perhaps when a call for paper has been published e.g. “Looking for partners to write a proposal for #altc2010 with“.
Obtaining buy-in from users of the tag: As it is not possible to mandate use of an official event hashtag you should seek to ensure that users of the tag will be inclined to use the hashtag. If the hashtag is too long the users may choose to use a shorter one.
Explaining the tag: As well as promoting the hashtag to the event participants you should also try to ensure that other interested parties, who perhaps might notice a stream of tweets with the tag, can easily discover more about the associated event. One way of doing this might be to ensure that a Web page containing details of the hashtag and the event is published early so that it may be indexed by Google. In addition it may be useful to describe the event in Twitter aggregation services such as WThashtag (e.g. see the description for the IWMW 2009 event).

#iwmw2010, #iwmw10, #iwmw – or something else?

This post has described some of the issues which should be considered when choosing an event hashtag. But to put such discussions into context, I’d like to consider the hashtag UKOLN should be using for next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010) – the fourteenth in this series of annual events for members of institutional Web management teams.

I’ve recently attended four events which had a Twitter hashtag, each of which took a different approach: #altc2009, #techshare09, #alpsp and #cilip_lams.

As there aren’t pressures to brand our host institution, UKOLN, there’s no need for a ‘#ukoln_iwmw” style tag. The options, and arguments for and against, are therefore:

#iwmw2010
For: Consistency with previous years and consistency with tags used in Flickr, YouTube, etc. Also consistency with URL used on UKOLN Web site.
Against: Uses 9 characters – this could be shorter.

#iwmw10
For: Saves two characters over #iwmw2010.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Possible confusion over the characters (could it be confused with #iwmwi0?)

#iwmw
For: Saves four characters over #iwmw2010. No confusion with the ‘10′ characters.
Against: Loses consistency with previous years and with other tag services. Loss of the date may cause problems if data is to be used in content of other years (but not necessarily so as the tweets do have a machine-readable date)

What do you think we should go for? And are there other issues one should consider when choosing a hashtag for an event which I haven’t mentioned?

Posted in Events, Twitter

Guest Post: Blogs At Imperial College

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:00:28 -0700

After a gap of 11 months the guest blog post returns with a post by Jenny Evans, Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics at Imperial College. Jenny provides a background to two blogs (to support the Physics and Maths and Engineering departments) which were set up by liaison librarians in 2006 and answers many of the questions which librarians in a similar role may be asking: how did you get agreement from the management?; who contributes; what is the target audience; what do you write about; how long does it take to support; is it sustainable and, perhaps most importantly, can the blog service be regarded as a success?

About Imperial

Imperial College London is a science-focussed institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research with approximately 12,000 full time students. The Library comprises the Central Library and the Mathematics Department Library, located on our South Kensington campus, as well as campus libraries at Charing Cross Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Brompton Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Silwood Park.

Background

Our first two blogs were created by liaison librarians, Ruth Harrison and myself, in March 2006. There were three main reasons we considered using a blog.

Firstly, we had tried sending out emails and newsletters to departments informing them of relevant developments. Problems with this method included academics wanting different formats, or complaining about email overload. From our perspective, as a newsletter tended to be produced only once a term, information we wanted to get out to them quickly was often out of date by the time it was sent.

There was the option of adding pages to the library website, however this relied on us getting information to another library staff member, and then waiting for them to put the page up. Which if you needed to get information out to staff/students quickly was not the ideal solution.

Finally, the library Web site doesn’t provide detailed subject specific information pages, which academics had complained about to us, so we wanted to address this issue – the blogs were a way in which we could provide very specific information and only to those people who wanted it.

As such, we felt a blog would be an ideal way to be able to communicate quickly, effectively and directly with our respective departments about information that was relevant to them. Blogs would enable us to post content as we needed to, they would be easy to set up and maintain, and we could delegate responsibility to staff where appropriate. It also meant academics could set up an RSS feed to the pages so they could control how they viewed the information.

WordPress software

We decided to start the blogs using the free blogging software from WordPress. It was a fairly new option at the time, but it was getting good reviews, seemed to be flexible, offered some useful features and was free.

Getting agreement from management

Working on the assumption that it is much easier to sell an idea that you can demonstrate we created a working prototype and began posting content to the blogs before presenting them to our respective managers. They then took them to the relevant management meetings. Although there was some unease about the lack of branding, and the idea that at the time not all liaison librarians would have a blog, it was agreed that as this was a form of communication, specific to a liaison librarian and their department (not unlike email) that we could continue.

Over the past 3 1/2 years, other liaison librarians have seen the success of our blogs and have created their own. We now have thirteen blogs covering a variety of subject areas. There is currently no specific ‘library style’ for the blogs, although some look more ‘Imperial-like’ than others.

Blog authors

Our blog authors are a mix of library staff – though all work in Library’s Faculty Support Services for Teaching and Research Directorate – as the blogs are aimed staff and students in specific departments/subject areas. As such, the relevant library liaison team are responsible for the blog. This could be a single person or more than one member of the same team. Our medicine blog is aimed at all medical staff and students and as such members of staff from all of the medical campuses contribute to this blog.

Target audience

Each of our blogs has a different target audience, depending on what is thought appropriate for that subject area. This can include:

Academic/research staff
Postgraduate research students
Postgraduate taught course students
Undergraduate students

For example the maths and physics blog that I am responsible for (as I’m no longer responsible for chemistry) is aimed at academic and research staff, and research post-graduate students, although some content is relevant to post-graduate taught course students and I do make them aware of its existence. It is not so relevant to the undergraduate students, however I do have a maths projects blog I have created to support the projects they work on in the first and second year of their course.

Content

This is also something that relies on the particular person or group of people responsible for each blog.

Examples of what people include in their blogs:

New resources including new book purchases and journal subscriptions
News
Custom search engines
Journal citation reports/bibliometrics information
Help/advice pages
Support for teaching sessions
Identifying key resources such as e-books
Highlighting relevant parts of the library website
Highlighting the physical location of relevant collections
Overview of relevant key database and referencing information

Generally, we would try not to duplicate information found on the library Web site, but do highlight relevant content.

How long we spend maintaining our blogs

As you can imagine, this differs depending on who is working on the blog. I did a quick survey of fellow bloggers as to how often they post on their blogs and this ranges from a couple of times a week to once a month. Personally, I must confess I don’t spend as much time on mine as I used to, though my team member Katie does most of the posting these days.

Publicity/Marketing

You can find a link to our blogs on our library homepage and there is also a link from the College blogs page. I’ve also got links on the Physics department website and the Maths Library web page.

For my blog, I email department staff, PhD students and MSc students at least once a term, reminding them the blog is there and highlighting any current news. Some bloggers use Feedburner which enables them to give people the option to receive updates by email.

Our Life Sciences team introduce their blogs to students in induction sessions and point out useful features.

This is possibly something we could market better than we do so at the moment. Suggestions from fellow bloggers include giving them a higher profile, making them more visually appealing, perhaps giving them a similar style/layout.

Success?

As a whole our blogs have been very successful – they are all getting used. They enable us to raise our profile as liaison librarians within the departments we work with, and provide our users with a resource that is specific to their areas of expertise.

In the words of one of our Life Sciences bloggers:

“Subject blogs are an ideal way to gather relevant subject specific material together in one place for your staff and students, they can be tailored and expanded to meet the need and are much more flexible than having to coordinate an official webpage update. We introduce our students to them in inductions and point out useful areas such as ‘Finding Books’ (which is a well-used page) and Academic Writing Skills (another well-used page which lists academic writing skills books in the library with links to the catalogue – this really picked up over the summer when Masters students were focussing on writing up).“

The statistics available via WordPress do enable you to see details about how many people are viewing your blog, who is referring to your blog, what the top posts and pages are, search terms people are using to find you, and what people are clicking on and incoming links. However, this doesn’t include RSS feeds (unless you are using Feedburner). And these statistics do demonstrate that our blogs are being used.

Personally, I didn’t expect loads of comments on my blog – I use it more as a means of getting relevant information out to my departments (maths and physics) – however I do encourage people to get in contact via the comments mechanism of the blog. I have installed a MeeboMe widget on my blog which hasn’t had a great deal of use (though the widget I installed on the blog I created for my maths undergraduate students has had a few enquiries). My humanities colleague has also tried MeeboMe with limited success.

Our Life Sciences team has noticed that the more time they have invested in “developing, populating and marketing (not to mention regularly updating) the blog has seen a continued growth in usage figures”.

Another unexpected outcome has been the interest from third parties such as Victor Hemming from Mendeley who had seen “posts we had put up about referencing and networking for researchers. This initial contact led to Mendeley coming to Imperial to give a personal introduction. It was good to know that our blog was attracting the attention of useful people and sending them in our direction”.

Sustainability

Our blogs have been running for 3 and half years now and show no signs of slowing down. The bloggers I have been in touch with all feel that it is worth the time they spend maintaining and updating them.

Jenny Evans,
Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics
Imperial College
London
Email: j.evans@imperial.ac.uk
Blog: http://physmaths.wordpress.com/ Posted in Blog, Guest-post

If It’s Not “All About The Technology” Then What Else Is It Not About?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:46:06 -0700

The announcement of the availability of a video summary of the event reminded me of the opening F-ALT session, held on 8 September in the Lass O’Gowrie pub (a pub I always try to get to when I’m at a conference at Manchester University). This was my first time at F-ALT, the ALT’s Fringe event, and I was looking forward to meeting up with the F-ALT organisers and participants, many of whom I’ve met previously or may not have met but read their blogs or follow on Twitter.

From what I’d heard of last year’s F-ALT, the Fringe event would provide an opportunity to discuss topics related to elearning in a informal and friendly setting. I’d heard anecdotes of last year’s debate on the “Edupunk” meme and was looking forward to a similar light-hearted evening of geeky fun. However the topic of the opening F-ALT session was “Postdigital” and the description on the F-ALT wiki read:

“What does this mean? Why is it not two words? Is it just Dave making-up another term in an attempt to get keynote gigs? No, it actually has some substance to it and could be a very helpful way of framing the learning-tech discussion over the next few years. If you are sceptical about all this then you should definitely turn-up. The chances of an argument breaking out are very high.“

Perhaps this year’s F-ALT wouldn’t turn out to be the informal evening and drink and chat that I had expected! The participants at the event were asked to give a two-minute response to a number of ideas we were presented with. Mine was, if I recall correctly:

The speed of the change, however, has left us with the mistaken belief that social change was somehow ‘created’ by the digital rather than simply played out on a the canvas of the digital; that the digital itself is the main driver of change.

Being presented with this serious topic in the pub on the opening evening of the conference I tried to response in a light-hearted fashion. I suggested that it was appropriate that this topic was raised in a traditional Manchester boozer, possibly a pub which Fredrick Engles drank in when he spent time in the city. And just as we call for ownership of our scholarly works in ours IRs (institutional repositories) so Engels called for ownership of the means of production in the better known IR – the industrial revolution. So the arguments we are having now aren’t about primarily about the technologies, but reflect arguments which date back hundreds of years (indeed Martin Weller has suggested that the debates go back many centuries).

The publication of the video summary of the evening (which is embedded below) provides an opportunity to revisit ‘postdigital’ debate …

If, as Dave White suggests in a post on “Postdigital: Escaping the Kingdom of the New?“, we tend to overhype the new and exciting, and fail to appreciate the aspects which are actually useful, what are the implications? Perhaps this is a topic which is worthy of more considered thinking.

Now maybe it is correct to suggest that we in the development community, who consider ourselves to be agents of a transformational change to a better environment, fail to appreciate that our users often ignore our developments and our vision. After all, if the initial evidence reflects a more general trend, we seem to be living in a world in which most users use an MS Windows platform to access institutional resources – they’re not interested in Linux, for example, despite many years of evangelism from the open source community. A computer’s a computer, just like a fax machine is a fax machine – only nerds care about what goes on underneath the bonnet.

But if this is true, what are the implications for accepting that we are in a postdigital age? Don’t we then accept that our IT environment will be owned by the mega-corporations – Google and Microsoft. And let’s forget debates about device independence and interoperability – unless the mega-corporations feel such issues may provide a competitive edge.

It strikes me that the postdigital agenda is a conservative one, in which we are asked to accept that we (in our institutions and in our working environment) cannot shape our digital environment. And for me that is a worrying point of view which I don’t accept.

Posted in Events, General Tagged: altc2009

200,000 Views

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:29:39 -0700

On 6 September 2008 I published a post entitled 100,000 Views which documented the date of this blog having received 100,000 views according to the usage statistics provided on the WordPress.com site. I described how:

“I’ve found it useful in the past to write about significant landmarks on this blog in order to provide some data which other bloggers may find useful in drawing parallels. And such factual data may also be useful in the various blog workshops which myself and colleagues have been running“.

Just over a year later, with the blog having yesterday received 200,000 views, this milestone provides another opportunity for some reflection. As can be seen from the graph, there has been a significant increase in the number of average monthly page views which began (coincidentally?) after the blog reached 100,00 views in September 2008.

There was a peak (of 9,108 views) the following month (October 2008) followed by a plateau of over 7,000 views until June 2009, which saw a new peak of 9,300 views. This peak coincided with work I had been involved in for a workshop on “Using the Social Web to Maximise Access to your Resources” – it would seem that the experiments (including gathering evidence of the influence of Twitter in generating traffic) were successful. However there has been a significant decrease in traffic since that peak, although the figures are still higher than a year ago (the dip could be accounted for by the summer holidays and a decrease in the numbers of posts while I was away at conferences recently – but could also reflect a more general decrease in blogging activities which some commentators have speculated about recently).

Although I recognise that it is not possible to gain a picture of the state of the blogosphere based on usage figures for a single blog (to say nothing of the view that there may be Lies, Dammed Lies, Blog Statistics and Unexpected Spikes) I hope this snapshot is of interest to others. It would be particularly interesting to hear if others are experiencing a downwards trend in light of the supposed move away from blogs to use of Twitter.

Posted in Blog

We Need Evidence – But What If We Don’t Like The Findings?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:00:33 -0700

The Need For Evidence

We know that technologies have the potential to provide many benefits, but this potential is not necessarily also realised. We therefore need to gather evidence in order to inform our policies – perhaps to help us recognise that what seemed to be a great idea has actually not been delivered in practice, perhaps to make us aware of a need for greater advocacy and user engagement or perhaps for refining the approaches we initially took.

Usage Statistics For Mobile Devices

Such issues came to mind following a recent discussion on the website-info-mgt JISCMail list. The discussion began by addressing the question of whether institutions should be developing iPhone applications providing, for example, resources of interest to new students.

Following a discussion as to whether we should be developing generic applications for mobile devices and whether this could fail to exploit device specific features, especially features which might be particularly valuable for students with disabilities, David Bailey (Bath Spa University) put the discussion into context by providing statistics on access to his institutional Web site from various platforms.

His statistics revealed that 80.55% of visits to the Web site in the past month came from an MS Windows platform, 17.84% from the Apple Macintosh and 0.66% from a Linux platform, The figures for mobile devices were iPhone (0.44%), iPod (0.11%) and Symbian (0.10%) with the figures for mobile devices such as the Palm, Blackberry and Android and gaming devices such as the Wii and Playstation being less than 0.1%.

In response to this sharing of evidence a number of follow-up posts provided additional statistics:

Heriot-Watt: MS Windows (93.51%), Apple Macintosh (5.05%), Linux (0.67%), iPhone (0.34%), Symbian (012%) and iPod (0.11%) (see email).

Sunderland: MS Windows (92.4%), Apple Macintosh (5.7%) and Linux (0.7%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

Imperial College: MS Windows (91.69%), Apple Macintosh (6.9%), Linux (0.87%), iPhone (0.3%), Symbian (012%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

University of Warwick: MS Windows (89.19%), Apple Macintosh (8.4%), Linux (1.85%) and iPhone (0.25%). The figures for other devices were all less than 0.1% (see email).

Before reflecting on the implications of this evidence we need to be aware of the limitations of these figures: it reflects the experiences of only four institutions; the data is not necessarily based on institutional data and may reflect usage for departmental Web servers and the data reflects usage in the summer vacation. But having acknowledged these caveats, what might the implications be if this evidence does prove to be indicative of the wider higher educational community?

Discussion

Ironically although the discussion on the website-info-mgt list began over access to institutional Web sites from mobile devices the data provides little evidence of significant usage by mobile devices. But the data does reveal patterns of desktop usage which are worthy of further consideration.

I suspect many of the Web and IT developers and support staff who have been critical of Microsoft over the years will be disappointed at the overwhelming popularity of the MS Windows platform for accessing the institutional Web sites described above. Should we now accept that MS Windows has won the battle for the desktop operating system environment? And at a time when, if the predictions are correct, we may see a reduction in staffing levels, do these figures suggest that the time and effort in testing Web sites on the Linux platform may not be justified? This isn’t to suggest that Web sites should be designed for the MS Windows platform, rather that the effort in testing and tweaking for little-used platforms may not be justified.

Of course an argument could be made that the figures suggest that there is no point in developing services for the mobile Web as the current levels of usage are very low. But the difference is that the desktop and laptop computer environment is now mature, whereas the mobile environment is new.

I think there is a debate to be had – and there is also, perhaps, the need to ask “Where did it go wrong? What happened to the diversity of operating systems? Where have the Mac users and Linux users gone?” Or perhaps they are still around, and simply aren’t visiting institutional Web sites. What do you think?

Posted in Gadgets

Tweetboard: Adding Twitter To Web Pages

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:00:48 -0700

I was recently alerted to a blog post on TechCrunch entitled “Tweetboard Launches Twitter Client And URL Shortener“. The article described how this service “lets you create a Twitter-powered forum on any site“. In addition Tweetboard provides “the ability to view discussions as a thread, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook“.

This sounded interesting so I signed up for a (free) Tweetboard account and created a page in which I added the HTML code to create the embedded interface.

An screenshot of my experiment is illustrated.

As can be seen the tool provides a threaded view of replies to tweets – something I’ve not seen before but a feature which does seem popular in FriendFeed.

However as has been pointed out, the service does seem slow (although I wonder if this might be due to the increased usage of the service which the TechCrunch article may have generated) and the tweet display cannot be moved.

Now although many experienced Twitter users may be interested in the threaded replies feature I suspect that a typical response is likely to be “So what? There are lots of good twitter clients available – why should I be interested in this one?“. This may be true, but will this approach be a useful way of introducing new Twitter users to the service, in a specific context of use. At an amplified event, might an event page with this embedded interface prove useful, I wonder? And if the HTML