Science Library Pad

Elsevier's 2collab article bookmarking service

I had the opportunity to preview some of the features and upcoming enhancements in Elsevier's 2collab bookmarking service.  Some of the details I will provide are not in the released beta yet, but they should be out soon.  (Disclaimer: this preview was set up for me by Elsevier, because of my blog.)

The basic interface and method of operation will be familiar to users of delicous or the more specialised science bookmarking and bibliography-management services like Connotea, Zotero and CiteULike.  I do have to remind myself that most people doing academic work are not aware of such services, and Elsevier is of course well-positioned to reach huge numbers of users in the course of their daily interactions with its content.

2collab is a completely free, open, stand-alone service.  I made a point of asking about import and export of bookmarks and both are supported.  Once you're logged into your account, you can go to manage and select "import bookmarks" or "export bookmarks".  The version of import I was shown supported various other bookmarking services.  You can export in various fairly simple file formats.

In terms of bookmarking it doesn't yet have the ability to import very rich metadata.  It can get good information (journal, title, volume, pages etc.) from PubMed, Scopus and ScienceDirect, but for other services it just works like a plain URL bookmarker.  I suggested they might look into either or both of

• being able to read COINS microformat and encouraging sites to including COINS
• an infrastructure to build site translators either similar to Zotero's or ideally sharing the same technology as Zotero (assuming both groups would be willing)

A strength of 2collab is the ability to create an manage groups.  I had experimented with creating a group in Connotea (ARL e-Science Task Force) but as far as I could tell, there was no way to have only particular bookmarks in it - it appears to show all the bookmarks from all the members of the group.

The 2collab group abilities appear better, you can create open public groups, closed public groups (you can see the bookmarks, but have to request membership in order to be able to add bookmarks) and completely private groups.  When you make a bookmark, it will list your group memberships with a checkbox to select which groups to share with.  You can also copy a bookmark into a group using the "edit bookmark" screen. 

Any bookmarks you make are private by default, you have to explicitly share them by selecting a "make public" checkbox.  If you try to copy a private bookmark to a public group, it will pop up a warning box and let you choose what you want to do. 

You can rank and comment on bookmarks.  You can get RSS feeds on tags, groups and users.

Not surprisingly they are taking some advantage of their access to Scopus data, it will automatically pull in the number of Scopus citations for an article, and if you know your Scopus Author ID(s), you can use that to pull in articles you have written (you can also mark yourself as an author when making a bookmark).

In the new version it will show a little blue "OWN" icon on bookmarks that you have made, and a little golden "AUT" icon on bookmarks of articles where you have indicated you are an author.

I asked them about APIs, they seemed fairly open to discussion, they described 2collab as a "data aggregation platform".  You can get an idea of their current thinking from their blog posting Next Big Things - pt 1: integration is the key.

UPDATE 2007-11-28:  More thoughts after working with the November 27th release and its new features.  It is not yet a very tag-centric system.  You can't do a mass rename or split of tags.  You can't attach an explanation to a tag, a Connotea feature I use a lot to explain tags I use for particular presentations or reports.  You also can't set an embargo period for a bookmark, it is only public or private.  There is no way to "friend" another user or follow their bookmarks within the system (you can get RSS feeds to use externally).  That being said, I do find the 2collab "fresh face" is a clean design and quite intuitive to use.

Flickr Places launches

Flickr has launched Places where, if I can borrow a term from Lorcan, they are making their data work hard, providing a (dare I say it) portal to each location, with a map, temperature, time, popular tags, groups, and "interesting" photos (where photos are selected with a fairly complicated algorithm including explicitly mapped photos, along with photos that just have been tagged e.g. "ottawa", with interestingness metrics mixed in).

You can see this evolving in various fairly obvious social networking, travel, and discussion directions.

Check it out:

http://flickr.com/places/Canada/Ontario/Ottawa

They've also changed the map display for photos, the default global view now shows tags placed at locations, rather than just dots

http://www.flickr.com/map

Personally I find it's actually less intuitive to navigate their new interface than the all-dots one.

in which I launch a new blog

Although I have been justifying my reviews of GPS devices and other such things as analogous to the Internet Librarian gadgets presentations, I can't quite justify stretching this blog to include fun technical topics like say, using WDS to create a wireless bridge using an Airport Express and a DGL-4300, so to celebrate the third anniversary of Science Library Pad I am hereby launching an additional blog

Richard's Tech Reviews

It will be mainly about the types of gadgets you may already have seen in this blog, presented as technically and comprehensively as I can muster the energy for.  It's a completely separate blog with a separate feed.  All gadget reviews and highly technical networking stuff will now be there.  Science Library Pad will continue to be about academic library future topics, as filtered through the lens of technology and my particular interests in SOA and e-Science.

Enjoy!  You can never have too many blogs or feeds in your reader, right?

blogiversary year 3

Just three years since I started this blog to hold presentation notes from Internet Librarian 2004.
I continue to be amazed at the connections and opportunities it has opened up.

As always, these numbers and graphics may demonstrate that my blog is either much bigger or much smaller than you thought, anyway, they're mostly for my own amusement.

Feed Stats

Feed readership growth has been steady, I was hoping to get to 1000 (as measured by FeedBurner) but I didn't quite make it, I hit 956.  That compares with about 575 last year.  (I might have done a bit more analysis but FeedBurner was having a rare meltdown as I was trying to write this.)  Part of that jump though, visible in February 2007, was just Google turning on the reporting of stats for Google Reader and other Google properties.  The various valleys and dips this year are FeedBurner temporarily losing connection with one of its feed stats sources.

Web Stats

The direct hits on my site (as seen by StatCounter) are steady to declining.  However the stats are a bit bogus in terms of library technology anyway, as many of the hits are for my GPS and other technology reviews (about which, more to come).

Technorati provides some vague measure of incoming links as "authority" a count of the number of different blogs that have linked to one's blog in the last six months as Technorati Authority, mine is currently 96, for whatever that's worth (major blogs have authorities in the thousands, in case you're wondering).

By far the most popular content as measured by feed item views was Sci Foo.  The all-time winner continues to be my controversial posting on the future of the research library.  For "clicks back to the site" Medicine 2.0 looks like the tops on a quick scan, but I only have click data starting from mid-2007 when Google bought FeedBurner and made FeedBurner Pro free.

Google Analytics has changed its map views, here are country-level and city-level views of my web hits (and no, I don't know why they made the thin strand of islands that curve off of Alaska look like a giant prong)

I am up to 1857 posts, 542 comments and 106 trackbacks (a few of the latter two groups are undeleted spam, but most are not).

Previously:
November 19, 2006  meta: 2 years of Science Library Pad
December 22, 2005  year-end wrapup
October 24, 2005  to every season turn turn - one year of scilib blogging

open science and the web for research library 2.0?

Peter Murray-Rust points me to Dr. Liz Lyon's keynote for a November 2007 ARL Directors meeting

Open Science and the Research Library: Roles, Challenges and Opportunities?

I saw her present at InfoGrid 2005 and I've downloaded subsequent ones, this one is more Web 2.0 centric than others I have seen.  She has done a lot of deep thinking about the challenges and opportunities related to dealing with scientific data in our new cyberscience world.

Along related lines Bernard Dumouchel (former CISTI DG) wrote a short comment which asserted that supporting open science was a key possible future role for the academic library, it was for the September 2006 ARL Task Force on Library Support for E-Science ARL/NSF Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe, the paper is

New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe - CISTI submission (PDF)

Unfortunately ARL moved all the files from this event, breaking all the previous links to presentations and reports that I had made.  Data stewardship irony, no?

This is the new site they made, it has working links

http://www.arl.org/pp/access/nsfworkshop.shtml

Previously:
March 31, 2006  presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation
February 15, 2006  roles and challenges for the academic library in e-Science
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:00 - Developing e-infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

ICCBSS conference 2008 - SOA and component-based software

7th IEEE International Conference on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS) - "icecubes"
February, 25-29, 2008 - Madrid, Spain

The programme is already set, it includes NRC's Anatol Kark with SEI's Tricia Oberndorf, doing a workshop on "Research Agenda for System of Systems Interoperability" and a keynote by Alan Brown of IBM Rational Software on "Practical Approaches to Delivering Service-Oriented Solutions: The Role of Software Architects and Architecture in an SOA World".  Many of the papers/presentations cover SOA or related topics.

Canadian Digital Information Strategy comments deadline coming up

The Canadian Digital Information Strategy is currently issued in draft form for comment by any interested person or organization. Please note that comments are due by Nov 23, 2007.

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cdis/index-e.html

learn from music industry, we all can

Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Edgar Bronfman told mobile operators that they must not make the same mistake that the music industry made.

"We used to fool ourselves,' he said. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."

Mobile operators risk the same, he said. Fewer than 10% of mobile owners buy music on their handset, the vast majority of which is ringtones.

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," he said. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content. They want it to be easy to buy with a single click - yes, a single click, not a dozen. And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are. 24/7. Any player in the mobile value chain who thinks they can provide less than a great experience for consumers and remain competitive is fooling themselves."

MacUser - Music boss: we were wrong to go to war with consumers - November 14, 2007

widely reported

All of us who are adapting to the new ways of operating in the digital environment can learn a lesson from this.

ROM unearths dinosaur... in their own collection

Or: "One small sentence for John McIntosh, one giant dinosaur for the Royal Ontario Museum".

"This is a fascinating and somewhat humorous story, and one the Museum is extremely pleased to tell,” said the ROM’s Director and CEO William Thorsell.

Dr. David Evans, new Associate Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the ROM’s Department of Natural History, found the ultimate “skeleton in the closet.” Arriving in May 2007 to head up the ROM’s dinosaur research program, one of his first jobs was to find a sauropod dinosaur for display in the new Age of Dinosaurs gallery. The ROM’s new gallery already included excellent specimens of three of the four most recognizable dinosaur types – T.Rex, Triceratops, and Stegasaurus – but none of the largest dinosaurs, the sauropods.

After spending months investigating options, including purchasing a cast or even digging one up, Evans found what he was looking for in an unexpected place. While on a related trip to Wyoming, he was reading an article by famed sauropod expert Jack McIntosh when something caught his eye -- a reference to a Barosaurus skeleton at the ROM. The ROM’s databases turned up a blank, but after connecting the disparate dinosaur dots Evans was able to show that what were thought to be isolated bones scattered throughout the collections room actually belonged to a single dinosaur.

ROM News Releases - Massive Barosaurus skeleton discovered at the ROM

CTV Newsnet has a good video (which is either not available or not free) where Dr. Evans says it was a 2005 article by McIntosh that said the skeleton was transferred from the Carnegie Museum to the ROM.  I did some searching and I turned up a single 2005 book chapter "The Genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae)", which is searchable on Amazon, the book is Thunder-lizards: The Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs (ISBN-13: 978-0253345424) and on page 42 it says

"These elongate cervicals (CM 1198) probably belong to a partial skeleton, field #155 (now ROM 3670), which was originally identified as Diplodocus."

Here's a direct link to Amazon book search for page 40, which shows the ROM abbreviation (I couldn't quite figure out how to get it to go to page 42, but you can scroll there).  The book is also on Google Book Search, but page 42 is a forbidden page there.

The dinosaur is named "Gordo".

ELPUB 2008 in Toronto June 25-27: Open Scholarship

The CFP for ELPUB 2008 is out.

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences , and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications.

deadline is January 20, 2008

$10 million if you can find a better silver extraction method

you have until January 21, 2008 to register as a participant and submit your Phase 1 proposal

Barrick’s Unlock the Value program is a unique opportunity for scientific problem solvers. We invite proposals for an economically viable way to recover silver from silica-encapsulated ore. For proposals judged to have merit, Barrick will:

    * Fund your research
    * Pay you a consulting fee
    * Provide resources and expertise
    * Help you develop and test your idea

http://www.unlockthevalue.com/

Widely reported, e.g. International Herald Tribune

OTTAWA: In an unusual approach to research and development, Barrick Gold is offering a $10 million prize to any scientist, researcher or inventor who can increase the amount of silver the company recovers from a mine in Argentina.

Gold and silver extraction, which generally involves trickling diluted cyanide over crushed rock, has at times caused serious environmental problems. But Barrick's decision to stake a prize for a new process comes from its frustration at recovering only 6.7 percent of the silver in its Veladero mine, compared with an 80 percent rate for its gold.

After several alternative techniques for removing the silver proved either unsuccessful or financially unfeasible, Gregory Wilkins, chief executive and president of Barrick, said the company thought it needed a broader approach.

"This is a way to go out to the global scientific community to focus that intellectual horsepower," Wilkins said Wednesday from the company's head office in Toronto. "Rather than limit the problem to a very small R&D staff, we have turned our R&D group into managers of research."

The competition's winner, if there is one, will probably receive more than $10 million. Wilkins said that Barrick, the largest gold miner in the world, would help finance research proposals with potential. If any prove successful, the prize will be an additional payment.

IHT - Barrick offers $10 million reward for silver extraction solution - September 20, 2007

NRC Research Press launches updated site

<marketing-mode>
NRC RP has a new site (which if you know anything about the constraints of Canadian government CLF and official languages is an accomplishment in itself).  An explanation of the open access compliance of the journals is prominently featured in the bottom centre of the front page.  I find the site has more modern look.

http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/home.html
</marketing-mode>

latest EA info from IT Architects in Academia

Without having ever attended, it nevertheless appears that this group is probably the closest in alignment to the sorts of activities and challenges faced by my architecture group at CISTI.

ITANA’s Constituent Group meeting [was October 25, 2007 as part of EDUCAUSE].  We had approximately 40 people attend. Many of the attendees were from newly formed architecture groups.

Jim Phelps started out the meeting with a short presentation on ITANA, how it is supported and how you can participate. He reviewed some of the findings from the CIO Survey on EA (Enterprise Architecture).

There was active discussion around the role of Architecture in Business Process Improvement. Most CIOs stated that Business Process Improvement was where EA had the least impact on the enterprise. The reasons that were put forth included:

• EA is often seen as a “technology group” with no real input or understanding of the business side
• EA is often on the technology side and the changes actually need to come from the business side and be made by the business side.
• The business owners often want to re-implement the processes that they are currently doing not adopt new processes. We often make the technology match the current business process rather than change the business process.

There was discussion about the role of EA in business process change. This mostly focused on the fact that EA cannot implement the change but they can highlight the issue, document the current process and the improvements and work to lead the discussion around the change.

We also discussed the way that EA engages in the enterprise. Some institutions use EA as a gate function. Projects don’t get the go-ahead without EA’s approval or they are allowed to continue with contingencies. Other institutions use EA to guide projects and illuminate issues. Where does EA plug-in to the organization and the project / funding processes?

itana.org - EDUCAUSE CG Meeting Notes - October 26, 2007

There is also an ITANA wiki.

Designing Cyberinfrastructure 2007

I am a bit late to this content, but there was a conference "Designing Cyberinfrastructure" in January

http://cyberinfrastructure.us/
or http://www.si.umich.edu/cyber-infrastructure/

with the papers published in a special issue of First Monday in June

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/

It's more grid, policy and patent focused than about specific IT architecture(s).

Some papers and presentations of interest:

• The Open Science Grid (paper), Building Large-Scale Cyberinfrastructure Through Collaboration (PowerPoint presentation) - Paul Avery
• Cyberinfrastructure and Innovation Policy - Brian Kahin
• Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability - Chris Mackie
• Implementing Openness: An International Institutional Perspective - Sacha Wunsch–Vincent, Taylor Reynolds, and Andrew Wyckoff

I hope that these sorts of discussions will continue, but also as I indicated, start to encompass the idea of IT architectures for (in Christine Borgman's term) "scholarly infrastructure", that will bring in many more services and capabilities than just the compute and storage focus of the grid initiatives.

Previously:
November 12, 2007  Enterprise Services Architectures - Chris Mackie - DLF Fall Forum 2007
September 30, 2007  Blog for OECD Participative Web goes live (Sacha Wunsch–Vincent played a key role in enabling this)

Scientific American - 60 second science

Scientific American has launched an additional site

http://www.60secondscience.com/

In addition to brief news items, there is also a podcast

http://www.60secondscience.com/archive/science-podcast/

via FeedBurner Publisher Buzz

Enterprise Services Architectures - Chris Mackie - DLF Fall Forum 2007

I was privileged to have been paired with Chris Mackie of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on the DLF programme, and fortunately I think our talks were quite complementary.  Chris talked about Enterprise Services Architectures (ESA), presenting a very clear-eyed view of the sustainability challenges of IT infrastructure for higher education, and how ESA and some specific Middleware ESA (MESA) projects are addressing those challenges.  His presentation (PDF) is now available from the DLF site.

Facebook fad or future - TVO's The Agenda

The Nov 7, 2007 The Agenda on TVO starts off with swearing (seriously) and then has a panel on Facebook.  Unfortunately TVO's new video player doesn't show you a time index (a control bar will come up at the bottom of the video if you put your mouse over the video window), so I can't point you at a starting time for the panel, other than to say it's roughly one-third along.

I can't direct link to the video either, but it's on their videos page, I think it only stays up for a week.  You can also get audio of just the Facebook segment free via iTunes or video also from iTunes.

I'm never convinced that having a bunch of middle-aged people talk about a technology that started with university students is particularly useful.  Anyway, Om Malik was there, he talked about the valuation and such.

Om has a good posting about Facebook Beacon, which may or may not be evil - Facebook’s Cruel Intentions, Facebook Responds.

Middle-aged opinionmaking aside, the Agenda discussion is informative, and at 32 minutes long, comprehensive.  I like Nancy Baym's turn of phrase about Microsoft and Facebook - the moderator asks "can Facebook make Microsoft cool?" and she responds "I don't think so, it's like the middle-aged man with a new sports car".  Baym's website Online Fandom also reminds me that you can also get TVO video through iTunes, as a free video podcast.  It's interesting to see all the panelists all commenting on each other's blog postings - I have to wonder whether they made similar connections and had any discussions within Facebook.  (And of course since Facebook is a dark net, I have no easy way of discovering this.)

Mathew Ingram - http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2007/11/09/video-me-talking-about-facebook/

Mary Evans - http://markevanstech.com/2007/11/09/whats-a-friend-these-days/

Jesse Hirsh - http://jesse.openflows.org/the-clash-of-the-titans-20/

They talked a lot about about Beacon and all this application notification virality, the dream/nightmare of these megatargeted social network ads (which I have already been ranting about on Facebook).  They also discuss Facebook apps and Google OpenSocial briefly.

In my experience, the main thing Facebook has done is connected me to a few people from Junior High, and gets me a little bit of insight into activities of some people who don't have blogs.  But for me overall I get way more out of my blog connections.

This URL should get you to the Agenda audio Podcasts page in iTunes:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=200802797

and this one to their video podcasts

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=251692621

(Additional update after I realised The Agenda has both audio and video podcasts on iTunes.)

Internet filtering and the Global Commons - IDRC reports

The Canadian International Development Research Centre has an interesting article Net Protectors Defend the Global Commons, in which they talk about the Internet filtering and censorship efforts in various countries, and what is being done to investigate and counteract them.

[OpenNet Initiative (ONI)] research results are publicized in a variety of ways. The team produces rigorous country reports and regional overviews, available on the ONI website. The country reports have also been compiled, along with further analysis, in a book to be published early next year by MIT Press (Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering).

To reach an even wider audience, ONI findings have also been synthesized and presented in a visually compelling way in an online, interactive Global Internet Filtering Map and on an information-packed poster, both of which were funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

The article also talks about the Citizen Lab, a group that is new to me, here's some info from their website

The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada focusing on advanced research and development at the intersection of digital media and world civic politics.

Andrew Keen and the demise of authority - TVO's The Agenda

TVO's The Agenda had Andrew Keen on, followed by a panel about the changing nature of authority.

You can watch the video, it's linked from The Agenda - Video, it's the Nov 8 2007 show (I do wish people would provide permalinks for these JavaScript popup things).  Their new video player has no time indication, so unfortunately I can't tell you when the second segment on authority starts.

UPDATE 2007-11-12: You can get the audio for Keen and for authority directly from iTunes, as well as see the entire page on Agenda audio podcasts.  The video is also available, see the video podcast page as well as the Keen and authority videos.  ENDUPDATE

Keen basically said "the kids today are too dumb to separate truth from truthiness", from which he draws the conclusion a better system would be elite gatekeepers providing "professional" content.

I still don't quite follow his idolisation of the mass media.
Journalism used to be ok, but you have to go way way back to the early days of TV to find much quality content (and maybe even then it was mostly garbage, I've only seen the highlights from those days).

There was no Web at all in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, do you want to go back and look at some of the professional mass content let through by the gatekeepers Keen lauds?  Good lord man, it was shite, particularly the TV and movies.  We have TV shows that are 10x better now, thanks to a fragmented market.

It's particularly telling to see Keen's visceral reaction of distaste to a video of a Google VP talking about the promise of Web 2.0.  I'm not convinced Keen is motivated so much by a love of "professional" content as by a hatred of Silcon Valley utopianism (possibly related to his being a former Valley entrepreneur).

In case you're not aware, Keen wrote a book called The Cult of the Amateur, which is basically All Hail Mass Media and The Professional Classes.  Which, as I said, would be a more convincing argument if both the media and the professionals had been delivering us amazing content, rather than a lot of commercial pop-cultural lazy garbage.  The amateur cult on LibraryThing has rated the book 2.5 stars out of 5, which is quite a low rating.  Personally I thought it was such utter nonsense I couldn't manage more than a one sentence review.

That being said, I am not a relativist.  I think there are absolute moral and physical truths.  I think all this cultural relativism is baloney.  Science is not one belief system amongst many, there is no "believing" in DNA, as much as post-modernist "professionals" would like to assert.  But where I disagree strongly with Keen is that only the elite authorities have access to this truth.  Professionals can and do spout utter nonsense.  Amateurs can say things that are self-evidently true.  Truth is not relative, but it is equally available.

The most notable weakness of Keen's critique is it is not the public that has been pushing the truthiness agenda, indeed quite the opposite, it is the unwashed masses who have been seeking out BETTER ways of finding factual content, through rigourously referenced Internet postings, while the minor forces of leftist cultural relativism and the major forces of right-wing "when we make a statement it becomes inherent truth" have been leading the Assault on Reason.  Indeed my major beef with Al Gore's book of the same name was that it got diverted into being an anti-Bush diatribe, when the topic of the systematic assault on truth led by the right and supported by the "professional" mass media is one of the biggest and most important stories of the decade.

In fact, so adamant are the Internet amateurs about high-quality content, in the absence of such from the mass professional media, that I think it may be damaging Wikipedia.  There are two competing visions for Wikipedia.  For me, I'd like it to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  What Keen sees as a flaw, the fact that its entry for "truthiness" is as meticulously referenced and detailed as its entry for "truth", i see as a strength.  Here's the thing: the Wisdom of Crowds benefits most from... a crowd.  That means a few big central sites can get much better information as there are many more eyeballs checking for bugs.  I have long been dismayed by the decline of USENET, because it used to be one central place you could go to ask a question or start a discussion and get useful responds (yes, along with ridiculous flame threads, but those were manageable).  Now if you want to find info about a digital camera, or ask a question about physics, you're faced with dozens and dozens of fragmented discussion groups and web sites.

Wikipedia can and does address that fragmentation for general knowledge, in the same way that IMDB does for the specific topic of movies.  And at a certain level I agree, very technical items about Battlestar should go on a BG wiki, Warcraft on a Warcraft wiki, Trek on a Trek wiki etc.  But there are lots of general items that still benefit from being in the larger WIkipedia community.  There is a big tension right now unfortunately about what level of "notability" warrants a Wikipedia page.  I would set the bar fairly low - it's tremendously useful for me to do a search on Number Eight and get a nicely curated Wikipedia entry. 

Unfortunately Wikipedia seems to be moving in the other direction.  Sci Foo was challenged for notability (although it survived).  Number Eight is marked as trivia (although the notice has already moved from the top of the page to a miscellany section).  The problem with this is it's going to undermine content creation.  The great thing about Wikipedia is you can put up a starter page about your particular interest, and there are enough people in the crowd that it often builds up into a useful entry.

Anyway, those are my amateur thoughts, in my blog that has created more interesting connections for me than I probably could have ever gotten from an entire lifetime of writing more professionally crafted content for major media venues. 

Turning back to the TVO episode that started this all, the panel on authority that follows Keen is ok, I wish their points had been made a bit more clearly and sharply, they were a bit drifty, but the gist is that questions of truth have been pondered by philosophers since the dawn of philosophy, that the decline of authority (in particular of respect for authority figures such a doctors and teachers) started long before the Internet, and that most people are perfectly capable of separating nonsense (like say Keen's book) from quality content (like a good Wikipedia entry).

Previously:
October 13, 2007  The Wrath of the Professional: more anti-Internet nonsense
October 24, 2006  Maclean's: the Internet sucks

Leopard firewall protection is spotty - Mac OS X 10.5 users beware

The ideal parent-safe OS continues to be Mac OS Classic, as it literally has no services exposed for people to attack.  But of course Progress Must Continue.  OS X 10.4 Tiger at least used the sturdy ipfw firewall, albeit well-hidden from most users under System Preferences... Sharing->Firewall.  ipfw is a time-tested and well-understood software firewall that operates at a low system level, filtering network packets.

In Leopard, Apple has introduced a completely new "black box" firewall that no one knows much about, it is an application level firewall, more like an application inbound traffic ZoneAlarm or Little Snitch.  The main problem is it simply doesn't work very well.

The first problem with the Leopard firewall is that it's difficult to tell what the Set Access option does. It starts the new application-level firewall and lists in the Sharing pane any services you've opened, but it doesn't indicate if they are allowed or blocked. There's also no option for you to add your own open services or ports anymore. Instead, you can add or remove individual applications, but not network services. Stealth mode is still available in the Advanced settings, but the UDP blocking, useful to stop port scanning and some other attacks, is gone.

Worse yet, when you install Leopard, the firewall is turned off, even if you're upgrading and the firewall was previously enabled. Say what you want about Windows, but the firewall is enabled by default. Finally, the firewall can actually break your applications, which I'll explain more about shortly.

TidBITS Safe Computing: Leopard Firewall Takes One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

Also see:
Apple Support - Mac OS X 10.5: About the Application Firewall
Macintouch Reader Reports - Leopard: Security
Macintouch Leopard FAQ - Security

As an immediate note, if the Leopard application firewall is activated, its code signing currently will break both Skype and World of Warcraft.

In a world where having a better security model and a clean, always on, network-level firewall was an advantage for Apple, this new firewall is a stunningly bad move.  They should have just talked to the Little Snitch people, or Zone Alarm, or other application-level firewall experts to create an inbound and outbound application level firewall IN ADDITION to (as an optional layer on top of) the already known and tested ipfw.

Also this emphasis on code signing is shades of Microsoft all over again.  "Hey, let's take something that demonstrably hasn't worked in Windows, and add it as yet another 'feature' in Leopard."

UPDATE 2007-11-15: Apple has released a 10.5.1 patch to address some of these issues, and clarify others.  What was called "deny all" is now

2. Allow only essential services:

This is the most conservative mode. Mac OS X will block all connections except a limited list of services essential to the operation of your computer.

The system services that are still allowed to receive incoming connections are:

    * configd, which implements DHCP and other network configuration services
    * mDNSResponder, which implements Bonjour
    * racoon, which implements IPSec

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306938

via Slashdot Apple Fixes 'Misleading' Leopard Firewall Settings /.

In my opinion you should still consider crafting ipfw rules in front of the app firewall, if you're comfortable with that sort of thing.

lame bookmarking advertisement interruptions @ USA Today

Read a story in USA Today, for once I thought, hey, I'll use the Facebook button on the page, rather than using my Firefox bookmarklet.

And I got an ad interstitial.

http://www.usatoday.com/_ads/interstitial/2007/page/interstitial.htm?http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-11-04-big-bang_N.htm&title=There's%20a%20science%20to%20CBS'%20'Big%20Bang%20Theory'

Are you kidding me?  I have to watch an ad before I send a URL to another website?

Firefox bookmarklet it is from now on.

future directions of library systems

It was great to talk with various enterprise/IT/technology architects at DLF Fall Forum 2007 about our various ideas an approaches to modeling and implementing the new library technology infrastructure.  But it's clear there are still more library technology architects out there (even if they may not have that in their job title), I ran across an interesting blog posting by Jonathan Rochkind:

Notes on future directions of Library Systems from Bibliographic Wilderness blog, September 28, 2007

Here are some notes on near/medium future directions of the library systems environment/architecture, and a sketch of requirements on where we want to go. These notes may or may not end up as part of an internal white paper here, as we analyze where we want to be headed (something good to do anyway, but we got a kick in the pants when the vendor ended development on our current ILS).

...

The library systems environment has grown from being composed of a single “Integrated Library System” at the origin of library systems in the 1980s, to being composed of an ‘ecology’ of systems in most libraries today. These different systems could be from various sources (proprietary and open source), fulfill various–both overlapping and distinct–functions, are used in various ways by different subsets of users (both library staff and our end-users), and interact with each other to varying degrees (some well, some poorly). 

I wonder if I should consider adding a "library technology architecture" category to SLP?

PS Jonathan was at DLF but we didn't formally meet, it's odd how sometimes virtual connection and discovery is easier than in the physical world.

presentations from DLF Fall Forum 2007

Some of the presentations are posted on

http://www.diglib.org/forums/fall2007/2007fallprogram.htm

If you want to locate them, just search for [PRESENTATION]

LAC on cataloguing

in the case of digital publications, new workflows are being developed that may result in acquisitions and cataloguing functions sometimes occurring simultaneously. As well, we are interested in finding new paradigms for supporting the catalogue function, such as incorporation of metadata supplied by publishers or others.

via Cataloging Futures

(LAC = Library and Archives Canada, the National Library of Canada)