Paul Coyne Dot Org

Content Trees

2010-06-27T13:34:00.001+01:00

Until a few years ago I often slept with a pencil and a pad by my bed to scribble down crazy, middle of the night thoughts. This blog is now the closest I have so the latest brain-fart is here.

A number of developments surfaced this week, and other commentors picked up on the potential for automated, user-centric aggregated content - e.g. mtrip, paper.li and ??? Also, Scott Karp introduced the notion of the Content Graph a few weeks ago and I think they're all related.

Content Trees:

Start with a 'seed' research paper or article or news story
Build a concept graph to 'x' nodes distant using the citations in the paper
highlight Key readings - based on Impact factors, downloads and rewteets, mentions in the blogsophere
Pick out key authors (with > 1 articles in the graph)
Build a timeline
Trawl OA and IRs for working papers
Include conference proceedings/Call for papers
Overlay geo-tagged/geographical data - any clusters?
Suggets funding and publishing options based on profiles of research bodies and publishers

Will think on this a bit further I think...

Untethered publishing

2010-06-26T14:53:00.001+01:00

In a recent post to the Lib Licence Listserve Joe Esposito asked his readers to imagine the possibilities offered by a new generation of dynamic content solutions from publishers. Solutions such as mtrip. Quoting from Esposito's post :

"It takes but a small leap of imagination to see Mtrip and its
many inevitable kin beginning to shape the ways scholarly
reference works get created. As the level of editorial work for
something like Mtrip is huge, the effort and cost of other kinds
of reference works is bound to rise. This in turn will create
new barriers to finding audiences, as the best-produced services
are more likely to attract attention. By "best" I don't mean
empty bells and whistles but features that provide real use to
readers."

To be honest it's taken me some time to appreciate what Joe was driving at. But intelligent, automated and highly personal publishing has been a bit of a recurring theme this week. Let me explain.

Aft mTrip first up was paper.li, a service that trawls your twitter graph and re-presents all your tweets and those of your network as a daily newspaper. Neat. In fact it's more than neat, it's awesome.

Next day there was this story from ReadWriteWeb:

"Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal
will launch a new publishing platform. It's grandly described as a
"semantic synthesis platform," but simply put it's a publishing
platform that automates the production of content. What's more, the
resulting web pages include no original content. It's all aggregated from other sources."

Now if I were a research student looking to put together my Literature review, or a teacher/lecturer assembling course specific content for my students I'd be grateful to any savvy publisher putting together a set of tools that help me not only to search for content that was related and of interest but assembled and add some neat tools to help me manage, interrogate and scan the content too.

Future of the Internet - National Geographic - Digital Capital Week

2010-06-20T14:49:00.001+01:00

Very interesting slideshow from The Pew Research Center's internet & American life project.

Future of the Internet - National Geographic - Digital Capital Week

View more presentations from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Radio Interview: Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Open Data, Linked Data, and Other Topics

2010-06-20T11:40:00.001+01:00

Reblogged From the ResourceShelf. A 37 minute interview with Sir Tim covers a number of topics. You can listen online or download as an mp3 files.

From a Summary Article:

On Linked Data:

“The Web works by everybody doing their bit and finding others’ [work] valuable. So, if you put your data out there, it may not be that you actually see the benefit; however, it will be very beneficial to the fact that that everybody else has [something]. Say, for example, if — before — you wanted to find out about something that is actually in another department, you had to make some official request . . . and then you’d get the data and maybe somebody would give you a paper brochure, but you have to really negotiate to get the data. Now, in the new world, where they put the data on the Web publicly, that’s actually very beneficial [even] from department to department.”

—Sir Tim Berners-Lee

[Clip]

On Data Quality

“[Some say], ‘What about the data quality? If I put this out there, surely I’ll be held to a higher standard.’ Well, not necessarily. The really important thing is for you to be open about what the quality is. No data is perfect. Nobody expects it to be perfect, but they do like to have metadata about it. ”

—Sir Tim Berners Lee

Source: Federal News Radio (via SemanticUniverse.com)

See Also: A Video Introduction to Linked Data (via Vimeo and SemanticWeb.com)

Asking the right questions

2010-06-19T23:02:00.001+01:00

I had a good conversation with a UK educational publisher recently. As one of the leading publishers and providers of textbooks to the secondary school markets they possess great content and brand awareness and they are embarking on a ambitious digital expansion program designed to create new business as schools become increasingly reliant on VLEs and richly interactive multi-media content in the classroom by repackaging textbook content as digital coursepacks.

Afterwards I wondered if this approach was a way in which the firm answered the question "in the future, how do we continue selling what we make?" Admittedly this is a necessary and useful question to ask - and answer - but it carries the danger that my publisher friends begin to believe that his customers exist to buy what they make.

The conversation prompted a recall of Peter Drucker's call to leaders to probe and question such a premise. For example, he proposes a simple but radically different premise: “The customer defines the business.” Then he probes, asking a series of questions, “Who is the customer? Where are customers located? What does the customer want? How do we find what the customer wants?”

These questions lead to more questions. “What is value to the customer? What value is the customer getting from us and from our competitors? How do we profitably provide value to the customer now and in the future?”.

It was a polite conversation and I didn't feel qualified to comment on their strategic choices but I think if I had the conversation again I'd test the assumptions behind the plan a little more. It altogether felt a lot like this publisher believed that digital content in the classroom was basically the same as printed content with bells and whistles. I'd ask them, and other publishers who have to travel down the digital road to revisit their Drucker before they set off.

New OCLC Report: “A Slice of Research Life: Information Support for Research in the United States”

2010-06-19T18:03:00.001+01:00

“DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, 16 June 2010—Relationships between researchers and traditional library and university support for research have shifted radically; many of the services most valued by researchers are found not in the library but on the network.

The majority of researchers interviewed for this study use online tools – and commercial services – related to their discipline rather than tools provided by their university. This report summarizes interviews held with researchers, research assistants, graduate students, grant and other research administration specialists, and university administrators at four elite U.S. research universities. It complements a similar study undertaken in four English universities, to be published shortly. This joint research results from a partnership between OCLC Research and the UK’s Research Information Network. Participants reported on how they use information in the course of their research, what tools and services are most critical and beneficial to them, where they continue to experience unmet needs, and how they prioritize use of their limited time.

While some universities have devised services to better manage data and other information derived from research, many researchers flounder in a disorganized and rising accumulation of useful findings that may be lost or unavailable when conducting future research.

This report is related to the OCLC Research Support for Research Workflows activity. It was discussed in an update session at the RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, 10 June 2010 in Chicago.

More information

Report: A Slice of Research Life: Information Support for Research in the United States (.pdf)
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-15.pdf

Support for Research Workflows activity
http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/support/

new blog, new home

2010-06-19T17:38:00.000+01:00

With my previous hosting provider going under (and taking all my posts with them!) I am forced to find a new home for my occasional scribbles.

Blogger.com it is then.

I confess that I blog much less than I used to; twitter has become my preferred channel but I think I might consciously work to blend the two a little more, offering some comment to the re-tweets and observations I post there.

And the time is right I think. The launch of the ipad and the success of droid suggests that we may be entering what is being called the 'post-browser' era. More on this in later posts.

On a wider point, the economic climate is causing stress and flex in business model provision that is unprecedented. The technological disruptions that have characterised a lot of the recent peripheral discussions about future trends in publishing, learning and libraries - social, mobile, long-tail and democratized
participation could be as nothing compared to the disruption wrought by declining budgets and the shift in purchasing powers from institution to individual.

I think that these will be become my dominant themes over the life of this blog, but who knows. I guess we'll find out in the next few months.