Confessions of a technophile

Japan unveils storytelling robot

2009-06-29T09:32:00.000+08:00

Researchers from Japan's prestigious Waseda University and the Shanghai Jiaotong University in China have jointly developed a robot capable of reading out stories from printed books.

Called 二宮くん or Ninomiyakun, the aluminum-made robot is 1-meter tall and weighs 25kg. It comes with a built-in camera and a computer that can recognize 2,300 Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji) commonly known to a Japanese elementary school student. A character recognition software is used to translated text into spoken words, which are produced by a voice synthesizer.

Kamada Seiitirou, the professor who co-developed the robot, told the Yomiuri Shimbun that in future, Ninomiyakun will be enhanced to tell stories with emotions. Listen to the robot here:

If robotic researchers get their way, how will the face of storytelling be changed? There are larger questions to think about here as we inch closer toward technological singularity. What does it mean to be human?

WARC becomes ISO standard

2009-06-12T22:49:00.004+08:00

It's official. The International Internet Preservation Consortium has announced the publication of the WARC file format as an ISO standard.

For those who are unfamiliar with web archiving, the WARC format provides a standard way to structure, manage and store resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It is an extension of the ARC format, which has been used since 1996 to store files harvested on the web.

WARC allows recording of HTTP request headers and arbitrary metadata, the allocation of an identifier for every contained file, the management of duplicates and of migrated
records, and the segmentation of the records. WARC files are intended to store every type of digital content, either retrieved by HTTP or another protocol.

The demand for a container format such as WARC came about many years ago when heritage organizations started searching for appropriate ways to collect and keep track Web content using web-scale tools such as web crawlers.

At the same time, cultural organizations were concerned with the requirement to archive very large numbers of born-digital and digitized files. A need was for a container format that permits one file simply and safely to carry a very large number of constituent data objects (of unrestricted type, including many binary types) for the purpose of storage, management, and exchange. Another requirement was that the container need only minimal knowledge of the nature of the objects.

The standardization of WARC is the first step toward facilitating interoperability across institutions charged with preserving our cultural heritage on the Internet. Hopefully, this move will promote the use of WARC beyond the web archiving community.

NLA debuts prototype discovery service

2009-05-30T12:34:00.007+08:00

The National Library of Australia is giving users a glimpse into SBDS, an in-house developed discovery service focused on Australian content held by institution in the country. Essentially, it provides a "single point of access to resources currently discoverable via the Library's multiple discovery services, and to digitised material freely available online anywhere in the world."

The primary purpose of this first prototype version is to develop the technical framework to support this new discovery service, and as far as possible ensure that the technologies we are using will provide acceptable performance, especially for record updates. The design so far is based primarily on decisions made within the project team to allow rapid development of the prototype. What is there now will form the basis for feedback, ideas for improvement, and input into the design of new features from a wide range of people.

The system is a work in progress, and we have made it available for you to follow our development as we build and improve it. The prototype will be constantly updated as it evolves into a system planned for release into production in the third quarter of this year.

This is one of the most laudable efforts in the development of information discovery platforms I've seen in recent years. The user interface is simple, yet displays search results that do not overwhelm users. You can choose to look for content that's only available online, in addition to external sources that are not held by the NLA.

The metadata comes from several sources including the Australian National Bibliographic Database, Picture Australia, Australian Research Online, OAIster, the Open Library, Hathi Trust and Wikipedia.

For now, the only thing that's lacking is the ability for users to tag and comment on content.

Nancy goes to the library

2009-04-26T21:52:00.003+08:00

After 76 years, Nancy finally goes to the library!

First take: Oracle to acquire Sun

2009-04-20T21:37:00.005+08:00

Oracle today said that it is paying US$7.4 billion for Sun Microsystems, an amount that represents a 42 percent premium over Sun's Friday closing price of $6.69.

The surprise announcement comes on the heels of an earlier attempt by IBM to acquire Sun earlier this month. Talks between both companies broke down after a Big Blue refused to agree to Sun's request for a higher bid.

This deal, if approved, will mark Oracle's first acquisition of a vendor with a significant hardware business. Even before this, Oracle and Sun have an existing partnership where the former's datawarehousing solutions and database products are optimized for Sun servers, StorageTek arrays and the Solaris operating system.

While this acquisition presents opportunities for further synergies between Oracle and Sun, there are also issues that could derail the effort. Oracle needs to balance the interests of its lucrative database business with Sun's MySQL open source database product. That's on top on the competing middleware products from both companies.

Oracle will also have to heed the concerns of its existing hardware partners. Dell in particular needs to be assured that Uncle Larry's complete stack – from applications to disk – will not encroach on its Oracle partnership.

Facilitating conversations through social search

2009-04-19T21:58:00.005+08:00

In participatory librarianship, one of the things we're trying to do is to facilitate conversations between people. That means helping people to connect with one another to engage in knowledge sharing. I recently learned about Aardvark, a company which has developed a social search product that should keep librarians awake at night.

So what is social search? According to the company's whitepaper published in March 2009:

Just like Web Search provided a revolutionary way to find web pages that have the information you're looking for, Social Search is a revolutionary way to find people who have the information you're looking for. In both cases, using sophisticated search indexing algorithms is a vast improvement over the manual process of following links or browsing directories to find what you want.

The goal of Social Search is to make the everyday activity of getting information from people you are connected to easier and more powerful. Most people rely on the human knowledge of those around them on a regular basis: when wandering over to a coworker, emailing a friend, or calling a family member, people are getting information that is personalized, timely, and trusted.

If you've studied about information seeking behavior, you will know that we often turn to the immediate folks around us or those we have identified as experts in our social networks whenever we have an information need.

Like it or not, librarians are not the first people we think about whenever we need to know something. And while librarians know where to look for answers, they aren't experts in everything. More importantly, they can only work with information (not knowledge) that resides somewhere in online some database, website, book or journal.

Aardvark addresses that shortcoming by allowing you to tap into knowledge residing in people's heads. After all, information represents just a small fraction of the total universe of knowledge. There are far more things we know as a civilization that haven't been written or published somewhere.

To connect you with people who can help you address your information need, Aardvark will aggregate your connections in various social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, as well as your IM contacts. You send in any question and the system will use a variety of algorithmic techniques to identify the expert in your social network to answer that question.

So how should librarians respond to something like this? I'd say we should identify ourselves as experts in areas we're naturally comfortable (whether it's music, technology or fashion) with and plug into these communities. Librarians, especially those working in public libraries, can no longer be a Jack of all trades if we want to provide a valuable reference service that meets the diverse needs of our users.

Ideas for Conversants sessions

2009-04-16T23:10:00.003+08:00

If you are intending to participate in the Conversants virtual conference on participatory librarianship, check out this presentation by Dave Lankes for some ideas on conference topics. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

Amazon customers boycott Kindle books over $9.99

2009-04-12T22:59:00.003+08:00

A group of Amazon customers have decided to boycott Kindle titles that cost more than $9.99. So far, nearly 800 books have been tagged "9 99boycott".

It's the case of greedy publishers who do not incur distribution and other costs that are typically associated with selling physical books. Their counterparts in the music industry had once pressured Apple to raise the price of iTunes' 99-cent music downloads, but Steve Jobs was adamant about keeping the price. Any effort to raise prices would backfire on the record labels themselves as well as Apple, since consumers may be driven to free downloads from illegal P2P sites and services. An Amazon customer summed it up best:

Kindle prices have been going up.

Just today I spotted a "trashy novel" for over $10 on the Kindle store -- when the HARDCOVER version costs $9 from Amazon!

Let's send a message to publishers:

Charging $11 for a paperback novel -- without the paperback! -- is ridiculous.

Charging $18 for a digital version of a book that relies heavily on photographs -- which look bad on the Kindle -- is ridiculous.

Charging $12 for a business book you can get at Costco in 2 weeks for $9.99 is ridiculous.

** LET'S TAKE ACTION **

Let's tag all over-$9.99 books with the tag "9.99boycott"!

Just go to the form field under the "Tags Customers Associate with This Product" headline and type "9.99boycott" (without the quotes) and click the button.

It's that easy.

I've already started.

-------------

WHY?

Kindle books are kinda like movie tickets. While you can re-read the book, you cannot:

* donate it to a library
* sell it to a used book store
* sell it on Amazon's Used Marketplace
* trade it to a friend

And, of course, the book *has no paper* so it *has no production costs*.

The publisher does not need to pay for paper, glue, press time, press employees, insurance, ink, boxes, or shipping.

Amazon does not need to stock its warehouse, pay staff to fulfill orders, or pay shipping.

The price needs to reflect these VERY important facts.

We did not buy our Kindles with the promise of convenience and low prices, in order to be swindled with this kind of bait-and-switch tactics.

"Beautiful Imperfections"

2009-04-10T21:12:00.005+08:00

Those of you in Singapore might have seen this ad that aired on TV over the past week. It's extremely heartwarming, and forces you to take a step back and examine your relationship with your family members, though it was created with a purpose of getting singles to think about their expectations of their life partners by the Singapore government. Oftentimes, we get so caught up with those expecations that we fail to realize that it is the imperfections of the other person that complete our lives.

As the woman who delivered the eulogy of her late husband in the ad put it: "In the end it's these small things that you remember, the little imperfections that made them perfect for you. So to my beautiful children, I hope one day you too find yourselves life partners who are as beautifully imperfect as your father was, to me."

Microsoft ups ante with new ad

2009-04-05T21:24:00.005+08:00

Microsoft has started airing its version of Apple's Mac vs PC ads to state a point: that PC users know what they want and demand a machine that does what they want to do, rather than turn to a Mac that's "more about aesthetics than about computing power". The model in the ad, Giampaolo, goes on to state further that he wants to pay for the computer and not the brand.

To be fair, as a user of both Macs and PCs, there's really no difference in the hardware and performance of Macs and PCs today. This ad is potentially misleading to the average consumer who needs to consult a Best Buy salesperson before a computer purchase. By the way, isn't HP a brand? By dismissing the brand equity of PC makers, Microsoft is undermining efforts undertaken by its hardware partners in differentiating themselves from other PC vendors and Apple. See it for yourself:

Conversants: A Participatory Conversation

2009-03-28T15:43:00.006+08:00

I am part of a team that's organizing a virtual conference on participatory librarianship that's spearheaded by Dave Lankes of Syracuse University. The virtual conference will culminate in a hybrid event at the ALA Annual conference coming up in Chicago this July. For more information, refer to the following video and statement that we released recently:

Introducing Conversants from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

Announcing "Conversants :-) A Participatory Conversation," a new idea in professional development for challenging economic times.

We invite you to join the movement to create and share information through worldwide coordinated conversations. Library communities and organizations are uniquely poised to employ the latest collaborative resources; the conversations that result from these collaborations hold great promise for students and practitioners across the information professions. Sharing knowledge and expertise via these collaborative conversations as part of a united effort is both beneficial and necessary, so we invite you lend your voice and join us in this unique event. Become a Conversant!

This effort is spearheaded by R. David Lankes with support from the Information Institute at Syracuse University, librarians and library students.

Theme: Participatory Librarianship

Save the date: Session Proposals are Due April 16th and Ongoing Virtual Sessions will begin April 30th, 2009. A Hybrid Event will take place at ALA in Chicago.

Call for participation:
Virtual sessions will be coordinated through the conference site, but can take place anywhere on the Internet. Blog posts, Second Life presentations, FriendFeed rooms, videos, etc., are all encouraged.

We need participation in the following two areas:

Proposal submissions
We will be soliciting involvement at many levels of participation. Some ways that you can contribute include:

Papers - Traditional long-form papers will be considered for publication in Conversants, an online open-access journal. These papers will use CommentPress to allow participants to comment upon and discuss the paper on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.

Events - We are also seeking time- and/or place-based events that can be archived and shared. Examples might include a SecondLife presentation, which can archived as a streaming video and shared with participants, or a podcast of a workshop or discussion that took place at a physical library.

Cases - Do you have an example of something that you did at your library that worked really well? Or that flopped spectacularly? Share your experience with your fellow Conversants! Creativity in format is encouraged.

Posters - Present your research, tackle an idea or controversial topic, or present conflicting viewpoints of a current event. Everyone is welcome to submit poster proposals, but library students are especially encouraged to participate at this level.

Postings - Blog postings, open Facebook posts, etc., that will carry a conference badge (that links to the conference hub with an associated conversation).

Conversations - All Conversants will be encouraged to participate in the conversations that will be happening throughout the event. In addition, special "water cooler" threaded conversations on a topic or issue of your choosing will be encouraged. Proposals should include an overview of the topic, starter questions, and a core of at least 5 people to seed/start conversation.

Conference Facilitators
In addition to the above, in order to ensure that this global conversation goes smoothly, people are needed to assist the core group in the following ways:

Technical support - Assist with the managing the Conversant web site, which will include pointers to the various conversations.

Participant support - Create tutorials, pathfinders, publicity, etc.

Reviewers - Review and qualify papers and posters.

Session moderators - To act as hosts or conversation facilitators.

Please send Proposal submissions and Conference Facilitator offers to: conversants@gmail.com

For Proposal Submission, please include "Proposal for Conversants" in the subject. For Conference Facilitators, please include "Facilitation for Conversants" in the subject.

Course on Gaming in Libraries

2009-03-17T22:25:00.005+08:00

If you're interested in learning more about gaming in libraries, Scott Nicholson from Syracuse University will be running an experimental course on the topic over the summer. Much of the content will be free and publicly delivered through YouTube.

This course is actually part of Syracuse's MSLIS program, where graduate students enrolled in the class are required to post video responses to the content. Even if you're not enrolled at Syracuse, Scott's also encouraging you to post your responses and engage in the conversation!

The topics to be covered include the history of games in libraries, setting up gaming programs in libraries, planning, budgeting as well as assessing the outcomes of library gaming services. Check out Scott's video below for more information:

Separately, ALA has recently released a library gaming toolkit with assistance from a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation. The toolkit offers content contributed by expert gaming librarians across the US, and includes a wide range of resources to help librarians create, fund and evaluate gaming experiences in the library.

NetLibrary ebooks for the Sony Reader

2009-03-02T22:58:00.005+08:00

OCLC's NetLibrary has launched five new eBook collections developed specifically for the Sony Reader. They include titles on business, leadership, young adult, romance and popular fiction titles for readers on the move.

These mobile collections come with everything libraries need to get started on loaning ebooks, including the Sony Reader, a collection of quality titles from leading publishers, and all required licenses!

OCLC says once libraries have purchased a Sony Mobile Collection which starts at US$500, they can make the Sony Reader available to library users for on-site or off-site circulation. Not a bad starting price, given that they're throwing in the ebook reader as well.

Using a PC, libraries then can download a Mobile Collection title or titles from the NetLibrary site and transfer to the Sony Reader. The catch: the collections are only available to U.S. libraries.

It's obvious Sony and OCLC are taking advantage of the ambiguity surrounding the terms and conditions governing the use of Amazon's Kindle, which users cannot "sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party", although it can reportedly be loaned without content - and why anyone would do that is a point of contention.

These are beginning signs of a ebook war erupting between Sony and Amazon, though it's unlikely anyone will end up as winners, if they continue to take the wall-garden, lock-in approach. I've always argued that an open standard such as ePub is the way to go before ebooks can eventually take off. After all, it was the development of the MP3 format by the Motion Pictures Expert Group (and approved as an ISO standard in 1991) that planted the seeds of the digital music revolution.

A peek into the future

2009-03-01T19:54:00.003+08:00

Microsoft has come up with a new video that envisions the future of technology. It's not unimaginable, that if every wall and device has a touch screen, coupled with sentient computing, robotics and "see-through" transparent screens, we'll be living in a vastly different world.

The future of reading

2009-02-26T17:29:00.000+08:00

Amazon recently released the second generation Kindle ebook reader that offers more storage and a slimmer design. There's a text-to-speech feature that reads out books, magazines and newspapers to you, and a better screen that now boasts 16 shades of gray.

As a reviewer of tech gadgets over the years, I've grown to appreciate the importance of good design and the Kindles still don't cut it in the design department. I owned a Kindle while I was in the U.S. more than a year ago, and while there's no doubt it offers lots of convenience - volumes of books in just need one device - it is not sexy like an iPod or PSP.

I've since sold my Kindle, because I can't download ebooks over the air in Singapore (for that, the Kindle uses Sprint's EVDO network). Yes, I could buy stuff from the Kindle store and transfer those over via USB, but that means I'm missing out a whole lot on what the Kindle stood for - the convenience of getting books and the New York Times delivered over the air.

Tell me why I should still stick to reading printed newspapers that always leave my fingers stained with black newsprint. BTW, I always have to wash my hands after reading the papers, because the next task in my morning routine is to log on to my white Macbook.

For the past week, I've been working on a book review and one of the things you do as a book reviewer is to make notes and point out quotes and paragraphs that could make it into the review. I ended up folding dog ears of pages, and sticking Post It notes all over. It was messy, I should say. On the Kindle, I could make annotations, bookmark pages and highlight text. Best of all, I could search for text if I needed to look up content, which really makes index pages look silly and redundant. After all, it's only ONE way of arranging the topics in a book.

With the Kindle 2, we're inching closer to what the future of reading might be. The book format may still remain but the medium will change, and for the better.

If every book has a reader, then why are bookstores and libraries not carrying every single book published, even if it's only sold or loaned out once every five years? It's the tyranny of physical space - the limitations of space have forced physical bookstores and libraries to restrict their offerings to mostly hits. With ebooks - and when (not if) we perfect the ebook reader - there's no reason to only stock the hits. For users, it means gaining access to an infinite bookstore or library.

This post first appeared on Techgoondu.

"So-what?"

2009-01-09T22:57:00.005+08:00

We often hear of stories of people benefiting from library services in one way or another. An entrepreneur who made it big after attending a workshop, or a student who now turns in better quality homework after acquiring search skills at an information literacy class. Librarians share these stories with one another because it humanizes the work they do.

More importantly, these stories answer an important question: the "so-what?" of library services. They go beyond visitorship numbers and other loan statistics. These numbers, while important in planning because they help assess the efficiency of the library in converting inputs (staff time and dollars) to outputs (number of loans, programs and library members), do not tell us about the impact of libraries on its users. So what if teens check out more books? What difference does it make to them whether they check out more or less books? What the library does is not the aim in itself, it's what the library does to bring users closer to their goals that matters.

Through anecdotes, we know the impact of library services on users, and not the library's efficiency in converting inputs to outputs. However, there is a tendency for libraries to measure their success based exclusively on library-oriented statistics that measure what librarians use and do. Few libraries measure outcomes which look beyond statistics to include their impact on users. Note that even when we conduct customer satisfaction surveys, we are asking users about us, not about them!

Part of the reason for this is that some outcomes are hard to measure in the short term, and even then, the impact on users may not be totally attributed to a library service.

It will take me several posts to run through the whole process of determining user impact, but the long and short of is this: 1) identifying programs for outcome measurement, 2) determining interim and long-range outcomes, 3) make those outcomes measurable, 4) data collection and analysis, and, finally, 5) implementation. More details of each step are further elaborated in Rubin's Demonstrating Results in the PLA's Results Series. I applied this process for a library gaming service I was working on in the U.S. and found it to be highly effective in measuring the impact of our program beyond the numbers.

So, the next time you look at loan and visitor numbers for the month, start asking "so-what?" Librarians need to answer that question convincingly, if they want to claim that they are making a difference to people's lives.

LOC's Flickr Report

2008-12-27T22:59:00.004+08:00

The Library of Congress has released a report on the impact of its participation on Flickr Commons. Lots of interesting nuggets of information about LOC's experience that will be useful to libraries interested in putting up stuff on Flickr even if they're not on Flickr Commons. Some of the points in the report that jumped out at me:

The high level of public interest in the LOC's collection on Flickr Commons was unexpected.
Of the 59,193 tags added through May 13, 2008, 40% of these tags were added by a small group of 10 “power taggers” (defined as taggers who provided over 3,000 tags each)
By August 2008, more than 500 Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records had been enhanced with new information and cited the Flickr Commons project as the source of the information that was changed or added.
Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages rose 20% over the five month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007
Given the emphasis of “place” in user-supplied tags, “geotagging” (specifying the location at which the image was taken using special tags called geotags) should be a popular activity, but the number of geotags remains significantly lower than 1%.
Do the community-supplied tags work to drive searchers/browsers to LC’s photos? The lack of a mechanism to easily correlate searches to community-supplied tags remains a problem when trying to answer this question. We know from blog posts and emails that some users access the photos directly from the photostream—in fact, they anxiously await the weekly load of new photos. What is not as clear, however, is the degree to which discovery is based on searches of the tags, descriptions, or groups other than for searchers who begin their searches outside of Flickr.

Singapore National Library goes mobile

2008-11-28T23:01:00.008+08:00

The National Library Board of Singapore has started a mobile website where users can search the library catalog, check their library accounts, find out about events and even download free e-books.

While the mobile site (http://mtest.nlb.gov.sg) is currently in beta, I've been impressed with its simplicity and ease of use. More importantly, this is a step forward in putting library services at the fingertips of users on the move. Note that you can only access the site on a mobile phone browser.

My favorite feature has got to be the catalog search. I still remember the days when I had to write down call numbers on paper after searching for books on the library website at home or in the library before I hit the bookshelves.

On NLB's mobile site, you can perform a catalog search like you would on the full library website, and have the details of a title sent to your cellphone as a text message. It makes a lot of sense - we all carry cellphones with us wherever we go, at least here in Singapore, so why do we still end up with call numbers written on slips of paper while we are in the library?

Besides putting the catalog in your pocket, you can reserve a title, check its availability and choose a library branch to pick up the item, just like what you would do on a full-fledged site. You can also check out the latest arrivals, read the posts from NLB blogs, and download short novels in the form of e-books written by local authors such as Ho Minfong and Wahab Hj Hamzah.

It's interesting to see a library experimenting with e-books on a cellphone which can be potentially challenging. The diverse range of handsets can present compatibility issues with Mobipocket Reader, the mobile reader software that NLB has chosen for its e-books. I'm sure these issues were taken into account, since PDF versions of the same e-books are also available to cater to users with mobile PDF readers.

In the long run, my guess is that reading e-books on a mobile phone will continue to be a novelty. The small screen sizes and celllphone user behavior (short bursts of usage, in-transit), do not lend themselves to reading full-length novels. The only place where e-books have worked on a cellphones is Japan, where a genre of writing called the keitai shosetsu, written with truncated text and often with little plot or character development, has become part of Japanese popular culture. While controversial from a literary point of view, these mobile novels, some of which have been republished in book form, continue to appeal to Japanese youths.

Outside Japan, the declining cost of data plans and improvements in cellphone user interface designs will be key drivers in attracting more users to the mobile Web in years to come. In fact, telcos that are carrying the Apple iPhone are already reporting higher data revenues from iPhone users.

Just as libraries today are now expected to have a website on the WWW, they will have to establish a presence on the mobile Web. Particularly in developing countries such as India, where wired infrastructure is still limited in reach, the cellphone is proving to be the only way for people to access the Internet.

If you're interested in finding out more about what libraries can do with mobile technologies, check out ALA's fifth Library Technology Report written by Ellyssa Kroski, an independent information consultant. She recently presented at the NEASIS&T Mobile Mania event in Boston. Her slides below provide a good overview of things that libraries need to think about when going mobile:

Libraries to Go: Mobile Tech in Libraries

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: libraries mobile)

Microsoft joins social networking fray

2008-11-14T15:18:00.008+08:00

Microsoft yesterday announced that it will begin rolling out social networking features to Windows Live over the coming weeks to U.S. users and globally by 2009.

It's a significant - though somewhat belated - move from the software giant, given that its Windows Live products have been natural candidates for social networking. After all, there's always an element of social networking in applications like instant messaging, photos, events, calendaring, groups, file sharing and e-mail.

Prior to the announcement, I participated in a private beta for Microsoft's Windows Live Wave 3, essentially an updated suite of the company's Windows Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Mail and Messenger products, plus new products including a blog editor called Windows Live Writer and Windows Family Safety for Internet filtering. These products are now branded as Windows Live Essentials and available here.

While the updated products displayed a marked improvement over their predecessors (I'll talk about a few of them in a later post), it's their integration with online services that's worth noting.

You can, for instance, upload your images from Windows Live Photo gallery directly to your Flickr account, or to Windows Live Photos. These photos can then be shared with your friends on the new Windows Live homepage, which has been completely spruced up.

The most notable difference for anyone new to the revamped homepage is the list of status updates from your Live Messenger contacts. Besides aggregating your content and activities on other Live services and sharing those with others, you can also add third-party sites to your Windows Live Profile and have activities on those sites appear in your "what's new" feed across your network of friends.

So far, the list of third-party sites include Twitter, WordPress and Yelp with more expected to be added on. Microsoft said it is collaborating with over 50 Web companies, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, among others. Reports have indicated that Facebook and Amazon are also in the list.

You can also include RSS feeds from just one blog on your profile, though it would have been much better if more blogs were supported. Most people track or author multiple blogs and it's silly not to allow users to include more blog feeds.

With all these, your new Windows Live homepage looks similar to current aggregators such as Netvibes and iGoogle, plus social networking features.

Early this week, Barrie Ooi, regional product manager at Microsoft's online services group in Southeast Asia, started his presentation and dialog with a group of regional bloggers by pointing out that users are now swamped with multiple social networks, and that the new Windows Live can now aggregate them all.

But, questions linger over the willingness of users to start adding pictures and engaging in conversations on their Windows Live network when they're already doing that for things hosted on some other Web 2.0 service or social network site.

While I can now include my list of favorite books in my Window Live profile, I'm not going to start putting out a list all over again when I've already done that on LibraryThing. More importantly, my network on LibraryThing is different from my Facebook and LinkedIn networks, which are different from my Windows Live network. The kinds of conversations I have with people on different social networks vary both in depth and interest.

That brings me to one important point about any social network. It has to create stickiness among users. If Microsoft wants Windows Live to be a social network made up of Hotmail and Messenger users, there needs to be something more compelling for users besides aggregating users' stuff from other services.

It's a good idea to build on the user base of Messenger and Hotmail, but people started using those services as IM and e-mail services respectively - and not in social networking terms even as elements of social networking are clearly present.

For now, I don't have more than a handful of friends on Messenger who've created Live Spaces profiles, the starting point of any social network site. The first thing Microsoft needs to work on is to convince users why they should do that.

FT to launch revamped website

2008-11-10T19:51:00.008+08:00

This week, the Financial Times will launch a newly revamped website that looks cleaner than before.

New features include an integrated search box that allows you to search both news and stock quotes, a list of top 10 must-read and most popular stories, as well as thumbnail and italics that identify Lex commentaries on the main landing page.

The website will also use the same masthead design of the printed newspaper.

Besides user interface and aesthetics, FT editor Lionel Barber wrote in an email to readers that the new website will also expand coverage of important subjects such as macroeconomics, energy and technology, better integration between market data and news to give context to market movements, and more opportunities for readers to become part of the FT community by contributing to discussion forums and blogs.
Update: The new FT website has launched, but it's disappointing to see the inside pages retaining the old template. Apparently, this revamp only applies to the homepage, which makes one question the point of it all. Not only is FT confusing users, they are forcing people to use inconsistent navigation menus (drop-down on the homepage and left bar on the inside pages). This doesn't do any good for FT's branding - homepages are seldom the only entry point for visitors.

Social CRM: will sales reps bite?

2008-11-04T16:57:00.006+08:00

I recently caught up with the folks at Oracle who gave me a glimpse of the company's Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems, even those from Oracle's rivals.

Oracle's Social CRM portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Oracle Sales Campaign and Oracle Sales Library. Sales Prospector is now available, while the other two are expected to be released at a later date here.

CRM is often seen as the most likely candidate among enterprise applications to be enabled by Web 2.0 tools. As customers become more comfortable with social media, they'll be using Web 2.0 tools to seek out information about a company's products and services from others in their community. Indeed, such platforms to enable conversations among customers about products and services are beginning to emerge.

Several months ago, I was approached by ProCompare, a New York City startup that has built a platform to link technology buyers, consultants and IT experts in the SMB market, for potential opportunities. With communities like ProCompare, sales reps will be pressurized to seek as much information from their colleagues. Employing social media tools to tap into the collective knowledge of the enterprise will reduce prep time and effort in meeting the needs of sales prospects.

According to Sathya Prasad Rai, senior director for Oracle CRM On Demand in South Asia, Asean and India, Oracle Sales Prospector is aimed at sussing out this information from the an enterprise and its partners.

Leveraging on network effects, Oracle Sales Prospector uses business analytics to combine internal customer data (such as purchasing history and product profiles) with external information sources to propose qualified sales leads. IMHO, the next phase of development for any kind of social CRM application would be to find a systematic way of mining conversations on external business social networks such as ProCompare and LinkedIn.

While Sales Prospector is focused on sales leads, Oracle Sales Campaigns lets you create, share, manage, and track the effectiveness of email campaigns. Users can build campaign templates from scratch or use a colleague's templates for a similar campaign, complete with tags, comments and ratings. Similarly, sales reps can also share presentation slides with others through the Oracle Sales Library.

Before you jump on the bandwagon, remember the most important thing is to first foster a knowledge sharing culture. The success of the social CRM assumes that sales reps will share information with one another. Competitive pressure to top the sales figures for the month is likely to discourage sharing. What companies can do is align the reward structure for sales reps with collaboration. This will provide incentives for knowledge sharing and collaboration since each sales rep will want to increase the overall revenue and profits for the company - and their individual share of it.

Also, consider appointing an Enterprise 2.0 champion to communicate the benefits of social CRM. If sales reps feel that social CRM is a just another management fad, adoption is likely to be lackluster. Finally, it's important to develop metrics to gauge success. Some potential metrics to consider include lead conversion rate, sales cycle time and quota achievement rates as a result of the use of social CRM.

Stop chasing things you can't catch

2008-10-16T22:07:00.008+08:00

I'm at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference this week in Singapore - it's the first one I know of with library 2.0 as the main theme here in Asia. Although most librarians would have heard about library 2.0, I'm not sure if everyone knows what it really means for librarians.

Jenny Levine started the ball rolling by citing Dave Lankes' work on participatory librarianship - way to go Syracuse! Though participatory librarianship provides a good theoretical foundation for libraries to find their role in the sea of user-generated content, no one is entirely sure how libraries can help to make those objects of creation easier to find and preserve. There's also the critical issue of sustainability - what is the scope of the librarian's role in this information environment? Are we going to scrape the existing universe of user generated content for quality stuff? Or do we try to get users to gravitate toward the "knowledge communities" that some libraries are trying to seed?

Many libraries have started cultural heritage projects as a way to facilitate conversations within communities. This is one of our strengths and the easiest way to begin, since libraries already have rich collections of cultural heritage material. And through user conversations, this content can be enriched in unexpected ways, as Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has found.

I'm not sure, however, if we should go out to the wild wide web and try to get users to create content on "knowledge communities" sanctioned by the library. Why should one start a social network of writers with the library vs. doing the same thing on Goodreads? There are many other Web 2.0 sites with good VC backing that can do these better than libraries. Stop chasing things you can't catch.

A more sustainable strategy would be to start conversations with what we have. Begin with collections that libraries have worked hard to put together. These are our strengths. Revamp the catalog from one that is essentially an inventory system to one that's centered on user conversations and the contexts in which the content was used. That's more useful to people than just bibliographic records and lists of things in this example.

The 'ATM' of books and other digital matters

2008-09-19T13:13:00.005+08:00

My apologies for the long hiatus - it's been more than a month since I wrote anything. I'm now back home in Singapore after a year-long stint in Syracuse. I'm not done with the LIS program yet - there's still one final class which I'm doing in the distance-learning format. There's also my month-long internship with Singapore's National Library Board digital resources and services division, which I'm really looking forward to. In fact, I'm now going through tons of specifications for a new digital preservation system that has been procured. Interestingly, it's the same one that was jointly developed by the National Library of New Zealand and Ex Libris, but built to our requirements. I can't get into the specifics, but I'd say it's going to the preservation platform that will encompass all of the Library's digital assets - think Web archives and digital copies of publishers' legal deposit materials.

Recently, I was also at the launch event of DNet, a network of publishers, organizations, donors and content owners who can deposit and donate their materials with the National Library. A new ingest Web interface has also been created to allow publishers to submit digital copies of their publications. Although the submission of printed materials and offline publications such as educational CD-ROMS is mandatory under the NLB Act, online publications are not covered under the legislation. Through DNet, the NLB hopes to encourage publishers to submit online/digital publications for preservation and access by future generations.

There are potential issues that need to be addressed, however. Digital publications, particularly interactive CD-ROMS, are often produced in proprietary interfaces and formats. This presents problems in long-term preservation. In addition to the publication's bitstream, we'll have to consider its content, structure, context, presentation and behavior that is necessary for accessibility and usability in the long run. There will be trade-offs in some of these areas for sure, and this will also shape the preservation strategies to be adopted.

If you think about what some libraries such as the University of Michigan Library are doing to provide access to digital books, digital preservation becomes even more crucial. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that U-M library users will soon be able to order print-on-demand copies of books from the university’s collection--and get them in about the time it takes for a barista to whip up a latte using the Espresso Book Machine, a book-printing machine described as "the ATM of books".

These digital surrogates are no longer mere replicas that are only second to the original copies of the digitized books as implied by the term "surrogate". With on-demand printing, they are now treated like original copies. I think this forces us to think deeper about the balance between quality and access in digitization projects. Do we digitize as much and as quickly as we can to increase access to our collections, sometimes at the expense of quality? What if the digital version of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the only copy of the painting centuries down the road?

It's not just about the process

2008-08-11T16:39:00.003+08:00

At an Oracle press briefing on enterprise performance management (EPM) last week, it was refreshing to hear Frank Buytendijk, a senior executive admit that technology is not the all be-all, end-all solution that would solve the problems of business decision makers -- even more so for something such as EPM.

EPM essentially involves optimizing activities and processes such as budgeting, financial reporting, variance analysis and other management activities to support business decision making. This was performed in the early days through decision support systems. Today, EPM is likened to what we've done with operational activities through ERP and CRM systems.

According to Oracle, the success of ERP and CRM came from their ability to drive operational excellence by 1) taking a systematic approach to the processing of transactions through modules operating on a common platform, and 2) identifying and refining key business processes necessary to run the business.

In contrast, EPM involves 1) taking a systematic approach to the management activities through modules operating on a common platform, and 2) identifying and refining the key management processes necessary to manage the business.

The difference between the two definitions is that EPM focuses on management processes while CRM/ERP is targeted at streamlining business processes (think business process reengineering) on the operational level. The problem with both definitions is that they are still process-centric, a view that is commonly undertaken by technology-deterministic thinkers.

Business process reengineering failed because technologists did not take into account local practices when they crafted well-defined processes. There is no doubt that linear processes that lead to precise information can be valuable to companies, but such processes, in the words of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their book, The Social Life of Information, "do not encompass all that goes on in the organization".

Management is something that is less linear and less defined by process and information. It has also been difficult to reengineer. It is not surprising that business process reengineering has been more successful in organizations such as the military where command and control is the order of the day. Even the reengineering of seemingly linear processes by Xerox to provide its technical reps with clear-cut directions in repair work did not succeed. The reps ultimately turned to one another for help.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, noted that management is ultimately about people -- it's about "making people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant." There is a danger that organizations will overlook this important aspect, as they have done so in the past, by focusing their business activities around technology solutions.

Stories from the reference desk

2008-08-05T06:24:00.002+08:00

Anecdotes from librarians about their encounters with users often crack me up. Some librarians from the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana have put together a really neat video depicting the things that users do. If you interested in stories from Singapore, check out the librarian tales by the QQ*librarian.