Civil servants are reeling in the wake of the horrific news that CDs containing the records of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) database have been lost, and the futher news of DVLA data being lost. The full cost to tax paying members of the public may not be fully realised for years to come.

This debacle is not only an example of incredibly poor information management, but also a sign of a wider problem in the UK, that you get what you pay for. Or in this case you don't get what you pay for. 

Information management is, or rather was, at the heart of British life. Travel to former colonies like India or Australia and they'll gladly inform you of the regimented behaviour towards information that led to government structures that have served the sub-continent and prison colony well to date. Yet, those standards have dropped.

An IWR reporter remarked as we debated the issue, how come information of this value was so easy to simply download and burn to a CD?  Technology preventing such blunders is not new and is a basic function of many information management systems.

Revelations of the missing information came a day after a report on the BBC's Today programme that the Driving Standards Agency and vehicle licensing body the DVLA employees take on average three weeks sick leave a year. Missing information and low staff moral are examples of a civil service that is poorly funded and poorly managed.

It is too easy to wag the finger of blame at civil servants, when in truth a much wider debate needs to take place.  As tax payers and child benefit recipients we are angry and worried, as information professionals we are dumbfounded that such lapses could have occurred.  What of our role as citizens?  Since the 1980s we've wanted a John Lewis service, but only paid Tesco value brand prices.  If you want John Lewis quality, you pay John Lewis prices.  On the high street this modus operandi fits well with the public, as they choose when they want quality and when they want to increase their spending. So why is it that we expect our state services to manage high level information on a low level budget?

This needs to be a debate about our society and its values, literally, as well as an improvement in information management.

Ben Toth reveals how he keeps his information intake healthy and why blogging can be more valuable than social networks such as Facebook.

Q Who are you?
A Ben Toth, 48, domiciled on a farm in Herefordshire. I trained as a librarian at University College
London about 15 years ago. I used to be the director of the NHS National Knowledge Service when it was part of Connecting for Health. The best known service it runs is the National Library for Health (www.library.nhs.uk). Currently, I’m designing the enterprise architecture for the National Institute for Health Research (www.nihr.ac.uk). I’m also writing a book on Health 2.0, which will be published in parts later this year.

Q Where is your blog?
A You’ll find it at http://nelh.blogspot.com

Q Describe your blog and the categories on it
A It’s just a public notebook really. Its content tends to reflect what I’m working on, but it’s mostly about libraries, health and the web. I could use Microsoft Word to keep my notes. I could use del.icio.us. But a blog is more visible and more in the flow of the things I’m reading, which
are almost invariably on the web. A lot of the entries I make are just notings – highlight, right-click and
send to Blogger. I use tags but I’m not very strict about categorising things.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Since about 2001. Eighteen months ago I lost all my entries and had to start again.

Q What started you blogging?
A I was helping my daughter set up a website as part of a Brownie project she was doing. I couldn’t use the National Electronic Library for Health servers and I didn’t want to manage Apache or pay someone to, so we used Tripod. Which worked, but it was difficult to use. And then I read about Evan Williams’ little project, which became Blogger, had a go with it, and haven’t looked back. It’s become a
habit, and I haven’t got tired of it yet.

Q What bloggers do you watch and link to, and why?
A These days I follow things through RSS if I can, so my blog-watching is mostly via a feed reader. The only blog I regularly visit is Dave Winer’s (www.scripting.com) because he’s taken blog writing to a level where the argument is developed through the day and so needs to be read on the page. I look at Techmeme (www.techmeme.com), but that’s not really a blog. I used to maintain a list of blogs
that I linked to through blogrolling, but I can’t see the point of doing that any more. The social web takes care of that sort of affiliation-showing much better.

Q Do you comment on other blogs?
A I don’t comment much. Sometimes I carp from the sidelines on e-healthinsider (www.e-health-insider.com), but I don’t think there’s much value in commenting or reading comments. That’s not to say that discussion isn’t valuable, but I’d rather read views as blog entries rather than comments on
someone else’s blog.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your blog presence?
A It’s the best way of keeping in touch with what’s going on, and keeping a blog maintains some
visibility to people.

Q How does blogging benefit your career?
A Blogging and RSS are really important for me professionally. They keep me up to date in a way
that nothing else can.

Q What good things have happened to you solely because you blog?
A Making professional contacts that I otherwise wouldn’t have and maintaining ones that might
otherwise have fallen off. In some ways blogging is more useful than LinkedIn and Facebook
as a social networking tool. But it’s really only a matter of time until traditional blogging gets divided
up between Facebook, Vlogging and Twitter.

Q Setting work aside, which blogs do you read just for fun?
A The Fake Steve Jobs blog was great (http://fakesteve.blogspot.com). And when I need a chuckle, I check out the Dilbert RSS feed (http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf ).

What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A The reliably interesting starting points on library matters for me are:
■ www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
■ http://orweblog.oclc.org
■ www.philbradley.typepad.com
■ http://tomroper.typepad.com
And Jon Udell is a first-class technologist who happens to like libraries (http://blog.jonudell.net)

We're used to offshoring work to other countries to achieve cost reductions or follow-the-sun working, or both. We're also used to having some of our computing activities and services hosted remotely through web hosts, Salesforce.com, Google, Facebook et al.

Some of these companies run huge data centres and they are concerned about continuity of energy supplies. Some are siting themselves near renewable energy sources, others moving to where they can get the stuff cheap or to locations where they can avoid declaring their energy consumption. (True, but you can do your own research on that one.)

Anyone who's a serious consumer of power is trying to find ways to get the consumption down. Hardware and software suppliers are having a great time selling virtualisation software, efficient new kit and clever new cooling systems. And, when customers have all done this and got themselves sorted out, they'll still find that the need for computing resources will grow and they'll have to find new ways to cope.

Well, with a hat tip to an announcement by Data Íslandia and Hitachi Data Systems, another possibility has surfaced. Why not move all the hosts to safe countries where natural energy abounds? The 'safe' is probably the main challenge. If you think 'solar' then some of the hottest countries also happen to be the least desirable from this perspective.

Iceland, on the other hand, has a rather unusual combination of plenty of renewable geothermal and hydro-electric energy coupled with a cool climate. It has a technically literate population and it is relatively secure. No-one seems to want to invade it, for example.

Data Íslandia specialises in providing disk- and tape-based long-term data archiving services. Yesterday's Hitachi deal is based on its data management services which will enable multinational organisations to address the management, compliance and environmental burden of exploding data volumes. Data Íslandia director, Sol Squires, says "virtualising six-month old information, which is effectively digital toxic waste, is a very poor use of resources." Customers will be able to offload stale data while still having real-time access to it.

No doubt there are a million political reasons why I'm wrong, but Iceland strikes me as an environmentally agreeable and secure place to house our national digitised libraries. Maybe our tax records too.

The IWR American Psychological Association Information Professional of the Year award has been announced and went, deservedly to Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus for the UKOLN organisation.

The award is judged by a panel of previous winners and the IWR editorial team. As editor of IWR when I judge the award I look for an individual who is pushing the limits of information, technology and making the role of the information professional as far as possible and making it an exciting role.  When looking through the final results I could see that the other judges felt the same way and Brian was an excellent choice.

Brian's role is a national Web co-ordinator, an advisory post funded by the educational body JISC and the Museums, Library and Archives Council (MLA).

In this role Brian is looking at the web as central resource for learning and research in higher education and is looking at ways to make the web a successful resource, which is a challenging role, because the web is still very young and is constantly changing. This can be seen with the recent changes dubbed Web 2.0, therefore Brian is going to be pretty busy for some time to come.

Based at the University of Bath, I know from information professionals I have dealt with in the academic sector that he is very well respected and his thoughts are often the basis for great debate within the industry. Linked to this is his blog, which is one of the most popular blogs in the sector.

I hope all IWR readers will join me in congratulating Brian for an award very much well deserved. 

Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikipedia was the keynote speech of Online Information 2007 with a presentation Web 2.0 in action: Free culture & community on the move.

Starts with Britannica editor Charles van Doren 1962, who said the encyclopaedia should be radical, but Wales claims they have been anything but.

Small showing of hands for those that have edited, although Wales believes it’s a good showing, "but not as many as college kids".

I consider us to be the Red Cross of information, he says as he describes its charitable status. Have 10 full time staff and will spend about $2 to 3 million this year, which is tiny compared to the major publishers. Vast majority of the money is from small donations, which he likes because its grass routes and not dependent on advertisers.

Wales talks about the desire to extend the languages that are in use on Wikipedia, including Hindi and Afrikaans.

Wiki is free in the sense of GNU, its free to copy, modify and distribute.

Shows a video of his travels to India and how he learnt that the local communities want to use the English version, as the English language is a route out of poverty. His organisation has been out to South Africa teaching students how to edit Wikipedia. "One of the things we have learnt is that if you can get five to 10 editors working together, it can make a great difference." These groups make progress and then they look towards outreach and who they can include. Hence the organisation has set up an academy to find the founding editors. It has begun in India, with 10-20,000 articles a month being put together by academy organisations.

Wikia is his next subject, a separate organisation with 66 languages, including a 67th, Klingon. Wales goes on to demonstrate using Google search results for Muppets and how the top result is the official site, but the rest of the results are from web based conversation, ie Wikipedia pages, forums and fan sites. He demonstrates an article on the Ford motor company and how on Muppet Wiki site, there is an article on Muppet Ford ads and how this demonstrates this level of information would never have been available before.

The search engine is a political statement, in a small P sense, Wales says. The proprietary software of the main players is a mystery in that people have no control of the accountability. The Wikia search will publish its algorithm.

Wales believes that the trust of social networks and setting up trusted networks can be utilised in search. .

On the role of collaboration, he asks the audience to imagine that they are designing a restaurants, discussing the idea that we trust the people around us, we don't put people in cages in restaurants because they will be using knives.
The wiki philosophy is to allow people to do good.

I was meant to be going to the House of Lords tonight. No I haven't spent the missing IWR marketing budget on a Labour party donation and offer of a peerage from Tony Blair. Tonight's rare opportunity to entered the hallowed chambers of the Lords was for the launch of Information Matters, a guide to good information management practise.

Obviously this has become a bit of a hot potato subject for the powers of Whitehall and I was not totally surprised to hear that the event has been "postponed", I am though disappointed, now I really will have donate money to some political party that will change its policies from day to day to suit its sponsors!

But cynical disbelief in political parties aside, the debacle at HMRC is not an opportunity to clobber the current Labour government, they can do that on their own. This now needs to be a debate about the quality of service we desire. The mistakes that took place at HMRC happened because of poor policy and in all likelihood, a demotivated and under appreciated and underpaid staff. These factors in any organisation will lead to a disaster.

Sadly as a nation we are demanding a John Lewis service, yet only prepared to pay a Tesco budget brand price for it. Our government and political parties fear spending public money, or worse, the public and the Daily Mail discovering that public money has been spent. Yet cuts in budgets and over stretched departments have led to this scenario and could lead to more.

It is ridiculous that a country as rich as the UK that is experiencing unparallelled levels of growth is trying to run its infrastructure, which after all is what our civil service is, on a shoestring. We have politicians tempting us with tax cuts, yet clearly they cannot balance the books with the revenue they have, how will public information be well managed and secured in a state that has even less revenue coming in?

The awful mess at the HMRC needs to spark a debate about how we want our nation to operate. Groups and parts of the media are quick to call for changes to immigration levels, but lets have a debate about the quality of our services, all of them, whether its schools and hospitals to departments looking after taxation or defence. We cannot lower taxes when our troops are being put at risk in Iraq to secure oil in ill equipped vehicles and our civil service is making basic mistakes with valuable data.

It may not be a popular move, but as a European nation that expects its authorities to provide child benefit, shouldn't we at least pay a proper level of taxation to meet those expectations?

At a major international publishing event like the Frankfurt Book Fair the bright lights of trade publishing and all its household star names could easily drown out the academic and scientific publishers. But this has not been the case.

Talk at the event, in all circles, is about books and technology, in particular search and eBook readers. On both subjects the specialist publishers are leading the way and the trade publishers salute them.

Amazon and Sony were expected to steal the show with their eBook readers, they are instead conspiquous in their absence, but that has not stopped publishers and technology providers from talking about the devices and their potential.

I was particularly interested in a conversation I had with sceintific, technical and medical publishers WIley where they hinted that they and other specialists may get involved in driving the adoption of eBook readers. Could we see the eBook reader adopt a similar model to the mobile phone where users sign up to a subscription service, content of a particular kind in this case, and in return they get a sleek and sexy device? Its certainly worked for the mobile industry, which now resembled the car world with its emphasis on styling and marketing.

But such a move could also be a blind alley, as one expert said to me, these devices don't support the interlinking and interactivity that content users are currently enjoying with the web.

During the fair Google, Ingram Digital Group and Amazon have all used the scientific and academic publishers as case study beacons for just what can be done with books on the web.

Geographically the Far East is the leading adopter as its markets radically develop according to Mark Carden, Ingram senior vp.

Perhaps Amazon spread rumours of a possible launch to see if there was real interest, well if the level of conversation we've heard is anything to go by, the eBook reader is in demand.

Earlier this week PaidContent.org launched its UK and European information service at a swanky Scottish bar in, err, London.  IWR went along and once underneath the deer antler chandelier it was as if a time and space wormhole had opened up and we were transported back to 1999 and they heady dot com boom.

The zeitgeist was unmistakable, young trendy professionals in Chris Evans glasses, sharp suits, bright shirts and an excitable level of conversation about "content" and "funding". It was uncanny. The headache's from the launch parties of Boo.com, Handbag.com and anything you like .com have only just cleared at the IWR Editor's desk and all of a sudden I get the feeling that it is all about to happen again.

The last web boom rapidly replaced CD-Rom in the professional information space and for those of us commentating on it for the traditional information sector, we were regularly told our days were numbered and the geeks would inherit the earth. In many ways everything has changed, yet also, nothing has changed.  Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia are significant changes, but despite falling ad revenues, the stalwarts of information still remain kings of the jungle.

Interestingly at this party, fund toting entrepreneurs didn't make the same mistake of predicting the demise of traditional information providers; instead I heard many conversations about partnerships, relationships and hosts. Kewego, just one of the bright (complete with lime green logo) Web 2.0 start ups present talked of the importance of the "content owners" and rattled off the names of respected information providers. The general feeling I left with is that if we are about to start partying again, but the difference is not that the new players think they have all the answers and will replace our libraries, publishing houses and research departments, instead they see themselves as a component and supplier.

Widgets is a term used widely in the blog world and already newspaper groups are adding widgets to their online portfolios. The next information wave appears to be about a wealth of new ("funded" and partying) companies offering to add their widget to your information. For information professionals this means understanding what a widget is, what it offers your users and negotiating a good deal for all parties involved.

Catherine Draycott, chair of British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) and the Wellcome Trust discusses how difficult it can be for image libraries within an organisation, including museums because there is often a need to generate a profit. She wants the industry and BAPLA to consider new models where there is an exchange between the academic community and the image provider, whether it is partnership or digitisation benefits or other ways of sharing revenue.

Wellcome now makes its images available under Creative Commons and a large percentage of the royalties goes to the creators. They have gone to the attribution model, because it is in line with the Wellcome's OA policies and the policy applies to the images on the Wellcome trust. If the images are for teaching, academic research and non-commercial publication the fee is waived.

Intelligent Television a documentary company that looks to make educational material more widely available, chief exec Peter Kaufman begins talking about screen based visual material, which is what a TV producer considers and so do information professionals. Gartner believe that paid search is a $15bn industry. The JISC digitisation strategy doesn't talk about free  and open access and focuses on business models and public private partnership and Peter Kaufman thinks that is a practical approach.

In the Q&A Draycott describes an idea of using the same metric as PR companies use to quantify the value of media coverage compared to the cost of an advertisement, to the re-use of images from an image library and how that may be useful for archive holders, especially as they are subsidising commercial organisations by providing the images.

Chris Batt, chief exec of MLA has a hard hitting presentation.

Libraries contain the raw material of the future, Batt says, and describes knowledge as being about learning, cultural identity, social development, and it has to be available to everyone.

"Understanding builds empowerment and cohesion and Batt considers this his aspiration. Our mission is to help people to take learning journeys, whether it’s the time of the next bus out of

Cardiff

or genetics. Being motivated will encourage people to carry on learning.

The only successful technology are the ones that are invisible, no one worries about how the TV or telephone works. Batt points out that presentation is the most important thing to the user and he shows and criticises examples of an archive page and the 24 Hour Museum page, both of which he states do not demonstrate to the user what they can do there.

Museums, libraries and archives have collections and customers, there role is to be the connections between the two. Collections are cared for by cultural heritage, education and research and they are passionate about it. Batt believes users though "don't give a toss" about whether these things are cultural heritage, education or research, they just want stuff they need.

Public Catalogues Foundation, could be a fantastic digital resource, it’s a collection of images of the publicly owned oil paintings in Great Britiain, county by country in the

UK

.

Batt ends on the statement, compared with fighting a war, the costs are minute and the benefits infinite. He believes the strategic e-Content

Alliance

is very important. Content in a networked environment is more important than institutes. An image of a little girl at a library hit home as Batt reminds every one that what they do now is important for her future. He wants knowledge as a utility, as trusted and as accessible and invisible as pure running water.

IWR is in the Welsh capital Cardiff for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digitisation Conference, which has been opened by Carwyn Jones of the Welsh Assembly.

The event is the launch pad for the digitisation strategy from the education group; and will also show case the work that has already been carried out and to analyse the role of JISC as the conduit to academic digitisation and what lessons the organisation  and academia have learnt so far.

Based at the St David's Hotel on the regenerated Cardiff Bay area, this gleaming white tower is an example of the new Wales and the new Cardiff, a country at the forefront of technology and the cultural landscape, whether its the location for Dr Who or ground breaking broadband and content strategies.

The conference has launched a blog for the event and is asking attendees and members of the information community to contribute to the debate.

The event has attracted leading members of the information community from universities in Manchester and Oxford as well as the Open University.

Daily newspaper The Guardian is still pursuing its worthy campaign Free our Data, which highlights how much information the government creates and then either never makes available to information professionals and consumers or does so at restrictively high prices.

Today's issue of the newspaper rather timely reveals how the Environment Agency forced an online information provider to remove flood information from its service which the company had gained from the Environment Agency. It did this as large parts of Yorkshire look more like Bangladesh as climate change wrought terrible rain and flooding on the region.

OnOneMap.com uses Google maps to offer a mash-up service that over lays information onto the maps such as properties for sale and let, the location of schools, supermarkets and mobile phones. To improve its service further, OnOneMap carried out a data scrape of the Environment Agency and collated together a layer of flood information, which, with no surprise created massive interest.

Just days before the heavens opened and flooded large parts of the UK, the Environment Agency demanded that the data be removed because of an infringement of "database copyright".

Guardian journalist Charles Arthur describes the need for this service and its use public information as an opportunity to save public money as there is a reduced need to use emergency services if houses in high flood risk areas are, effectively abandoned, especially when this information has been left out of the new Home Information Packs.

It’s a compelling story and The Guardian should be saluted for continuing this campaign, read the full story here:

Recently I was lucky enough to be part of a discussion panel organised by the City Information Group (CIG). The discussion centred on the future role of research and information professionals in the face of new networking technology, all dubbed Web 2.0, and how this technology will affect the working lives of information professionals.

My  hat  goes off to the information professionals at the event who put their hands in  the air and admitted they didn't fully understand the technology and the issues it presented to their working lives. It's a brave move in a busy room full of your peers. But it is OK to admit you don't understand the full complexity of the Web 2.0 plot. I left the conference feeling that almost everyone, apart from my colleagues Euan Semple and David Tebbutt, is a little shaky on some areas of Web 2.0. I too feel out of touch with RSS and FaceBook.

The problem with Web 2.0 is that there are so many different iterations of this technology, blogging, wiki encyclopaedia, virtual worlds created by users, social computing networks and image systems for sharing videos and photographs.  Is it any wonder that information professionals are, despite their deep natural understanding for information issues, lost in a virtual Sargosso Sea. 

At first I was worried that the attendees didn't fully understand this technology, but as the evening progressed I was re-invigorated to learn that on the whole, information professionals do want to learn and engage with this technology. And that is good news, because if the information community does not, it will lose out, because the next generation of information users will interact with information in a way so radically different from the way we do.

The first step along the rocky road to Web 2.0 is admitting what your level of understanding is, and I have nothing but admiration for those information professionals that admitted to a packed room that they were not part of this next generation, because by doing so, the information community can step back and take a look at what is required to fully embrace the technology and the all important information professionals.

Paul Miller at Talis mentioned a Tim Berners-Lee video in which he tries to explain, in plain English, the semantic web to ZDNet's Executive Editor David Berlind.
He chose the term 'data bus' to describe the end result. Computers can dip into the data bus and drag out whatever information they need, providing it's in there, and manipulate it how they see fit.
The data gets on the bus by being encoded using the RDF standard data format. And it can be sucked out using a query language called SPARQL, among other things.
(These are all my words, by the way, not Sir Tim's. But I hope I'm reflecting a new mood of pragmatism that Miller was relieved to note when Berners-Lee was talking at last month's www2007 conference in Banff. )
Changing existing data formats would prove a nightmare within and between organisations. They would have to trickle the changes to the furthest reaches of their organisations and their partners. A better approach for existing data is to 'wrap' it inside RDF. And this is how the great migration to the semantic web is going to happen.
It will start with data which benefits its owners from being open. It will be sucked up by computers belonging to people who believe they can deliver value by linking disparate information together.
Think of mashups. They link, say, mapping information with building information and, maybe, deeper level stuff about who's in the building and what they are doing there. Okay, I made that last bit up, but it's feasible. The main issue is that the mashup writer has to explicitly link up to the APIs for what they want to surface. These might be proprietary and, in any event, once a mashup is done, it does only that job.
Apply the same thinking to the semantic web: the data is in standard formats (think XML) and it can be grabbed and manipulated by software. Not only that, but relationship information and alternative terms can be embedded and defined.
David Tebbutt Likes IWR, for example. A subject, predicate and object. Such encoding, derived from one of my reading lists or my vote in StumbleUpon could be extracted and aggregated with others to draw new conclusions. Expect to see provenance and/or trust attributes as well.
The semantic web project is under way. Companies like Talis are already working hard to make sure that their own products and services exploit these standards to go way beyond the narrow world of libraries.
The W3C stuff makes for dry reading, but we all owe it to ourselves to become familiar with the opportunities presented by the sematic web.

In a wide ranging conversation Forum host Euan Semple asks the panellist what their assumptions and predictions are for the future of Web 2.0.

Simon Phipps, chief open source officer of Sun Microsystems begins with the idea that a something starts out as a wild idea and then becomes less contentious as it is discussed through comments, and wiki tools, you get the feeling that he sees this as the concrete that will ensure the foundations of Web 2.0 are strong.

Phipps describes Atom as the thinking man's RSS and he thinks forums, blogs and wikis will have Atom feeds. Semple adds how you have lots of little things that no one pays any attention to within an organisation, but then it builds up. Phipps responds that all of Sun's tools have tagging tools that do just this.

Nick Ward, media analyst with Panmure Gordon & Co, takes on the debate about where will Web 2.0 go as a business. Phipps finds it difficult to believe the profits of these companies will be difficult realise. So far for these companies to be floated on the stock market would be difficult and points to the fact that Last.fm and Friends Reunited were bought by large existing vendors, CBS and ITV respectively.

Thomson-Reuters deal is a sign of businesses having to restructure.  The city is sceptical are worried whether the ad supported model for the likes of Myspace really has legs to it. I simply think the whole issue of the business model for these and the loyalty towards general social media sites will struggle and it’s the more specialist ones that will triumph. There are a lot of B2B businesses that operate through jargon and barriers and they will have a great deal to lose through transparency from Web 2.0, law firms and broker firms are amongst those that could be threatened.

People want the name of a very big bank like UBS in on a deal so that if it goes wrong they can say, "well we had the best people in the world on this," but I would argue there are a few years while the barriers to remain up.

Semple says he would pay to be part of high quality networks, the ad revenue can go, Ward reminds him that subs revenue model is very slow to develop.

Marc Monseau, PR person for drug giants Johnson & Johnson thinks there has to be some guidance, Phipps adds that Sun bloggers all have to go through some training. "I see that as being one of the advantages, you then have a well informed workforce and that has benefits," Monseau said. Ward believes because it is public, it can make people more sensible, it is self regulating. Semple reminds everyone that it is easy to consider Web 2.0 as geeky for teenagers, yet there is an audit trail, which is a corporate thing.

People are using Facebook to create and manage their own identity and it means they cannot be treated as demographics anymore. Phipps agrees, all of the internet's evils is because it doesn't have strong identity mechanisms and is looking forward to strong identity, which he believes will damage spam and other areas.

Sun has a lot of tools being developed for identity management. Ward adds that mass culture is no longer needed to make a profit, discussing the long tail. Instead all of us watch and read block-busters and absorb all its marketing, we can all indulge our individual tastes and there will be greater cultural diversity. He thinks it is already happening. Phipps responds that the long tail is also about monopolising niches, but Ward doesn't believe that its all niche businesses pandering to Rupert Murdoch, because it will be easier to make and distribute products and make a profit from them.

Adriana Lukas believes it is all about focussing on the individual and the organisation will follow.

IWR Blog is at the Blogs and Social Media Forum 2 today, a conference organised by Incisive Media, which IWR is part of.

The conference will be discussing a wide range of blogging and social media issues including its impact on the media, advertising, content generation, business issues and social networking.

Amongst the organisations discussing the technology and its impact are broadcasters the BBC, content management specialists Jadu and private healthcare provider Bupa.

The BBC open up the debate early on in a conversation panel discussing how social media is affecting how people perceive it as an organisation, hosted by social media expert and former BBC employee Euan Semple. "Back in the 90s we bough H2G2, a version of Wikipedia, we've done blogging in areas like the Highlands of Scotland, but that approach of having to come to .co.uk will not apply any more," Jem Stone, a BBC executive producer New Media and Technology admits.

"The BBC should be using the web as a canvas, not just BBC.co.uk.  The BBC doesn't need to be on the internet, it has to become part of the internet and that is now coming to be. We need to integrate, we need to be on del.ic.ious. We ask people to submit to the BBC. We will reflect this, we ask people to share with us."

"What we need to get better at is monitoring the conversations, we need to do that better and we need to reflect that better on the BBC.co.uk site and we have tools that start that."

"What we are very bad at is engaging with those conversations in those spaces, and it is hard work. The perception of the BBC, it is interesting to note that Semple's perception of the BBC online is from the bloggers he knows, that is not necessarily accurate."

"Internally we need to shift the perception of what the BBC is doing. You need to have your staff and colleagues out there in these spaces." Semple adds, this is affecting all sorts of organisations.

Freedom of Information campaigner, author and journalist Heather Brooke is, understandably getting hot under the collar regarding the recently tabled changes to the Freedom of Information Act and its latest development, the Trade Secretary claiming the Act is placing "good government at risk".

Alistair Darling, the Labour Trade Secretary has, according to reports in Scottish newspapers written to the Secretary for Constitutional Affairs detailing his concerns. Brooke describes the story in the Scotsman as something she would expect to see in a Kenyan or Nigerian newspaper, but not here in the UK. "Politicians are fighting off demands for the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act," she says of Kenya and Nigeria, although the same can now be said of our own Mother of Parliaments.

The Scotsman quotes Darling's letter as stating, "“If we are to live under constant threat of publication, this will prevent MPs from expressing their views frankly when writing to a minister. We need urgent advice on what the position is.” Brooke responds, "Politicians as delicate creatures frightened to speak in public? As if!"

Juxtaposing the intensive scrutiny that scientific information receives compared to politics, Brooke very cleverly shows what risks society would be placed under if scientific research information was treated in the same way as policy forming is. "Some one could determine (in secret) that his snake oil was the best solution to a problem (treating polio, for example) based on findings that only he and his minions could access. No data would be published so no one could challenge legitimacy."

Brooke states that this is exactly how Parliament works and argues, "It is only by debating the relative facts and merits of an issue that a superior solution can be found."

David Maclean MP has demonstrated the contempt MP hold the public in with his shameful private members bill on Freedom of Information Act restrictions and personal expenses. The bill came closer to reality on Friday night. If the bill becomes an Act then the Hose of Commons and Lords will be exempt from an Act they have foisted on the public and information professionals across the land.

To make this seedy episode that little bit dirtier, the MP pushing the bill was discovered to have spent £3,300 on a quad bike to use at agricultural shows in his Penrith community.

I suggest information professionals let Mr Maclean know their thoughts:

David Maclean a Conservative MP, who tabled the bill suffers from multiple sclerosis and sought approval from the Commons to buy the vehicle on expenses, which they gave. It is just this example of expenditure that will be covered up by his bill.

Now I have a lot of experience of agricultural communities and shows, and I have some experience of MS; as a result I know how large and tiring these shows are and the need for suitable transport if you suffer from MS.

But under Maclean's new bill the public would never know that £3,300 of their money had been spent on Maclean and that when he steps down from Parliament how he'll have a nice asset in his garage thanks to us. Nor would we be able to engage in an educated debate with him on why he doesn't hire these vehicles for the small number of agricultural shows that take place each summer? Nor would we be able to question him about whether he could simply drive around the show in Land Rover, I'm sure show organisers would allow it. No, the public and information gatherers would be on the back foot, we wouldn't be able to challenge Mr Maclean because we would not have the facts to hand and there would be no way of getting to them.

There is no doubt that there are instances when an MP needs to be careful not to disclose details in an FoI response that may put constituent at harm. But the original Act provided methods to gauge when and what information should be released. A blanket restriction creates an environment open to corruption from MPs and prevents a case by case analysis.

Those who voted in favour of this restriction, and especially Maclean put agricultural communities, MS suffers, Parliament and

Great Britain

to shame. It has been a dark weekend for information.

Environmental issues are top of the agenda, so much so that even the Conservative Party has noticed them from deep within Notting Hill. To some of us, the affect of the environment is blindingly obvious, it is after all, well all around us. But business and politics have, until recently chosen to ignore the environment.

Now though the effects of climate change are beginning to affect businesses. Nothing gets attention more than a cost. Insurance companies must be beginning to wonder about how many Boscastle floods, or rogue typhoons in London and Birmingham their profit margins can absorb.

The good news is reaction is beginning to take place, but its not an easy issue to understand. Within the green agenda are many debates, these range from oil company sponsored "science" which denies many of the evidence based claims about climate change, right through to environmentalists campaigning against wind farms (sounds strange doesn't it) because they can damage bird migration routes.

When issues are too complex there is a danger that businesses will avoid them until it is forced upon them, which is often too late. Information, as we know, is the answer to these difficult issues, the trouble is, what information do you turn to in order to help your organisation go green?  The May issue of IWR tries to help by giving some pointers.

Tomorrow is the closing date for the 2007 Brit Blog Awards. No industry can exist these days without an award ceremony it seems. Sadly these awards, sponsored by web search provider Ask and organised by one of London's free newspapers has failed to recognise that blogging has taken off and offers a whole array of communities the chance to communicate.

There are categories for technology, sport, fashion, politics, arts & entertainment; travel, youth and weird and wonderful.

Perhaps because the organisers, the Metro newspaper and its parent the derisive Daily Mail have a poor track record at good news reporting there is no category for news, nor is there a category for business blogs, science and culture. Any one who has picked up either of these papers will be aware of their inabilities in these areas; and therefore it is perhaps sensible that they don't try to judge quality bloggers in these areas.

But the truth is, blogging has become a serious platform for creating, sharing and delivering information and if it is to have an awards ceremony, it needs one that has credibility.

Back when IWR's staff were tuning in and dropping out at Uni, JANET was a pretty new thing, and the National Centre for Super Computing Applications had developed a program called Mosaic that looked pretty interesting. Things have got a lot more complicated than they were in those early days, and allowing staff and students access to resources is a more complicated business.
Enter, stage left, Eduserv, the not-for-profit public sector services organisation. Eduserv has launched OpenAthens, a cheaper and easier framework for instititions that want to get access to UK Access Management Federation resources protected by internet2's Shibboleth, and keep access to Athens-protected resources. The aim, effectively, is to enable institutions to share and secure resources easily. At the moment, OpenAthens is not a huge deal - after all, JISC has made it possible for institutions to get free access to information protected by Athens and Shibboleth until July 2008. But after that point, it's a paid for game, and OpenAthens provides access for between £1000 and £10,000 per institution. The deal here is economies of scale - Eduserv does the development and offers it to many.
Eduserv reckons the bill is cheaper than Universities and the like going out and developing their own framework from scratch, but of course there are a couple of other options out there. The main two are Microsoft's  CardSpace, built on .Net (read a quick summary here) and the OpenID, which is a bit more, well, open, than Microsoft's offering. But the interesting thing about OpenAthens is that it's pretty much Switzerland - it'll play happily with OpenID and Shibboleth, yet be cheaper to implement than doing it in house using .Net framework or OpenID.

After successful trials at one of the North West’s best performing hospitals, an Intel and Motion Computing designed electronic clipboard has been unveiled, writes Daniel Griffin.

The portable device, known as a mobile clinical assistant (MCA) is the fusion of a tablet PC with traditional clipboard, but is also packed full of useful features for medical professionals including a barcode reader to scan for medicine labels, patient records, and wrist bands and a radio frequency identification scanner (RFID), to track and ensure secure login of staff. The unit also houses a digital camera to take images of wounds and connect and upload all this information back to a central database.

Its greatest strength is that medical practitioners will be able to call up patient records, order and receive test results, as well as making notes – all in real time.

Commenting on the healthcare hardware, Dr Mike Bainbridge, a senior clinical architect for the NHS has hailed it as “one of the most exciting developments in my 25 years in medicine.” Although there is no official confirmation, timeframe or further details, the BBC reported that Dr Bainbridge hinted the NHS may well be placing an order for the devices. At £1,199 per unit they are not cheap, although as the NHS is currently engaging in a £12bn IT infrastructure implementation that price seems like a drop in the ocean.

There are however a number of issues that will need to be addressed, first of all, for the MCS to be truly effective it will need to be used in a hospital with a Wifi network so that each device can communicate with the hospitals central database and various departments. Secondly there is real concern from GP’s about patient confidentiality being at risk if their records are put on an NHS national database, with over half who took part in a Guardian survey last year saying they would consider refusing to upload patient information at the moment.

It’s survey time again. The IWR reader survey is your chance to have your say about Information World Review and the general state of the information industry. Oh, and you can could win anything from a Creative Zen MP3 player (pictured) for downloading digital music and podcasts to a Nintendo DS games console (we all need to relax) or a DAB radio, thanks to our sponsors business information specialists Bureau van Dijk, providers of the Mint service.

We’ve split this year’s survey into areas to make it easier to understand and faster to fill out. As well as letting us know how you see the state of the information industry, we want to know more about you, the reader. We are not profiling readers to sell their personal details to a credit card
company, but the more we know about you as people as well as professionals the better we can make IWR. Questions range from associations you are members of, salary ranges, the size of team you work with and type of organisation.

We want to know what information management issues are of most concern to you, whether it’s free information or document management.

We also want to know more about how you use IWR, both the print publication, as well as our online titles iwr.co.uk and the IWR blog. No company or product can successfully develop without the input of its users and the more you let us know, the more we can do to make the product better for you.
You can fill out the survey and enter the prize draw by logging on to: http://www.cdsonline1.co.uk/vnu_online/IWR/iwr_2007-01-29.aspx.

Computing and software giant IBM has announced a set of new applications for its Lotus information management applications at the Lotusphere 2007 conference in Orlando; that lean heavily towards the collaborative modes of information management that Web 2.0 pioneers.

Lotus, traditionally known for providing large corporations with email, calendar, and staff directory applications will now offer users social networking, blogging, a presence in the online world of Second Life, as well as video casting and real time chat.

Lotus Connections is a new addition to the range of applications and allows a user to create their own profile or communities using keywords, which can then be searched by other Lotus users within the organisation. Experts at the conference in the US are talking of Lotus Connections as being a Facebook style development.

A further collaboration application announced was Lotus Quickr, which allows conferencing in real time from different locations. The latest version of the instant messaging application Lotus Sametime now supports video chat.

Technical support for Lotus has entered into another dimension with the announcement that a Lotusphere complex has been launched in Second Life to provide the residents of the virtual world with advice and tutorials on collaborating with Lotus.

IBM said at their conference they hope these applications will ensure that new generations of workers that are used to using Web 2.0 technology will find Lotus has the tools they are comfortable with. Major corporations like the security of workers communicating and collaborating through Lotus as it provides information management tools for capturing and backing up information for legal purposes. 

Trampoline Systems watches the flow and exchange of documents in a company network, giving it the ability to spot key influencers and to bring into view the documents accessed and an individual's network of contacts.

The primary value is to staff who need to find sources of expertise or particular kinds of information very quickly, or simply to keep tabs on their own recent activities and connections. Having said that, it is also of value to companies who are looking to reduce their dependence on some people and bring others more into the fold.

Many companies feel more comfortable with this kind of system behind the firewall, so it is available as an appliance as well as a hosted service. Customers so far include the UK Foreign Office, Grant Thornton and Channel 4 Television. Yesterday, it announced a substantial pilot programme inside the Raytheon Company, a US defence and aerospace business. The aim is to improve the sales process through finding and exploiting existing relationships and sources of expertise.

Last year, it chose to illustrate its system using 200,000 of Enron's internal emails from 1999-2002 which had been released by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The default in any company is to capture all emails, but the user can elect to exempt private messages. The system recognises existing permission levels.

Connections can be mapped around any individual and both their contacts and their communication  themes can be navigated through tag clouds as well. Emails are listed according to their relevance and each can be viewed in its own window.

Here's a (slightly reduced in size) map of some of the connections centred around one person:

The width of the connecting lines reveals the traffic flow between individuals. You can double click any person's name to bring them to the centre and show their own connections. The related document list and tag clouds appear in the same browser window, providing instant access to all that is important.

News emerged over the weekend that the Government is implementing plans to free up the flow and access of information between Whitehall departments and government agencies in a bid to make public services run more efficiently. The FT reported that this means that the public will only have to inform the government once if they change address, when normally would have to contact multiple departments such as the DVLA, local council and tax office.

Quality newspaper the Independent reported that civil liberties groups were in uproar as the plans were the thin edge of the information wedge, and are concerned the government can and will extend the range of shareable information as it sees fit.

Plans for debating the issue through 100 member strong citizen panels were also mooted as a means of “deliberative democracy” in an attempt to allay fears. The Guardian was also quick to point out that rumors for a “single massive database” were not accurate and that the announcement was just a means of “seeking public support to allow existing systems to exchange data.”

The FT also reported that the Government will keep in place current safeguards on sharing medical, tax and criminal records, whilst the Mirror, Guardian and Independent reported concerns from opposition parties that it was a chance for “bureaucrats to snoop” whilst Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty Group Director, the human rights group argued “This half-baked proposal would allow an information free-for-all within government – ripe for disastrous errors, and ripe for corruption and fraud.” The Daily Mail cited shadow Home Secretary David Davis criticism of the government’s record of database management such as failures in the Sex Offenders register and more recently the tracking of criminal records from overseas.

The Independent meanwhile devoted its entire front page to the issue and was slightly less hysterical than the tabloids with its sinister Big Brother themed coverage.

The broadsheet in a tabloid's clothes pointed out that Britain has “the world's most ambitious identity scheme, as well as a rapid expansion of the DNA database. Details of all children will be held in a single register to be launched next year, medical records are being transferred to a central NHS database and plans are being examined to track motorists' movements by satellite,” the Indie grimly reminded us.

In a sober effort for balance, their commentator Johann Hari questions in his accompanying article “When the Government acts, why do we always assume there is something to fear?” asking for a little bit of calm and consideration to the matter.

Initial fears of a major security flaw affecting every website containing a PDF are not as bas as first feared.  Last Thursday IWR revealed that security experts at iDefense, part of VeriSign had warned the information industry of the flaw.

Now Ken Dunham, director of the Rapid Response Team at iDefence has revealed that they over-egged the risk and now realise it only affects old browser versions and a hacker is therefore unlikely looking to exploit the flaw.  Dunham now describes the risk as "somewhat limited"; he said to IWR sister title The Inquirer.

Dunham does recommend that information professionals avoid future problems by downloading version 8 of Adobe Acrobat.

Another key question as we head into the new year…

1: Does Microsoft hold the IM key?

The past year saw some serious consolidation in the enterprise content management market - Stellent was bought by Oracle earlier this month, Filenet by IBM in August, OpenText merged with Hummingbird, and Interwoven has been cosying up to Microsoft (though there's no talk of marriage there yet). But as the IT giants come lumbering into the information management industry, can anyone hear the sound of a culture clash? The information industry (in which content is king) is being forced into alliances with technology and communications companies (for whom data delivery is king). The two do not make easy partners. In 2007, the information industry will have to come to terms with the fact that most users want easier, cheaper access to information, while the IT industry will need to better understand new groups of users – information professionals, content managers, compliance officers and many others – who want to control and regulate information. The two are opposing forces, and for most people involved in the information industry, the next year will be another of change, pain and agonising compromise. Whoever comes up with a solution that can satisfy both parties will be a winner – and the only company I can see with the DNA and track record to do so, is in fact Microsoft. It has satisfied both consumer and corporate marketplaces in the past with Windows; will it be able to do that double-edged trick for information users and information managers in future?