A lot of people see Microsoft’s agreement to buy Fast as just another example of how mergers and acquisitions are leading to inevitable consolidation in enterprise software generally. I’m not so sure it’s as cut and dried as that.

Most M&A is done to fill a gap in functionality or to grab market share. The Fast deal does both but it would also appear to cut right across Microsoft’s strategy of late last year when it described a plan to develop its search capabilities by organic means with a product called Search Server 2008.

Microsoft now says it plans to integrate Fast with Search Server and SharePoint but, having just cost Redmond $1.2bn, the Fast technology is a racing certainty to be predicated.

It’s a slightly odd state of affairs as it’s only a few months since Microsoft was describing how Search Server would soon be able to compete at the top end of enterprise search but, like Newcastle United parting company with coach Sam Allardyce, one can only assume that Microsoft saw the light a little at an odd juncture.

One report suggests Microsoft also might have taken a close look at Endeca and Autonomy before deciding Fast was the pick of the bunch available. Of course, Autonomy, at perhaps twice the price of Fast, would be pricey given Microsoft’s relatively Scrooge-like attitude to acquisitions, but both of these companies will now be under more sale scrutiny than ever, of course. It will come as no surprise that the most likely buyers are IBM, Oracle and Google.

Incidentally, Fast, like Autonomy, has R&D in Cambridge. That’s Cambridge as in the great university, punting on the Cam and so on, not Cambridge, Massachusetts or some other Cambridge. In enterprise search, at least, there is a part of the tech world that remains forever England.

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)

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 got a smashing email the other day from a fellow Flickr user. Apparently, they'd shortlisted a picture of mine. How exciting.

Well, turns out, not that exciting. The Schmap shortlist was for a so-so picture taken in Brighton to be published in their online guide to Brighton. So far, so good. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be paid, and Schmap, and  I'm presuming its owners, get perpetual worldwide rights to the image. Free.  If, like me, you love free stuff, that's great news. Except when you're giving stuff - free - to a company that will make money from it. Because although Schmaps are free at the point of consumption, the company makes money by selling advertising off the back of them.

Of course, to look at the web, this is great; Schmaps has clearly got its messaging spot on, and there are tons of Flickr users who think that being published - albeit without being paid for their work - is about as exciting as it gets. Some professional photographers are particularly excited, of course.

The rise and rise of software as a service has been such a mantra in the IT media over the last few years that it comes as something of a shock to see the SaaS model actually on the wane in enterprise search. Nevertheless, a recent report by CMS Watch says it plainly: “[the SaaS] model has been a hot topic recently [but] the SaaS model for enterprise search is on the decline”. So, what’s going on here?

CMS Watch itself lists three possible reasons: the preponderance of web-only search in SaaS offerings; the popularity and ease-of-use afforded by appliances; and the competition-squishing presence of Google in the sector.

Let me suggest two more: the fact that free is a compelling price, and the notion that SaaS might not be all things to all men.

Companies looking for a search service today will inevitably be attracted to freebie tasters, especially when the companies offering them -– Microsoft and IBM -- are as big as they come. As discussed earlier, these are highly attractive inducements that offer familiar environments to try out, and a solid upgrade path for those who want to carry on afterwards.

Second, it’s time to admit that SaaS has no Midas effect, except perhaps on marketers. The on-demand model has had a revolutionary effect on customer relationship management and sales force automation, and it is changing the way human resources operates, for example in measuring employee performance. But there are many, many other areas where it has had little or no effect. Even in the much-hyped area of productivity applications where Google and various startups have generated scads of coverage, there has been close to no impact on the hegemony of Microsoft Office, for example.

SaaS is a hugely important trend but privacy concerns, the need to delve into far-flung corners of the enterprise and ancient applications, and sundry other factors mean that search is unlikely to be a happy hunting ground for the model in the immediate future at least.

Lorcan Dempsey has worked for JISC and libraries on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. As a member of the National Information Standards Organisation, his blog on networked information and digital libraries is well followed.

Q Who are you?
A I work in Dublin, Ohio, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and spent a long time in between in the UK. I am lucky to have what I believe to be one of the most interesting jobs in the library world. I am responsible for the programmes and research area within OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). I also help shape OCLC strategic direction.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A http://orweblog.oclc.org

Q Describe your blog?
A I say that it is about “libraries, networks and services”. I suppose that over time it has become more general. At first it had more of a technical slant; now it ranges more widely. I tend to talk about how networks are reconfiguring library services and I have some recurrent threads. These include:

Making data work harder.
We invest a lot in bibliographic data and need to use it more imaginatively in our systems and services.
Moving to the network level.
No single website is the sole focus of a user’s attention. The network is the focus of attention. And a major part of our network use revolves around significant network-level services ­ Amazon, Google, IMDB, and so on. These match supply and demand in efficient ways. The real message of Web 2.0 is the emergence of this pattern of service: data hubs with strong gravitational pull generated through network effects.
Being in the flow.
The focus of attention has shifted from website to workflow. The network is not so much about finding things as getting things done, and we have increasingly rich support for “networkflow”. We may construct our personal digital identities around services in the browser or on the network (RSS aggregators, social networking sites, bookmarks, etc), and we use prefabricated workflows (course management system, customer relationship management system, and so on).

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Almost four years.

Q What started you blogging?
A After I arrived in OCLC I tended to send out a lot of emails. A colleague suggested that a blog might be a better model.

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A The comments on some blogs seem more important than on others.

Q What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A I keep a wide range of feeds in my aggregator and will focus on different ones from time to time. Again, I tend to be more interested in “voice” or those from whom I can learn something. From a library point of view, I look at Caveat Lector (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net) and ACRLog (www.acrlblog.org).

Alma Swan’s new blog, OptimalScholarship (http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com) and eFoundations (http://efoundations.typepad.com) from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, are informative and provocative. I find PlanetCode4Lib (http://planet.code4lib.org) an efficient and useful way of keeping up with a range of stuff.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A I have always contributed to the professional literature. But I find that blogging is quite liberating: it is much easier to write blog entries than longer pieces. It has made me write more quickly and to think about short communications.

Q Which blogs do you read just for fun?
A I look at John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 (http://memex.naughtons.org) and William Gibson’s blog (www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp), and the pictures in YarnStorm (http://yarnstorm.blogs.com) make me smile.

This post comes courtesy of Metafilter. I could bash on about how, if I'm looking for something  interesting or  controversial when aimlessly browsing I go to Metafilter and not a search engine. I could draw a comparison between the effectiveness of Metafilter as a search engine for really cool stuff and the primacy of a certain search engine. Or how Metafilter does the job right first time most of the time, while the likes of BoingBoing et al show merely occasional flashes of brilliance when compared to the massively parallel user model of Mefi. But I won't, because they're all a bit tenuous, to be honest.
Instead, I'd like to point you toward a posting on Metafilter; if Google were optimised for Google. Click through the page, and it's possible to see how search engines have changed the physical appearance of the web. We're all aware to a certain extent of how external influences change the design and layout of sites, but I was stunned to see the sheer volume of cruft, crap and extra verbiage added to the page in the name of SEO.

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.

It looks like they're all at it now. Techcrunch reports that MySpace will launch an application platform similar to Facebook Apps later this week. Techcrunch also broke the story that Google plans to do the same thing late last month.

I feel a little ambivalent about this, and it's partly because it's quite difficult to use an application on Facebook casually; to use it, you are prompted to invite your friends. If someone posts a video, you have to add the application too; you can't just watch it. And then there's the blasted invites to become a Jedi, Sith, Vampire, Werewolf, Mortgage adviser or similar. I might be exaggerating here, of course - Scrablous and Red Bull Roshambull are both cunning applications that have used up many working hours here at IWR towers.

There's clearly potential in applications on these sites, and opening up Google, MySpace et al is good for business and good for creativity. However, there does need to be a balance between utility to the operating sites and utility to the end user. I'm not sure about you, but I'm definitely getting a feeling that people are fed up with being swamped with apps, and fed up of spamming their friends with invites in the process. Of course, I may be (and usually am) wrong, but a successful launch by one or both of these behemoths could mean a dilution of the market - something that may cause a few problems for social networking services, which rather rely on a critical mass of users - you join because your friends join, after all. What are your thoughts? Let's have 'em.

Lovely post from Rob Scoble on what Microsoft thinks of the new spate of web apps out there. I would say I'm gobsmacked, if we hadn't seen this before; Microsoft doesn't hire idiots, it hires very intelligent people. As such, I find what Steve Ballmer (yes, Steve 'Dance monkeyboy!' Ballmer) has to say about the success of Facebook rather odd. I've made a similar, albeit slightly different point in the past, so it might be worth going back to that to clarify why I'm a bit shocked.

Ballmer says that a lot of social networking sites are faddish, flashes in the pan, and that they fall out of fashion quickly. I'd partially agree here - Scoble argues that LinkedIn and Facebook are his Rolodexes now, but their currency depends on the network effect - how often people update their profiles. I bet quite a lot of my business contacts on LinkedIn (In fact several I can think of right now) updated their information a couple of jobs ago. Plaxo is hopefully going to make a big deal of its plan to be the Switzerland of social networking - a way of managing your data online. But I still think that social networking sites are superseded by new and innovative feature sets - in the latest case, Facebook's ability to add home brewed applications at will.

The New York Times (Thanks for removing the registration requirement, NYT bods!) puts it best; Microsoft is going a fair ways outside its core competency by taking on Google at the advertising game.
Google has said it will buy DoubleClick for $3.1bn, regulatory problems allowing; Microsoft has already shelled out $6bn for aQuantive. It's going to be a jolly tight - run thing.

That said, it sounds as if Microsoft is going to take a very different tack. Brian McAndrews, the aQuantive chief now running things at the Microsoft subsidiary, is keen to divorce ads from search, concentrating instead on telling advertisers how their customers get to - and click through - their adverts.

I've been kicking myself all day today; News Corp's purchase of MySpace is making better sense than before. According to the New York Times, MySpace intends to customise adverts based upon the data that its users freely provide as part of their profiles. Facebook isn't far behind, although why one advertiser thinks that journalists want to work from home (we do) on dull data entry (Oh, hold on, this sounds rather familiar) for £12 an hour (Now steady on), I'm not sure. On second thoughts, that sounds like perfect targeting.
The long and short of it is that NewsCorp reckons it can tailor ads to its users, using intimate data the users provide - rather than usage data that the site, or a search engine, gathers from the user's behaviour. News Corp. says that the ad targeting is based on what users say, what they do and what they say they do - smart work.
There's a catch here. Most users assume that the old model of web advertising - get a rough idea of the user, slap ads on page, collect revenue - applies. What they're about to find is that the data they are providing - to be shared with friends - is going to be used to sell stuff to them.
That said, there is a massive shift in the way people use the web. I now realise I'm an old 'un at the age of 32, because I'm going to say the following: youngsters use social networking differently. They are less concerned about freely sharing all kinds of information with others; with inviting people they don't know, and have never met, to be friends. They're unconcerned that the deal they are involved in - be advertised to in a very targeted manner in exchange for the platform - is not as good for them as it was in the past. It's a toss-up as to whether the new profiling and advertising methods will cause a backlash - we'll only be able to find out by watching how MySpace users react. Assuming, of course, that they react at all.

A report from the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) in the USA shows that fair use of copyrighted material is beneficial to the national economy. According to the CCIA industries that can use material under the terms of fair use earned  $4.5 trillion, which adds more weight to the arguments of the Free Our Data campaign from newspaper The Guardian.

Free Our Data wants information held by the government, and therefore paid for by tax payers, to be made freely available so that organisations can use it.

Amongst the organisations using fair use terms that have benefited the US national economy are media organisations, education sector and software developers. 

Industries bound by copyright control with no fair use aspect contributed just $1.3 trillion to the US economy.

Fair use under US copyright law is described as being the use and copying of copyright protected material to comment upon, criticise or parody. Examples include summaries and quotes from medical articles for news, use of media content for teaching or the use of copyright protected material as evidence in a court case.

The Guardian Free Our Data campaign, run by its Technology supplement argues, rightly, that information collected by the Highways Agency, the UK Hydrographic Office and Ordnance Survey should be made available to organisations in the UK without being encumbered by clunky copyright restrictions. Although designated as trading funds, these three organisations receive almost 50% of their income from the public sector, which means taxpayers pay for it. Access to this data is charged for and as a result, organisations are turning to Google Maps for mapping information rather than using information they have already paid for through their business rates.

IWR supports the Free Our Data campaign because we are passionate about online information and want to see the UK remain a leader in information provision and we want to see British information professionals continuing to manipulate information in innovate ways that is beneficial to their user community.

There's nowt but a note on Barrons to show for it, but something is stirring at the long-moribund website of The Industry Standard. Could it be that, a mere couple of weeks after Business 2.0 bit the dust, another title tied to the Dot Com boom is coming back from the dead?
The Standard was one of the stand-out magazines of the era, a mag that didn't take itself as seriously as others, and wasn't afraid to puncture a few egos in pursuit of the story. Sub Standard, the unofficial in-house rag, was a hysterically funny read - if you could get hold of it. If you haven't read James Ledbetter's account, you'll have missed out.

But besides making tech hacks a bit misty-eyed, what does it all mean?

This week's news that the ISO has rejected Microsoft's OOXML standard should be welcomed. XML is a great way of opening up documents and files to people using whatever platform they choose, and OOXML was an attempt to squeeze proprietary and trademarked technologies into what should be an open standard. There's even been a petition against quick adoption of the standard by ISO.
OOXML doesn't stand for Office Open XML for nothing; it's not about doing stuff in an office, and everything about doing stuff *with* Microsoft Office. And if you live somewhere where the unbelievable cost of Microsoft Office is possibly a good deal more than your salary, then kicking out a proprietary format in favour of something anyone can use has to be good news.
OASIS and UN Edifact have worked incredibly hard behind the scenes over the years to introduce XML as a standard; it has real implications and a huge positive impact for the third world, where cheap computing can save lives.
I remember talking to a Sun spokesman six years ago, and, bear in mind Sun is partial, he predicted that Microsoft would attempt to embrace, extend and extinguish XML back then.
I'm being incredibly partial myself here, but the choice is pretty stark; use open standards and a choice of free or premium software as it suits your pocket, or embrace standards with proprietary elements and find that free software doesn't quite cut it, but a £400 software package will.

Bear with me; this may take some time to explain.

Not a few years ago, around about the time that music companies decided it would be a good idea to sue customers as well as file sharing sites, various people began warning that record companies were in a terminal decline. The internet - particularly the ability to find, download and copy pretty much any piece of pop music - had put paid to a business model that has endured since the first companies started printing sheet music.

Not many people took notice. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, record companies are not the sort of things that most musicians or music fans tend to have warm feelings for. Search for EMI, and the first page will be a collection of EMI's corporate web sites. Search for Apple, and the first page includes Slashdot's Apple minisite and the Wikipedia entry. Secondly, record companies, despite what they did to musicians, fans and downloaders, had a point; by downloading an MP3 of a commercial track, people were breaking copyright laws.

In the forthcoming September issue of Information World Review we have an exclusive interview with an information professional who is at the coal face of using the Freedom of Information Act (FoI). Rebecca Lush is the Roads and Climate Change campaigner for Transport 2000, an independent body that lobbies for sustainable transport solutions.

One body that has a wealth of information on transport usage in the UK is, unsurprisingly the Department for Transport. Yet as this article details; getting access to that information is nigh on impossible. Without access to proper information a body cannot deliver on its stated aim - to inform the debate and help those keen to adopt more environmentally sustainable transport. You get a small inkling of government conspiracy and double dealing. But Lush and Transport 2000 are above the nail gnashing fears of conspiracy theorists. In fact their experience is of a civil service that is poorly trained on handling FoI requests.

She tells IWR's Alisdair Suttie: ‘Government agency staff at all levels need to be better trained to deal with requests under the Freedom of Information Act. There’s a prevailing attitude that anyone asking questions is automatically bad. Until this way of thinking changes, it will always be a struggle to obtain information as easily and readily as it should be.’

A search for FoI training reveals on data protection courses. Organisations known to and for information professional training such as Aslib, Cilip and TFPL don't seem to have seen this golden opportunity coming.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the last person using Plaxo to turn out the lights. I was far too hasty, it appears, to write the calendar and contact synching company off. Within a couple of days, Plaxo's nice PR people had called up, and this afternoon I listened to a presentation from vice president and co-founder Tod Masonis and marketing VP John McCrea. The bunch at Plaxo have been busy. Very busy.

I'll explain what all this is  about in a minute, but first off, it's worth saying that quite a lot of what I'm going to talk about isn't going to happen until next week. I have no idea if it will work - the screenshots show it working, but I haven't actually had a chance to try any of this out. So take this as a pinch of salt, but have a try for yourself if you have a Plaxo account.

That said, I think Plaxo has had a great idea. One of the key features of a lot of the new social networking sites is open interfaces. Building on that, and on Plaxo 3.0, the slightly less spammy version of Plaxo, has resulted in something else entirely. Before we go further, it's worth reading Rob Scoble's take on Plaxo 3.0, which gives a good catch-up for those of you who, like me, forgot all about Plaxo.

The latest GuideWire Report takes a look at personalisation and discovery: the next big thing in our web experiences. We've already seen glimpses of it in things like Stumbleupon, which got itself bought by eBay.

The report goes on to examine the landscape for personalisation in some detail, concluding that hundreds of technologies are vying for attention at the moment. The market needs to shake out and recommendation and discovery will become as natural a part of our web experience as search.

Before tackling the new stuff, the report said "The search game has been commandeered by semantics and natural language, a burgeoning sector that merits its own analysis. The user intent on finding information online will turn to Powerset, Hakia, CognitionSearch, and others to find needles hiding in the Web’s haystack."

Hakia, CognitionSearch and Powerset. Who? The implication is that these are mainstream services to which we turn naturally. But, according to their websites, they are all beta or even pre-beta. Mind you, to call CognitionSearch a beta is a bit of a swizz because Cognition, the company, is well established in search circles. However, these innovations do give us an insight of the sort of thing that's coming down the track.

In terms of Google-like usability right now, Hakia is head and shoulders above the others. It works but it often doesn't seem to exhibit much more understanding of the question than Google does. A search for "What happened to Caxton Software?" delivered a good first result from Cardbox (a product Caxton published in 1982). In Google it was the second result. Hakia just about beat Google on the question "Why did Tony Blair resign?" But it did, rather cleverly, throw in a recommendation to read a 2004 Guardian leader suggesting that Tony Blair, rather than Greg Dyke, should have resigned following the Hutton report. So maybe Hakia does have brains and would be worth keeping an eye on.

Powerset is currently just website words and a YouTube movie, although it has a demo which it will be showing on July 24th in San Francisco if you happen to be passing. The product is scheduled for public testing in September.

CognitionSearch seems to be working its way through specific categories en route to a more general facility. At the moment it lists Case Studies, Government, Health, Political Blogs and Wikis as its active categories. Social Networks is there as a teaser, but greyed out at present. Within each category, it offers document sets although, under Wikis, it offers just one - Wikipedia.

Each of these companies, and many more, are looking for the holy grail of search - a way to deliver relevance without putting too great a burden on the everyday user.

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.

I read Dan's post (below, hopefully, but here's a link just in case this post has wandered off on its own) and thought I'd take issue. Sorry, Dan. Actually, I'm not disagreeing with Dan - after all, he is right on the money. I'm not too sure I want the IWR readers and contributors group on Facebook to know exactly how many chocolate chip muffins I ate this afternoon - that's something for my friends to know,  although possibly not the colleagues over the desk from me who wondered where the last one went.

But I also think that the line between work and social life is blurred, especially in more recent times. I talk about personal things with my workmates and contacts, and knowing about each other as people always helps to smooth things along. However, the sorts of information people share on Facebook - as Dan has pointed out - are increasingly becoming more intimate.

Yet, my first reaction to reading the post below was: isn't Facebook for professionals actually called LinkedIn? I know it doesn't get much love, and I'm one of thousands who has rather neglected their profile on that site, but frankly, it's there for friends and business contacts that I want to stay in contact with professionally. Facebook is something you share with an inner business circle, because you want to find out how everyone did at Glastonbury, or see the latest pictures of an old workmates' kids.

Then again, there is a reason why LinkedIn isn't necessarily the Facebook Pro of which we seek.

Well, what a cracking week. The internet has been going crazy over this blog posting from a Google employee, offering to sell pharmaceutical companies ad space opposite Google searches for Sicko, a Michael Moore film taking aim at America's healthcare system. Cory Doctorow's take on the original posting at BoingBoing (see the full list of posts so far here) is fairly typical of the response the the post has generated.

To paraphrase the whole scandal, it appears that Lauren Turner, the Google employee in question, suggested publicly that Sicko portrayed health insurers and pharma companies in the US of being marketing- and advertising-driven organisations rather than companies dedicated to making people healthy. She then suggested that the aforementioned organisations buy advertising to market their way out of the problem.

Nat Torkington at O'Reilly has a great write up (thanks to BoingBoing for pointing to this one as well, by the way). I'm going to wade in as well (with considerably less authority, of course).

One of the most entertaining things about the recent launch of Apple's iPhone has been watching what the hackers have been making of it. My personal favourite so far has involved a jeweller's loupe, used to turn the iPhone's camera into a rudimentary microscope.

There's no doubt the iPhone is selling like hot cakes, but the least attractive thing about it, as with the purchase of the most shiny and expensive new mobiles, is the contract. The handset might be free (or in the case of more fancy phones, hundreds of pounds) but the call plan you have to buy with the phone will recoup the price of the handset and more.

Quite naturally, people want to be able to use the other bits of the iPhone without paying the phone company - in the case of the US, Cingular. Apple and Cingular/AT&T have locked the iPhone to the network - you can't go t a different provider and sign up to their network. This is something the US Copyright Office and regulators over on this side of the pond think is a bad thing. Even better, it's not illegal to unlock phones.

This week, Library House ran another of its excellent conferences at the BFI IMAX cinema in Waterloo. This time the theme was 'Web Essentials'.

Since it was aimed at getting entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and related support companies together, a lot of the conference content was off to one side of IWR readers' interests. However, with around forty companies presenting their web products and services, some were bound to hit the mark.

Here are a few that might appeal to you at a personal or business level:

Garlik: how much of your personal information is spread around the web? And what can you do about it? That's the hook for this subscription service.

Quintura hopes it has a 'Google-beater' with its 'cloud' based approach to search. Slap in what you're looking for and a cloud of related terms appears to the left and the results to the right. Click on cloud items to refine the search. Companies can bid to attach their mini-logos to cloud words.

Click2Map lets you take a Google map and add stuff to it without programming. A kind of 'mashup for the rest of us'. It's a good idea but it's not ready for primetime. And it's French government backed. Hmmm.

ParkatmyHouse.com rewards you for selling your drive or parking spaces for short or long periods. Prospects tell the service where they're going (a football match, an underground station...) and it will find somewhere for them to park. Plans are afoot for SleepatmyHouse.com and others...

Ever recommended someone for a job? How about getting paid for it? Zubka will get you three or four thousand pounds for something you used to do for nothing.

Although there was general agreement that the mobile market is still difficult, a number of organisations are addressing the opportunities now. MakeMyShow LiveConductor connects people on the move with applications and RSS feeds.

Anywr keeps your contact and calendar information for you so you can access it from any WAP enabled phone. Apparently a phone is stolen in the UK every seven seconds. Makes you think...

Yuuguu is aimed at people on the road. Wherever you are, you can hook up to colleagues and share (and control, if you want) each other's computer screens. Uses national rate numbers to create conference connection in parallel.

Huddle looks to be a(nother) promising collaboration system. Getting praise in high places. Scales from small groups to enterprise.

A few quick mentions: Trexy and Trampoline have been covered in IWR before; AlertMe home security - dinky: take a look; and Wonga - great name, great punchline: "too much month at the end of your money". Instant loans, of course.

Given that this is only a tiny glimpse of the Library House event, you can imagine what an interesting and invigorating day it was.

And so to the Groucho Club, one time home of the media in-crowd, where dear old Yahoo! is holding a round table debate on social media. Various notables attended, and somehow they also managed to let a few print journalists in, possibly because we looked like we needed feeding. Not sure yet. Anyway, aside from the rather tasty salt beef sandwiches, the debate was a good one, even if it did stray from time to time into social networking, which everyone is more familiar with.

The debate brought up some interesting angles; not least the difference between Yahoo's own Flickr service and YouTube. While Flickr steers clear of unsavoury content (and that's not just pornography, you know), the likes of YouTube has been pretty open. Looking at the videos marked as being popular or well viewed on YouTube can be a little eyewatering at times, whereas Flickr's popular shots are generally fantastic examples of photography. Flickr's 100 most interesting was compared to the rather eponymous karate monkey video (no, not this Karate Monkey), which has been around since before YouTube and is nonetheless still one of the less pleasant work-safe videos out there.

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.

We blogged here a while back about Google's woes with the EU Commission. In short, the EU's a bit worried that Google is retaining too much data on its users. Google, it appears, has now backed down a little, and chopped six months off its data retention plan, reducing the period it can keep details of your searches, behaviour and other things from two years to 18 months.
Privacy International released a fairly excoriating report earlier this week, taking to task a number of firms, chief among them good old Google, ranked lower even than the Beast of Redmond, which, you might think, is now a fluffy bunny in comparison. We'd agree if we hadn't seen the videocast Steve Ballmer sent over two weeks ago to the London unveiling of the HTC Touch, but there you go.
Anyway, back to the Privacy International report, which labelled Google a threat to privacy - see the executive summary here for more information on this if you don't feel like wading through the report.

No, no, not that Morph. This Morph. I've been stuck in front of a load of page proofs in the office this morning, so missed Ask's presentation downstairs in IWR towers' TV studio, but apparently the bods have been in to tell us all about it. (Actually, Vodafone were just in to show off their new mobile portal, too, but more that later).

First thing that strikes me? Ooh, you can change the background image. Well, until you actually enter a search term. Ask has done a good job of creating context around a search (see the left hand column - it's very easy to refine searches and branch off into interesting areas) - and it's now presenting all kinds of extra information and links in the right hand column, as well. There's some pretty interesting little bits and pieces in there. 

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.