In the dim and distant past, when Adobe first announced Acrobat and I was a snidy journalist, it gave me huge pleasure to rib the company about the inflationary nature of its software. It would take simple text and inflate it to six or more times the size and say "now it can be read on multiple devices." My view then was that plain text could be viewed on multiple devices anyway.

But, of course, I was a words man and an ex-programmer whose first computers had the equivalent of just 2.4k of memory. We ran things like accounts, payroll and stock control on those things. I was a) not interested in presentation and b) paranoid about wasting computer resources. The idea that the Gettysburg address would require 6.4 times the storage in .pdf compared with .txt appalled me.

Of course, life moves on. Computer equipment has become cheaper and storage more plentiful and Adobe has spent its life delivering what real people want, rather than pandering to minorities like me. And, for what it's worth, I've been a consumer and creator of Acrobat and Flash materials for some years. I know my screencasts and invoices (for example) can be understood by anyone who has a Flash player or Acrobat reader, respectively.

This week, the company previewed some upcoming products and services, in particular Connect Pro 7  and Presenter 7 which are imminent. Adobe also mentioned a consumer-level conferencing system due in June and extended IM interoperability for Connect Pro later in the year. Connect Pro is a suite of web conferencing and eLearning facilities while Presenter is an authoring tool which adds things like quiz compilation, audio and video editing to PowerPoint 2007 and can publish the results to Connect Pro.

The end result is a powerful eLearning environment which runs from authoring, through conferencing, break-out group management, collaboration, quizzing and assessments. Live sessions can be recorded and edited and published for self-paced learning later. There's much more - security, APIs, integration with existing directories and so on. But best to visit the Adobe site for more details if you're interested.

Because Flash and Acrobat are available on multiple operating systems and run in different browsers, it means that just about anyone can participate in these conferences and learning experiences.

It turns out that the concepts that I scoffed at all those years ago, were actually smart in the extreme.

Since global warming has (temporarily?) stopped, we now have the term 'climate change' to keep us alarmed.

It strikes me it's all a bit like religion, you can be a Muslim or a Christian and the primary thing that sustains you is your belief, reinforced by holy books such as the Bible or the Koran. Generally speaking, those of one faith generally spend most of their devotional time among their own. Conversion to, or even understanding of, alternative faiths is uncommon.

Such has been the mass of hype around climate change (some of it well-founded, by the way) that it has created a new faith. It's not totally unlike the much-abused 'political correctness' before it, in that to challenge is to be branded a 'denier'. But who can deny that planting crops to harvest as biofuels is fundamentally stupid?

Covering large areas of Britain's land and sea with wind farms is another classic. It would make more sense to capture energy from naturally renewable and continuous energy sources - tide, geothermal, sun and even nuclear is being seen as increasingly realistic by some the pros and many antis. But they'd better get a move on and first make sure the energy generated exceeds that consumed by the lifecycle cost of raw materials, building, operation and eventual shut down.

Nigel Lawson has written a book called Global Warming: An Appeal to Reason. James Lovelock has written The Revenge of Gaia. I read them both together last week. Each makes interesting observations - sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, even when based on the same premises. If you've not read them, they cast different lights on the same science. I feel disinclined to follow either argument with any degree of passion, but they certainly provided plenty of food for thought.

We can choose a pro or anti stance or we can go for a more neutral 'trying to leave the planet in a fit condition for our successors'. With Green IT 08 coming up next week, there's going to be a lot of hype around. If you're going (and the conference looks interesting), I suggest you make sure of where you stand on environmental issues before you leave, and weigh everything that's hurled at you accordingly. In particular, if someone's trying to sell you something, ask them about the nett planetary impact.

What does 'sustainability' mean to you? The more time I spend with IT vendors, the more I wonder if they see it as something for other people.

To quote from the frequently-cited Brundtland Report: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Lots of companies pay lip service to that but, somehow, it always results in them making more things for us to buy. It's as if they've had trouble getting to grips with the 'needs' part of 'meet the needs of the present'. Do we ever ask what we really 'need' in order to stay afloat in the today's complicated world?

Of course, IT does have the potential to address the 98% of carbon emissions (say) that are not attributable to IT operations. Many manufacturers tell a good tale. They speak of reuse of components in future products, of their adherence to this and that regulation and, especially, of how the application of more IT will help cut someone else's environmental footprint.

In the end, though, there's no hiding the fact that they're still hooked on growth. Understandable, by the way. And while they could possibly achieve this through services, the global vendors see hundreds of millions of souls in developing countries as fine prospects for more 'things', even if they are made of fewer and more easily recycled materials.

Perhaps, by getting in early enough with IT equipment as a travel or printing substitute, for example, these vendors can help the developing countries avoid some of the excesses of the West. Frankly, I'm not optimistic, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

Two recent encounters brought Second Life and real life into sharp contrast. And, it has to be said, on this particular occasion I preferred Second Life.

The idea behind my Second Life visit was to see if things had livened up at all in the last year or so. I headed for the library archipelago and was soon redirected to Info Island International where I met a bunch of interesting people who shared my interests.

Before long, I was off exploring their web presences and picking up interesting snippets. One link worth sharing is this one to a free profiling tool associated with the Groundswell book written by analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Gareth Otsuka (real life name Gareth Osler of Liverpool Libraries) tipped me off about the link, mentioning that it is in his library technology RSS feed. Cheers Gareth - nice feed.

Looking at my notes, I was amazed to find that I'd spent 35 minutes with Gareth and some of his colleagues and passers-by. Time passed quickly because of our common interests.

Contrast this with a physical gathering today. In theory, we all had an interest in 'social media'. But the engagement rules were very different. In Second Life, you can click on an avatar to find out about a person and choose not to engage, or move on without embarrassment. In real life you have to do it through conversation. But by the time you realise you want to be elsewhere, you're trapped.

Both environments rely on serendipity to work its magic but, in the case of Second Life, it's definitely aided and abetted by effective focusing and filtration mechanisms. And, assuming you have the graphics power and broadband width, Second Life scores because it also avoids the inconvenience of physical travel.

Greenpeace has just published its seventh Guide to Greener Electronics. If you visit the website you can track your favourite manufacturer over the past eighteen months. This picture is just a static snap:

Despite lots of noise from the IT world about its green credentials it still falls short of the high standards demanded by the Greenpeace survey. In fact, in the seven reports to date, only one PC maker has ever reached an '8' - Lenovo. And that was a year ago.

The rankings are related to company policies on toxic chemicals and recycling. It is a mix of company claims and Greenpeace observation across a range of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles.

When companies are plainly competitive, then the chart serves a useful purpose. Acer, for example, ranks quite low among PC makers. If you were concerned about green issues rather than price (and this is still deeply unlikely) then you might standardise on Toshiba machines.

Once we get environmental regulations which penalise poor performers and/or reward good ones, then this will be reflected in prices. Goodness knows how long that will take but, in the meantime, we will probably continue to disregard any harm we might be accumulating for our descendants.

I carry no torch for Microsoft, but I did wonder what the heck it was doing in this survey. Especially so low. It's not as if any other software companies were listed. Then a bit of digging reminded me that it makes games consoles and that was the basis for its inclusion. The trouble with this is that, without a clear context, it makes Microsoft the company look like a poor environmental performer.

If I were Microsoft, I'd demand a clarification.

Jill Bolte Taylor gave a most moving 19-minute presentation at the recent TED conference. It was all about the brain and about how we choose to use it. I defy you not to be gripped by her performance.

She's a neuroanatomist by profession. Her brother is schizophrenic. And she had her very own stroke which slowly shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. This experience gave her a profound and intimate insight to the workings of the brain.

We all know that the two sides of the brain do different things. People often declare themselves as 'left-brained' or 'right-brained'. Some people are adept at switching from one side to the other. Others struggle.

The right side is the bit that deals with 'now', with movement, with senses, with grabbing, in parallel, everything that's going on at the moment.

The left side is serial in nature and deals with past memories and future plans. It extracts, from the messages being passed from the right brain, those which it feels might come in handy or need a reaction.

When Ms Taylor had a stroke in the left side of her brain, she was able to keep functioning, after a fashion. But, over the course of a few hours, she lost just about everything. She reached a point where she literally curled up to die.

Throughout this process, the left brain flashed into life spasmodically, enabling her to seek help. It also meant that she could store memories of the process she was going through.

When her left brain was dormant, she found herself stress-free, memory-free, baggage-free and euphoric. She felt at one with the universe.  By contrast, she describes the left brain as where we are individual, isolated, and separate from others.

She says much more during her talk and she believes that we can learn from her insights to make the world a better place. I'll not steal her punchlines. But she has shone a torch into the darkness of my rather left-brained computer-centric life. And explained why my happiness increases the further away from computing I get.

Last night (UK time) Hewlett Packard announced its new Labs structure. By focusing on five areas, it hopes it will become more effective. The five areas are: information explosion; dynamic cloud services; content transformation; intelligent infrastructure; and sustainability. All are jolly important and all reflect today's hot issues for the company.

Of the 23 labs in total, the biggest ones will be in Palo Alto, then Bristol and the remainder strung out around the world. Prith Bannerjee, the director in charge, talked of "twenty to thirty big bets, rather than the 120 to 150 of the past."

It would be interesting to know how many of Hewlett Packard's past successes came about as the result of serendipity rather than focused research. Bannerjee says that the approach of the past was appropriate for its time. I remember some of the garage startup style tinkering that used to take place. It often led to interesting software products, but none of them set the world on fire. So perhaps he's right.

Bristol has landed semantic web research. China is looking into searching visual content. Cloud services are personalised to where you are and what you're using. You'd expect more research into digitisation and digital to analog (pictures on buses for example). And you'd be right. Intelligent infrastructure is all about secure networks for banks, governments and the like. And sustainability is about ways of moving to a low carbon economy.

The new labs will work closely with the outside world, with venture capitalists,  entrepreneurs-in-residence and university students. You can take a look at some of what's going on at the IdeaLab website. HP Labs will seed HP's own business with teams, creating more of a start-up environment for new initiatives.

Apparently, although the labs are highly focused, they will still allow blue sky research within them. A third of the work will be applied research, a third will be advanced product development and a third will be blue sky.

This is the logo:

It bothers me that 'HP' and 'Labs' are being boxed in by those brackets. Could that be a subliminal message? Let's hope not.

During my first visit to SRI International in 1980, scientists were excitedly showing off pictures radioed back from the Voyager spacecraft as it passed Jupiter. On my next visit, it was showing pictures of Saturn's rings. Getting such close ups of these other worlds was a stunning achievement for the scientists and their powerful computers which were able to translate the incoming signals into such beautiful images.

It would be great, of course, to be a passenger on the spacecraft but, with a journey time to Saturn of over three years, and no prospect of return, this was clearly impossible. Until now.

Microsoft, amazingly, was allowed to pimp its upcoming WorldWide Telescope product at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference this week. The conference is supposed to comprise 'Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers' so I cannot be alone in thinking that this was a rather tacky coup by Microsoft.

Still, the program allows its (XP or Vista) users to immerse themselves into the visible universe, panning and zooming to whatever nooks and crannies take their fancy. Never mind waiting three years to get a close up of Saturn, it's a matter of seconds now. Or it will be in the 'spring' when it officially launches. The software changes the way we view and absorb the nature of the universe.

The pictures, which are taken from a variety of earth- and space-based telescopes, are stitched together into a totally convincing three-dimensional space using Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine. Different light wavelengths can be selected and a mouse click brings up contextual information about the current view.

Microsoft says that the WorldWide Telescope will be available as 'a free resource to the astronomy and education communities', which is an interesting way of phrasing things. But, presuming that public libraries are part of the 'education communities' bit and presuming they have pretty large screens, they could make the experience far more realistic than the average PC display. Indeed, this sort of thing could act as the hub for space events with astronomers as guest participants.

I've noticed that when looking for something - a house, a car, a solution to a business problem, whatever - a lot of people arm themselves with a checklist of criteria to be satisfied.

Today, I came across an interesting variation on this theme. Someone from BT was explaining how they decide whether someone is seriously in the market for what they offer.

If you know about this, my apologies, I'll be blogging again on Friday. If not, then it's a set of 'sliders', each with an opposing statement at each end. All the user has to do is place the pointer somewhere between the two extremes. At a glance, the sales person (I'm sure they're called business consultants or something) can see whether they're in with a shout or wasting their time.

I could imagine automating this. Have a little box at the bottom of the sliders which tells you "give it a whirl" or "don't bother". It would save so much of everyone's time. The example we were looking at today concerned implementing IBM's Unified Communications and Collaboration wrapped up with BT services. Here are the extremes (or 'discussion points' as BT optimistically calls them):

When asking the people you serve what they really want, it seems to me that such an approach, using your own criteria, would a) force them to think and b) give you a realistic idea of whether you might succeed.

While researching a column to be published next month, I stumbled across a New Zealand-based company called VortexDNA. It believes that it can boil your driving characteristics down to a ten digit code. This code can then be used to assess whether the web pages or people you encounter online are likely to be of interest to you.

Imagine doing a Google search and then having the best results highlighted in some way. The PageRank method is astonishingly good, but it knows nothing about you and your life purpose and values. Unless you are a totally brilliant search term creator, you can still end up wading through masses of pointless (to you) results.

The interesting thing about VortexDNA is that it doesn't need to keep any information about you. Although you answer a short questionnaire (some of it badly worded, sadly), your answers aren't retained. Your DNA is calculated and that's all the company needs to know. Best, though, to tell the company who you are and where to find you when new software releases come out.

You can download a Firefox extension right now and start experimenting with the software. Somehow, it overlays the web pages you're viewing with little orange highlights for stuff it thinks might interest you.

Your code could be attached to web pages that you visit thus giving people an idea of the type of people who like this kind of page. The seven digit number will be repeatedly averaged as new people arrive. (Don't ask me for the mathematics, you'd have to grill  chief boffin Branton Kenton-Dau on that one.)

Your code could be used to refine the ads that get displayed in the sidebar or the books that Amazon recommends to you. All without knowing a shred of personal information.

So the VortexDNA techniques can be applied to personal benefit and business benefit. 'Click throughs' are very important to online advertisers and one way that Vortex hopes to make money is by selling its technology to providers of online services, so they can increase their ad revenues and continue to give us the stuff we want for free.

Thomas Vander Wal is a man with at least two claims to fame. One was his invention of the term 'folksonomy' and the other his coining of another term, 'infocloud' or 'info cloud'. Anyone who's involved in social computing will have bumped into each of these phenomena. They are the way that ordinary folk tag and access information, rather than having to work with conventional rigid taxonomies.

So the man's no slouch when it comes to information, its organisation and architecture, especially in the digital social world. He's a pioneer and a deep thinker. And, this week, he brought a ray of sunshine into my life.

I'd been working on a content management, collaboration and web-publishing project. Trying to nail all the inputs, outputs, tags, relationships, and so on was not easy. But it seemed right that I should do this mapping without any consideration of the actual software tools that would eventually be brought to bear on the problem. The approach owed much to the clear thinking Lee Bryant of Headshift, who explained that he always works on user needs long before thinking of what solutions to apply.

So, having got all my ducks in a row, I decided it was time to investigate the software and services that would best deliver the elements. But a quick diversionary visit to Twitter revealed a message from Thomas Vander Wal. He'd posted 'The elements in the social software stack' on his blog. And he explained in considerable, and convincing, detail how and why social software worked. He even had a diagram to clarify how the bits hung together.

It was a perfect reality check for my own thinking. It explained the issues way beyond my own articulation. I won't spoil his story but I'll give you a clue: The running order for the elements to work is: Identity, Object (social object), Presence, Actions, Sharing, Reputation, Relationships, Conversation, Groups and collaboration.

If you're involved in introducing social software into your organisation, read this single post, even if you read nothing else.

I've spent (wasted?) a goodly chunk of the last month in Twitter. For those who haven't encountered it, it is a rapid-fire, miniblogging system which restricts each post to 140 characters. For those so-minded, it means they can post ten times as many items per day as when they were blogging. The posts appear on your computer screen or (selectively) on your mobile phone as text messages.

As you might expect, many of the 'in-crowd' hang out there - Scoble, Macleod, Le Meur and so on. A lot of the time they don't so much Twitter as witter. But then, every twenty posts or so, someone comes up with some really useful information. Obviously, you choose who to 'follow' so your diet should include some nourishment along with all the filler. The trick is not to eat everything that's put in front of you. Push it around the plate a bit and pick out the good bits.

A couple of months ago, these same people were all over Facebook. It was 'the' place to hang out. And, before that, of course, they were all busy trying to become 'A-list' bloggers. I don't think blogging's died for them but, judging from the current mood, Facebook is definitely falling from favour.

The great thing about all this is that if the ego-driven, time-wasting, blog postings are being shrunk and shifted to Twitter, then what's left ought to be a better, more thoughtful, blogosphere.

We can live in hope.

Happy new year.

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 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?

Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales is the keynote speaker on the first day of the Online Information conference.

He comes across as a genuine and thoughtful person with a huge commitment to open source, transparency and community involvement in projects. Wikipedia was the first result of his enthusiasms.

His keynote is entitled "Web 2.0 in action:free culture and community on the move". This suggests that he will be forward-looking and concentrate on his current long-term Wikia or Wikia Search projects (blogged here in January) rather than backward-looking and talking about Wikipedia.

If you are used to the traditional approach to computing, you'd expect a destination to be defined and the route to that destination mapped out with checkpoints along the way. Be prepared for a shock.

The approach that Wikia Search takes is to define a set of principles and the general structure of the project. This then acts as a magnet to the sort of people who are interested. They form communities depending on their specialisations and, at some point downstream, the great mass of the general public get involved, using the tools developed by the initial community.

Where wikipedia involves the world in contributing original material, the Wikia project is concerned with clothing existing information with value. The theory is that this will help refine search results and, partly through complete transparency and partly through community influence, be very difficult to game.

Just because Jimmy Wales made a great name for himself with Wikipedia doesn't mean that he can succeed again with search. But he's taking a pragmatic approach by doing the spidering and indexing just like the other engines but then using humans to refine the results by thumbs ups, thumbs downs and other more sophisticated assessments.

The project will take time to evolve and it's possible it will challenge the existing search giants in the same way that wikipedia has become a port of call for millions more users than traditional encyclopaedias. Who knows? Even Wales doesn't. He certainly never talks that way. But his thoughtful exploration of the issues around community development and participation should make for interesting and challenging listening.

See you there?

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.

We spend a lot of time talking about the benefits of different social networking systems. We talk about the conversations that are enabled and the shortcuts to meaningful relationships, whether business or social. What we rarely, if ever, talk about is the dark side. The big brotherish side that can, if it wants to, track our activities in minute detail.

If big business is involved, and it is, you can be certain that this information is like gold. Of course it wants to track you. It pays very good money for the privilege of learning as much about you as possible. And a terrific way to do this is to know who you are then watch your behaviour: what websites you visit, how much time you spend on various activities, where you're connecting from, who you communicate with, whether you're a man or a woman and so on.

The instant you log in to a service - Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, whatever, you're no longer anonymous. At a recent session with a company in this space, the first couple of hours were dedicated to how users could be exploited rather than served. I won't name names because, whatever the public face of these companies, the conversations behind closed doors are likely to be very similar.

But we're willing participants. These organisations provide a platform for communities to form and, because of our desire to connect, we share all manner of personal information. Not to the host, but to our online chums. Sadly, every time we contribute something or click the mouse, we freely, and unwittingly enable the host to refine our profiles and to deliver the advertisements most likely to appeal.

If we want to participate in online, public, social networking communities then it's best to assume we're regarded by many as victims rather than beneficiaries.

In the relentless game of public search engine leapfrog, Yahoo! may have just leapt into the lead. It has added some fresh intelligence to help the hesitant user.

No doubt other search companies will already be unpicking the Yahoo! offering to see whether they can improve on it. And it's highly likely they can. But, for the moment, Yahoo! is the benchmark with its 'Explore concepts' extension.

Yahoo! senses when a user hesitates while typing a search query and pops up auto-complete suggestions. This, of course, is not a new idea. The new bit comes when you get to the results page. If the results aren't what you expected, you can click on a little arrow to drop down a panel containing the autocomplete suggestions and an 'Explore concepts' section to the right:

In the above example 'information world' produced, not surprisingly, over a billion results. The autocomplete would have done the job for you and me, but the concepts on the right are designed to help the user who's thrashing around a bit.

As you click on each concept, new search results appear along with the concepts which relate to the new search expression.

I tried 'electron spin resonance', about which I know little. After clicking through 'free radicals' (thought I might hit a political pressure group), I was intrigued by 'magnetic moments'. Here's the first result.

Bear in mind that this functionality is not part of some hugely expensive enterprise search system, it's freely available to the general public.

If you're like me, you've regarded Yahoo! largely as an organisations that wants to push ads at you and keep you within its semi-walled garden. A bit of a turn off, especially in Europe apparently. But developments like this and, in a totally different context, Pipes suggest that Yahoo! has realised that life is not all about take, it's about give as well.

Global publisher John Wiley & Sons is not afraid of new technology and ventures, as I recently discovered in a meeting with them at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Bookseller reports today that Wiley has now inked a deal with Safari Books Online, an increasingly important on demand reference platform.

Wiley will add its business and technology reference books to the Safari platform and see its content aligned with other leaders like Pearson, O'Reilly and the publishing arm of software giants Microsoft. Wiley will add its For Dummies books, which it acquired from web and magazine publishers IDG, and the Bible range of computer books.

This is an important deal. Reference books are still an amazing resource for users, and a method of information delivery and publishing that still has plenty of legs in it. Like all information resources though, it is a sector that has been threatened by amateur services like Wikipedia. Reference is clearly an information set very well suited to the web. Safari is a platform that offers a genuine alternative to Wikipedia. Because the content on Safari is from credible publishing companies that check the veracity of information, use knowledgeable experts and put a great deal of effort into the writing, editing and presentation of the information, it is more credible than Wikipedia. Wiley has increased the desirability of Safari and improved reference information on the web.

Last week's round of investment in Facebook is enough to make any Dot Com veteran quake in their boots. It's not that Facebook isn't good - it's stunningly good. It's not that this particular dance involving Microsoft and a fresh young company hasn't been danced before, either - just take a look at High stakes, no prisoners for a good idea of some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that undoubtedly went on.

In short, Microsoft invested $240m, and two unnamed hedge funds plumped up another $500m, valuing Facebook at $15bn. It's a stunning number, something we haven't seen in a long time. Rightly, it scares the living daylights out of many people, myself included. It brings back memories of years past, when  things were valued on the basis of hype, on the basis of an ever-lifting market, on the basis of a new technology trouncing the status quo and ushering a new dawn of techno-wonderous utopia. But enough about the telegraph.

However, there's another way of looking at the investment, particularly from Microsoft's angle, that makes a little more sense. Remember Microsoft's recent moves into advertising? Chucking $6bn at aQuantive is a far bigger investment than a piddling $240m at Facebook. Any lay person might assume that Microsoft valued aQuantive more highly in terms of business use than Facebook; after all, it's punting  over 24 times the money on aQuantive than it is on Facebook. Of course, it's not that simple, but it's an interesting thought.

Techdirt has itself a very juicy idea of what Microsoft is up to - and it's all about aQuantive and Facebook's advertising plans. In short, the investment in Facebook is a place holder, something that makes a marketing statement about Microsoft's intentions in online advertising. I can't wait to see all of this play out.

Dear Mariella,

Enjoyed the repeat of your Open Book programme today. I'd sneaked away from the computer for a bit and up you popped on the radio. It was interesting to get your take on the world of social computing. Like many people who aren't involved, your incomprehension was quite a treat. Afterwards I wondered if you were doing it on purpose to wind up two of your guests,  Victoria Barnsley, boss of Harper Collins,and David Freeman, founder of Meet The Author.

Since I write for information professionals who are interested in both books and technology, I thought it might be interesting to get a conversation going on the value, or otherwise, of the internet to book authors.

Of course, this blog post could just languish, like most do, or it might trigger some interesting feedback. That's the nature of the web. People take a look at stuff and, in moments, decide whether to linger or move on.

The note below is to put my readers in the picture. Feel free to join in.

All the best,

David

The programme involved two websites: Authonomy, from Harper Collins, which will give authors a place to upload 10,000 of their words so that visitors can decide whether it's any good; while Meet The Author plays recordings of authors talking about their work.

Mariella suggested to Victoria that Authonomy was "just a cynical way to get the general public to do the work for you" and "ultimately it's a way of you getting your paws onto new work and creating a degree of ownership  over it before you've had to commit to it financially in any way." Ouch.

The answer is, of course, that people have a chance to make an impression and get picked up for consideration by Harper Collins or, indeed, any other agent or publisher who happens by.

Mariella found it hard to believe that that Harper Collins would not be "upset" if another publisher snitched talent from the Authonomy site. Victoria suggested that this would prove that the site was a huge success. Mariella retorted with, "but isn't it just like a talent show for authors. Like something you'd expect to see on ITV?" She threw the same accusation at David Freeman.

Not surprisingly, both speakers more or less agreed with her. Victoria noted that tens of thousands of authors might get read who otherwise would have been ignored. David suggested that if publishers and agents liked the author's pitch, they might ask to see their work.

In the end, good writing is essential to being published. But these two sites offer much needed visibility and promotion for unknown authors, a way to emerge from the fog that surrounds agents and commissioning editors.

But in publishing, as in the rest of life, the democracy inherent in the internet is a bit hard to get to grips with. It may be a little threatening to people in conventional positions of power.

Would anyone care to comment?

PS I just checked out the 'Meet The Author' site and it operates on vanity publishing lines rather than YouTube. Authors pay for the privilege. I suspect this will not be the case with Authonomy.

René Olivieri, chief operating officer at Wiley-Blackwell, the academic book and journals publisher has resigned, reports The Bookseller.

Olivieri was ceo of Blackwell when the company merged with Wiley in a surprise move last November. Since the merger Olivieri has been heading up the transition team as chief operating officer, a role he has held since May.

He has had a long and illustrious career at the Oxford based publisher, starting out as a publisher in the 1980s, before becoming an editorial direct, deputy md, and managing director. The Bookseller reports he became ceo of Blackwell Science in 2000 and stepped into the role of Blackwell Publishing ceo a year later.

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.

Grazr has always been a great way to organise and present information. Now, with release 2.0, it has moved into the collaboration space and, it has to be said, made building and sharing information models a whole lot easier.

Grazr offers a free hosted service, which means you will need to consider what kind of information you're going to put out there. But it is well worth experimenting with, if only to experience a snappy new way of gathering, organising and sharing information.

You can pop any web content or RSS feed straight into a kind of outline - that's links to web pages or specific images or sections of text. You just drag and drop between two concurrently open browser windows. It's a fast way to grab research material on the fly. You can, of course, add in your own text as well. And navigating the results is fast and easy.

(Perhaps I should mention that I publish a program which does something very similar but nowhere near as elegantly so, I promise you, this is good stuff.)

Your saved model shows up as a widget which you can drop into web pages, blog posts, wikis or share as a web link through email or whatever.

Take a look at this Camtasia demo of Grazr 2.0 in action. I found the voice grating and the subject matter boring, but the content is good and it is a quick way to see the potential of this new version of Grazr.

Information literacy expert Sheila Webber takes time out from the blogosphere and her Second
Life incarnation to extol the delights of blogging

Q Who are you?
A Sheila Webber, 54, senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A My Information Literacy blog is at http://information-literacy.blogspot.com and my Second Life blog is at http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com

Q Describe your blog?
A The Information Literacy (IL) blog highlights IL resources (such as tutorials, articles and portals), IL related developments and upcoming events worldwide, and carries conference reports. It’s primarily an information blog. The personal touch comes from the photographs of flowers and landscapes I put it – I mention them because some people have said that they look at the blog for those rather than the IL!
The Second Life (SL) blog is a diary of my avatar in SL, Sheila Yoshikawa. It started as a Bridget Jones-type blog, with a learning diary angle.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A I started in April 2003, with Stuart Boon as co-blogger, using Moveable Type software that was already available on a server in my department. Unfortunately, after we’d been blogging regularly for two years this server got hacked, an event that coincided with the only person who knew the setup moving elsewhere. We made a new start on Blogger in 2005.

Q What started you blogging?
A Initially, it was to publicise an IL project but I soon realised I was a natural blogger. I like writing short pieces and people seemed to find them useful. If anyone is interested, I wrote a piece about why I blog at http://inquiry-in-im.group.shef.ac.uk/team2007/02/20/learning-about-myperspectives-on-blogging

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A I don’t do much commenting, probably because the IL blog is not really a social networking blog. When people want to comment on my blog, or tell me about an IL item, they also tend to email me rather than comment on the blog. I think that I, and the blog readers, want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. It’s a bit different on the SL blog, where I mention more social and personal things (perhaps strangely, considering it is about SL rather than my first life!), so there tend to be more social chitchat-type comments from SL friends.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?
A I hope that the blog helps show that we in the department are participating actively in the information world. Since I have readers worldwide it helps bring the department to their attention. I also like to think that it may attract potential students who are interested in information literacy.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A Apart from the trips abroad,getting in contact with people via the blog. Also it’s nice when a stranger comes up to me at a conference and says they like the blog or my photos.

Q Which blogs do you read for fun?
A I don’t look at that many blogs outside work interests. There are blogs about fashion in Second Life (aggregated at http://fashionplanet.worldofsl.com) that are useful because the search function within SL itself is rubbish.

Which bloggers do you watch and link to?
Moira Bent
http://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/moira.bent
Michael Lorenzen
www.information-literacy.net
ALFIN blog in Spain
http://alfin.blogspirit.com
Jill Walker Rettberg
http://jilltxt.net
Brian Kelly
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com

How important is a book? You know, the actual artefact. I am old enough to remember when paperback books were still regarded as sacrilegious. Somehow they seemed cheap and nasty.

Christmas stockings, well pillowslips in our house, bulged with properly bound hardback books. To buy a paperback as a present was to somehow devalue the recipient. Now, in our family, we're viewed as quite mad if we waste our money on a hardback. Unless, of course, we simply can't wait for the paperback edition.

So what of the future? Will we abandon atoms for bits? eBooks proliferate, but few are (yet?) regarded as the equal of a real book. They do, though, have the advantage of being sized to fit the content. Which is nice. So many books, especially non-fiction, are padded out to match the publishers' ideas of a perfect page count. Thus, in some cases, rendering them quite unreadable. IMHO. Shelf space for electronic books is infinite and delivery is more or less instant. So online definitely has its advantages.

Last week I met Bob Stein at the inaugural meeting of the Creative Coffee Club (more on that another time). He was introduced as being from the Institute of the Future of the Book. Had I known that he was a founder of the Voyager Company (a pioneering laserdisc and CD-ROM publisher) and had worked with the legendary Alan Kay (inventor of the Dynabook among many other achievements), I would have enthused a lot more about meeting him.

Still, his organisation intrigued me. He said something to me like, "a book is a means of communicating ideas across time and distance." Printed books have been a rather handy mechanism for doing this for the past few hundred years. But this doesn't mean they will continue. I confess to finding the idea of being bookless a bit weird. But I do like the fact that you only need ambient light in order to read one. But life moves on. And if you're interested in knowing where we might end up, especially since this has a direct bearing on your career, you might like to visit the Institute's blog  or join its newly-formed UK Facebook group.

The word 'cuts' has been rearing its ugly head in the information sector with far too much regularity in the last month or two. The latest two organisations to be threatened are the two jewels in the British crown of not only information, but also our culture – the BBC and the British Library.

No organisation can spend willy-nilly and difficult as they often are to deal with, the money men have their place. But if the focus becomes too narrow, in other words too short term, the damage can be lasting.  Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library penned an item in this weekend's Observer discussing what will happen if the money men starve our national library of cash. As she rightly points out, "I simply don't want to run a second rate organisation. Slipping from world leadership to the second tier is not something that can be reversed."

Talk to anyone on the street and they will believe that Britain is second at just about everything. We've lost our iron grip on manufacturing (it was only really in place because our Empire was the world market), we are no longer a military super power and other than the brilliant efforts of Lewis Hamilton we are not winning every sporting event about. Yet when you tell people that the UK is the world leader in the information world they are surprised. But once again the money men could very well cut the costs and accept second place whilst talking of being winners.

If funds are cut the quality will drop. The quality debate has, of late, been caught up in a debate about information literacy and egalitarianism born from the Web 2.0 movement. Yet an excellent analysis of the role of Radio 4 as it reaches 40 in the Saturday edition of the Guardian summed up what I've been feeling, "The confusion is the assumption that unstructured demotic chatter is more "accessible" than a well written talk by someone who really knows about a topic. As sources of information and comment proliferate, the demand for authoritative, well informed programmes increases rather than diminishes." The last sentence sums up what faces the information world at the moment, not a need to ditch our methods in place of Web 2.0, but to improve our resources to complement Web 2.0.

The same is true of the British Library, according to Brindley, for the cost of a cup of coffee and a muffin (presumably at the BL café) the nation has access to some of the most important cultural, academic; and informed works on earth, including the Magna Carta.

If these two scions of information and quality are reduced to silver medal holders then the information industry as a whole will suffer.

Fourteen months ago, I wrote an optimistic column about Corpora and its sentiment analysis software. It can take a body of news stories about any particular subject and tell you whether the underlying sentiment is positive or negative. I thought this would be a boon for marketing and PR types for tracking the market's reaction to their activities.

At the time, the company hinted at an imminent big win. This turned out to be a partnership with Reuters. Being a media type, I had jumped to media-related conclusions. But the company (now called Infonic) has tapped a much richer, but more mammonistic, seam. The two companies have slipped a Sentiment Analysis layer into the data management layer of the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) used by banks and hedge funds.

Reuters is the biggest news agency in the world. If we had time to read all its output, then our view of the world would be more or less well-rounded. Investors aggregate as much of this information as they can in order to make their buy/sell decisions. But, in the end, all they're care about is whether there's a gap between reality and the market's perception. Trading on these gaps is how they make their money.

Governments, too, are very interested in these perceptions. So that's two markets with more or less bottomless pockets. (Update: I forgot to re-mention pharmaceuticals. The average drug has 70,000 trial reports which can be analysed unemotionally for trends.)

Infonic says that it will include Sentiment Analysis into its own search engine but, judging from the company's commercial priorities, I am less optimistic than I was about us getting our mitts on it.

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.

Dave Snowden, 'knowledge management' whizz and a lot more besides, runs an interesting blog called Cognitive Edge. One of his recent posts mentioned Bertrand Russell's observation:

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."

This is exactly what happened with the Quechup social networking invite which I mentioned last week. People were getting invites from their friends, or so they thought, and they signed up without a moment's hesitation. The evidence, in this case, was the fact the mail appeared to come from a friend, when it didn't.

Here's a more recent example. A story from Peninsular Business Services, which was swallowed whole by the BBC on Tuesday:

"233m hours are lost a month due to workers wasting employers’ time on social networking sites such as Facebook. The problem will cost employers £30.8bn per year and is to escalate."

From a sample probe of one, I learnt that people in the BBC are 'addicted' to Facebook. But whether the time spent on it is 'wasted' or actually time-saving, I have no idea. And I don't suppose Peninsular knows either. But it certainly knows how to produce a scary headline and frighten businesses into shunning social networking.

I tried to do the maths: if 47 percent (Sigurd Rinde came up with that one) of the 60-odd million people in the UK work, if they all used social software and if Peninsular's figures were true, they'd 'waste' just over eight hours a month each. Say two hours per week. Assuming a 36-hour week, anything below a 5.5% penetration would mean that users of social software do nothing else while at work.

Dennis Howlett, who waxed lyrical on this subject, reckons that fewer than one percent of employees use social networking sites at work. This would suggest that Peninsular's figures are very very wrong. It would mean those that had access would be spending over forty hours per day being social online.

Yet, returning to Bertrand Russell, I bet people believed them and their implications because it fitted their instincts.

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 gree