Toby Moores is a visiting professor at the Institute of Creative Technology and founder of videogame company Sleepydog. His company is best known for creating Buzz!, the hugely popular quiz for the Sony Playstation. He finds opportunities in the gaps between silos and traditional structures which are not good at communication and collaboration.

Of course, the barriers will fall over time and he will end up looking in new places for his opportunities but, as you might expect from a creative person, he has absolutely no shortage of ideas.

Loosely connected with this was the transcript of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, done by Talis' Paul Miller. It's scheduled to go online next Wednesday (27th) and you might find it interesting. It gives a glimpse of how information can be liberated from its silos and encouraged to flow to where it's needed and to be aggregated and annotated in new ways.

And also connected, IBM is a company which has unleashed a swathe of communication and collaboration tools on its employees over the past ten years which, once again, can liberate information from its silos to the benefit of those who are able to re-use it.

As you know, everything digital can be easily copied and moved. Hoarding is more likely to diminish a person's reputation or, worse, make them completely invisible. Creativity is easier than ever before. Sure, the average person can't create a Harry Potter film, but they can create interesting YouTube movies, machinima animations or screencasts. And, of course, information mashups get easier by the day.

Abundance is the key here. And the more abundant information (in whatever form) becomes, the less value it has in its own right. What adds value is doing something new with it. The Berners-Lee semantic web stuff can ensure that information carries its provenance around with it. The stuff that Sleepydog produces indirectly promotes the films and singers whose clips are used. Oh and the IBMers who give are more likely to do themselves good than those who simply consume.

Potentially, everyone who originates useful, interesting or entertaining raw material can gain in some way from sharing rather than hoarding. But the real winners are those who are able to innovate through original blending of existing material.

And that's where you and I come in. Everyone of us is different. We each have our own take on the world and most of us are multidisciplinary to some degree. We speak one language at home and another at work, one when we're with the engineers another when we're talking to the chef. It's a natural human thing. If you find yourself able to talk the language of each of two different groups then you are surrounded by opportunity.

It strikes me that operating in the gap between IT and management is a fine starting point.

IBM/Lotus held its annual shindig in Orlando this week. Called Lotusphere, it was packed with devotees plus a quite a few analysts and journalists. Yours truly included.

Perhaps Orlando was deliberately chosen, because the event was by far the most interesting thing going on there. And, miracle of miracles, IBM pulled some interesting rabbits out of the corporate hat.

Let's start with mashups, or composite applications, which sounds a heck of a lot more enterprisey. The on-stage demo's showed how mashups could be created with a few drags and drops - exactly what Teqlo was trying to do before it realised it didn't have a decent business model.

Corporate information could be surfaced, through SOA or (I believe) through Websphere, external information could be picked up through widgets and onscreen information could be highlighted and used as input to the mashup. The end result was a little window which would deliver the information you wanted, presented in the form you most needed it. Graphs, charts, maps, whatever. Mashups can be catalogued and shared, making for ready re-use and potential time savings.

The only awkwardness is in how much you let users do themselves before having to push the mashups through to IT for approval. Something that hoovers masses of data every few seconds, or some logic that dives into a dead loop wouldn't go down too well.

What else? Well, IBM hasn't been best known for delivering software to small and medium enterprises. It's now going to push hard by packaging up a whole bunch of collaboration stuff and offer it as a service. Code-named Bluehouse, it will be a few months before it sees the light of day. Except you might want to investigate the beta version. It's based on aimed at users of Lotus Foundations, a software set that will also be provided as an appliance or straightforward installable software for organisations with between 5 and 500 connected users.

A unified interface might sound boring, but the idea of working on multiple applications through a consistent interface makes software a lot more attractive to users. If they switch applications without really realising it then the clunkiness and time wasting of conventional interfaces become all too obvious. It's been tried before but the difference this time is that the user can incorporate the elements they want rather than be stuck with someone else's idea of what a user needs.

Lotus went high wide and handsome on social networking tools. Its own Connections was made all the more interesting by the fact that it can integrate with external services. The integration potential of Socialtext and Atlassian wikis made the point, especially given that IBM has its own wiki engine. And this is another thing that came out of the conference: that IBM encourages openness and integration. While it has its own world, this does have very porous edges which could lead to an interesting software ecosphere which doesn't necessarily put IBM at the centre.

In some ways it doesn't matter if IBM takes over the world with its software innovations because, if it does nothing else, it helps to raise the bar. The focus of Lotusphere was a hundred percent on making the users' lives better and more productive. And, it has to be said, more enjoyable and fulfilling.

I'll drink to that. Off on holiday now. See you in two weeks.

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?

I wonder if our lords and masters (our servants really, although that's difficult to believe) ever consider the environmental consequences of their decisions? Take the national identity card. Will the storage drives need to rotate perpetually in case anyone decides to check us out? Or could the forces of law and order be happy to wait while a drive is fired up and rummaged? If the drives are running continuously, has anyone worked out how much energy would be needed to run them, the computers that access them and the systems needed to cool them?

My guess is that the people who conceive these surveillance projects do not bother themselves with such matters. Yet, even if we're not yet running out of energy, it gets more expensive by the day and, of course, most of it contributes to the carbonisation of the planet. Surely any politician worth their salt would be careful before burdening the atmosphere with more CO2?

Which brings me to the British Library and its Microsoft-sponsored digitisation project. It's been worrying the hell out of me. I've been thinking of all those computers and disk drives sustaining substantial quantities of material that's going to be looked at only rarely. It makes no sense. But then offline tape storage doesn't make sense either.

Fortunately, a company called Nexsan has provided the Library with an answer. It's invented a MAID, a Massive Array of Idle Disks. They sit around quietly stationary until they're woken up by a request for information. This approach, according to Nexsan, cuts energy use by 96 percent. It gives an example of a conventional fibre channel storage device which consumes 187KW of energy per petabyte, whether it's being accessed or not. Its own Nexsan Assureon system in Level 3 AutoMAID idle mode consumes just 6KW.

It makes you think, doesn't it? Especially if your organisation has massive amounts of 'Just in case' storage.

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.

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.

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.

Jackie Cooper PR runs an 'anonymous' (not any more) blog called The Pirate Geek. A couple of days ago, it posted a paeon to personal contact, honesty and the demise of the cult.

I arrived there from Edelman Analyst Relations man Johnny Bentwood's Technobabble 2.0 personal blog. Cheers Johnny. (Although, for the record, I should mention that Edelman owns JCPR.)

Anyway, this all happened shortly after BIMA's 'Great Facebook Debate' which I tipped you off about earlier this year (more on that in November's column) in which a bunch of knowledgeable people on stage, and an even bigger bunch of knowledgeable people in the audience, debated the merits and otherwise of Facebook.

Facebook, for those unfamiliar with it, is a place to hang out, link up with friends, see what they're up to, find and join groups of like-minded souls, do silly things like 'poke' and 'super-poke'. Shame about the translation - think 'nudge' and you'll be close. Groups can be closed or open, public or not. And a ton of plug-ins allow you to do other things. Think 'long tail'. The majority are pointless to the majority of users. Vampire bite anyone? Gift of a toilet roll? Some are useful too.

You may be astonished to learn that businesses are taking to Facebook in droves. Whether they're enlightened or mad remains to be seen. But the BBC (is that a business?) and BT (that definitely is) have thousands of users.

Because Facebook was honed in the hothouse of the university (it started in Harvard) its focus was on facilitating relationships and friendships. It's mind-numbingly easy to use, compared with, say, a wiki. It is intensely social. But it's not just about online communication. In the end, it's a facilitation mechanism for personal contact with the people you really want to be with, whether they're at work or out there in the real world.

In the workplace, especially, the consummation of stimulating online hookups has to be physical meetings because that's where the real relationships form and the real work gets done.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing worse for a group blogger than to find his editor blogged on the same subject the previous day. Yep, it's pesky Facebook again. For me, for the last time. I hope.

The BBC now has 9,333 Facebook users. That's people who actually possess a valid bbc email address. I'm sure that's over a third of the company. They were turned on to social computing a few years ago, as reported in IWR, and this seems to be a high validation of Facebook by a bunch of knowledgeable social networkers.

Yet, other companies are blocking Facebook completely. Sophos gave some examples in a recent report but, because they were all banks, I was concerned that it might have come from a biased source. However, the same company has conducted surveys to reveal corporate attitudes to Facebook.

It discovered that 43 percent of the 600 respondents said that their companies were blocking Facebook, while a further seven percent were allowing employees with a specific business requirement to use it at work. Of the remainder, eight percent (in response to a leading question) said that they feared that "workers would complain" if access were switched off.

In a later survey, Sophos learned that a third of respondents believed that colleagues and employees "were sharing too much information on Facebook". Again, a bit of a leading question but one that serves Sophos' interests well. But, it also offers behavioural guidlines on how to best protect individuals and companies from such threats.

Here are the (paraphrased) topline items:

• Use Facebook options to protect your identity
• Think carefully about who you accept as a friend
• Use the cut-down profile for 'friends' who aren't really
• Disable all the options and re-enable each when you realise you need it

If you don't believe the risks, do take a look at Sophos' Freddi the Frog story. Eighty two people befriended and handed over personal details to an imaginary frog.

If you want to understand more, there's a very promising event brewing in October. Called The Facebook Debate, it is being run by the British Interactive Media Association. Entry costs £25 (£15 for BIMA members) and, although there's a panel, most of the action is expected to be in the audience.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has warned Facebook users to be careful and for employers not to sack workers for using the social networking tool in work time.

The TUC has written a guide on acceptable Facebook usage in the workplace in response to growing unease from organisations that Facebook is reducing productivity in the workplace. Facebook has become popular for social and professional networking.

Staff across the UK have already faced discipline or sackings because of the overuse of Facebook at work. Daily newspaper The Guardian reports that employees of Kent county council have been sacked.

With 3.5 million registered users in the UK the TUC describes Facebook as an accident waiting to happen. "Simply cracking down on the use of new web tools like Facebook is not a sensible solution to a problem, which in only going to get bigger," said Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC. Instead he advises, "It is better to invest a little time in working out sensible conduct guidelines, so that there don't need to be any nasty surprises for staff and employees."

These are a set of good suggestions, so far IWR has not come across any figures which show how much work time and productivity has been lost to Facebook, but we have heard anecdotal evidence of sales being lost and workers spending considerable amounts of work time within social networks.

Policing social networks will be hard. IWR and many titles have promoted them as useful tools in the information landscape. Unlike games or even YouTube, it is difficult to see where using Facebook is purely for pleasure and where is a useful corporate tool. Add into the confusion the fact that many managers are using these tools to communicate with their teams both about corporate and social issues and the blur gets even fuzzier.

Ultimately, it will have to come from the top down within the organisation. Managers should be involved with these tools in order to garner the best from them, but they should also set the parameters for staff's usage and enforce it, before UK Plc is ground to halt by a winter of disreputable content.

IWR has been keeping an eye on the Free Our Data campaign which the Technology supplement of daily newspaper The Guardian has been running. We've been watching it and supporting it. Now Charles Arthur, editor of the Technology Guardian supplement, has asked IWR and its readers to join the campaign.

"The more people and organisations we have on board, the better our chances of success," he said. The campaign seeks to make data which the public has paid for freely available, which will then stimulate new information resources for information professionals and the public alike to use.

The campaign uses a blog as its central repository and communications point, so its easy for all of us to add more information to the cause. So if you know of examples of government information costing you or your organisation, despite having already paid for it once through your taxes, let the campaign know. "If everyone joins, it would be sort of hard for the government to ignore," Arthur adds.

The campaign, which has been running since 2006 ,has highlighted some interesting disparities in

Whitehall

's information policies. Ordnance Survey (OS), known for its maps has been revealed to charging British citizens repeatedly for geographic information that is already funded by the public purse. It has been revealed that local authorities pay the OS for map information during the planning application process, planning authorities also pay separately for the same map information. During the campaign it has been revealed that a total of eight separate payments arrive at the OS as part of a planning application.

There are bound to be many more cases like this and it would be great if Information World Review and its readers can be part of a campaign to make the information we already own more easily available.

A friend of mine is big on creativity. In fact, he's a visiting professor at De Montfort University's Institute of Creative Technologies. He also runs a company that gets paid for coming up with bright ideas.

He has the most brilliant and clearly articulated approach to harnessing creativity profitably, which I'd like to spill the beans on, but can't. Not yet, anyway. At school he was a nightmare because of the way his mind worked. He fluctuated between total hopelessness and utter brilliance.

Sometimes his brilliance was misplaced but, as his subsequent life has shown, he has learned to corral his creativity and put it to good use.

Through his teaching, he is helping future generations harness their creativity. He knows this is what makes the difference between success and failure in today's frantic world.

Continuous innovation is demanded and this can no longer be the exclusive preserve of company founders or a coterie of engineers/inventors/whatever. We're all in this together and facilitating creativity seems to be right up the information professional's street.

The problem, as Jim Magee pointed out recently, is that to be creative, you have to be curious. And curiosity doesn't sit well with the suits that run organisations. I think they fear that if everyone followed their curious instincts, no work would get done.

Creativity rarely comes out of thin air, it usually comes from fresh juxtapositions of existing information. When I invented some software a long time ago (it sold tens of thousands of copies), it was the result of combining elements of Tony Buzan's mind-mapping, IBM's Bill of Materials Processing, Ted Nelson's information on Actor Languages and Vannevar Bush's paper "As We May Think".

Each of us has a different mix of information and experience, so the potential for fresh juxtapositions is limitless. The trick is to ensure that an environment is established where it's okay to dream and definitely okay to share and where curiosity and creativity are a continuous backdrop to real life.

Tim Spalding, of LibraryThing fame, has come up with an intriguing twist on his book-tagging operation. He's capturing combinations of tags and turning the results into web pages. 'Tagmash' takes anyone who looks for a tag combination to a URL for that combination.

Since I'm reading Charles Handy's autobiographical "MYSELF and other more  important matters", I threw in 'Handy, philosophy' to Tagmash. This is what came back:

In fact I lie, because the tags list their soundalikes, which are usually misspellings and punctuated words. 'handy' stood alone while 'philosophy' included 26 alternatives. Anyone searching for 'Handy, philosophy' in future will be taken straight to the URL. New combinations take up to 30 seconds to materialise.

You can apparently skip particular tags by preceding them with a '-'. I tried, 'Harry, Potter, -fiction' and got the same 16 results with or without the final argument. But, by using a double-minus, I got a single result. As Spalding explains, "A single minus (-fiction) 'discriminates' against items tagged 'fiction'. A double minus (--fiction) disqualifies all books with the fiction tag." Perhaps mine was a foolish choice of tags anyway.

According to Spalding, "Tagmashes work with different things, not a thing and its category." I tried "http://www.librarything.com/tag/florence,michelangelo" and, there on top of the list, was one of my all-time favourite books.

Alongside the results are a cloud of related tags, related tagmashes and a list of related subjects.

Like all Web 2.0 stuff, LibraryThing and its offshoots like Tagmash are work in progress. As people get involved and use the system and talk about it, ideas for refinements pop up and get incorporated. And, of course, the more people that use it, the more intelligently the underlying system behaves and the more any dross gets sidelined.

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.

Ants have been in the news a lot recently. They fill holes in the road with their bodies so that their colleagues can move swiftly. In an emergency, they slow down and proceed in an orderly fashion, thus speeding the escape of the whole community. Most things that ants do are for the good of the community as a whole because, without the community, they wouldn't thrive.

The government's agonising over public information has been in the news a lot too. And it's interesting to note the differences between its approach to life and the ants'. First of all, if you read any of the public pronouncements on public information, a lot of attention is paid to its 'value'. Yes, 'social value' is chucked in for good measure, but it's clear where the obsession lies.

Imagine yourself in a government department that is custodian of some public information and you are rewarded according to how much you can extract from others for the privilege of sharing it. How would you feel if someone came along and said "hey, the taxpayer has already paid for this information, you should be giving it back at no more than the cost of delivery." Gulp.

It's not an attractive thought is it? But this is exactly what has been facing those who govern us for several years. I think that opening up public information was first mooted in the year 2000. Only this year, when the clamour from outside is too loud to ignore, is the government really giving the appearance of trying to address the issue.

But, the people whose departmental funding depends on getting outside revenue aren't going to like it and they will talk endlessly about the commercial value of the IP or the need to provide a return on the public's investment. Or the need to create a 'data mashing' function within government in order to add more commercial value to the stuff we've already paid for.

The idea that liberating the data so that others can do a better job of the 'mashing' does not sit at all well with them.

Watch these people closely. They claim they will have a set of proposals ready for public comment by the end of this year. We should all be poised to scrutinise this and give our feedback. It will be a good test of whether they really want to listen or just try and put off the evil (to them) day when they have to give us back what was ours in the first place.

Unlike ants, one senses that government departments aren't actually interested in the greater good, only in their parochial needs, their bonuses and their career advancement.

Here are a few links you might find useful, should you wish to get involved:

The government's response to the Power of Information report by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg.

Yesterday, the Guardian published a piece on Ordnance Survey coming under fire from inside the government.

And here's the transcript of an interview (you can draw your own conlcusions) with Michael Wills, minister for information, and representatives from the Guardian Technology's "Free Our Data" campaign.

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.

Malcolm Read, executive secretary of JISC starts the conference proper with a witty and opinionated discussion on content.

"There is a lot of content out that needs joining up with what we do. JISC is working with MLA, want to work across and environment of content that is useful across education, health and culture. The driver behind this is an economy of scale, but also to improve access.

The NHS is a very good example of an organisation of its workers also involved in higher education, depending on where they are will depend on what information they can gain access to and you can imagine the frustrations of this and we want to break this down. Set up the strategic content alliance, that includes, BBC, Becta, BL, MLA, National e-Science, Centre and the NHS."

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.

Is Library Automation software meeting your needs?  It's a question that should be asked of all software, but of late we have been increasingly concerned about this issue. 

IWR is considering a major survey, we want to hear your success stories and your failures.  We also want to know just what the experience of acquiring this critical piece of information management software was like. Then we want to know what it was like to live with?

So, if we put a survey together, would you take the time respond?  Those interested could get the ball rolling by commenting to this blog posting. The more support we have for the idea, the more likely it is to happen.

Over to you.