Here we go again. The government wants to get more data about us. And store it in a monumental database. Although a Home Office spokesman has said, "Ministers have made no decision on whether a central database will be included in the draft Bill." That's probably just a way of keeping troublemakers, like the press, at bay until the inevitable decision has been made.

Dig a little deeper and you find embedded in the proposal for a Communications Data Bill and you'll find that a main element is to "Transpose EU Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention of communications data into UK law." This data retention law has already been challenged for breaching human rights. Yet our lot press on regardless. I'm never sure whether our government decides what snooping it wants to do, then finds a handy European directive to cover it, or whether it is just utterly supine.

Anyway, the ball is rolling. If the plans come to pass, our communications and ISP networks will sport the equivalent of street cameras except they will be black boxes snooping on our telephone and internet activities and feeding them in real time to the database. It will know how long we spend online, who we talk to, what web pages we connect to, what emails and IMs we exchange, with whom, and so on.

The government's proposal reassures us that, "ensure strict safeguards continue to strike the proper balance between privacy and protecting the public." In other words it is using the threat of crime - terrorism specifically - to snoop on us all. If the past is a good guide to the future, it is likely cost a fortune, be late, cost even more than planned, be insecure, run up huge carbon debts and fail in its primary task.

Seems to me that the government really is biting off more than it can chew with this one.

Posted by David Tebbutt | May 23, 2008 News & Reference | Permalink  | Comments (1)  

The lucky citizens of Bournemouth are soon to get 'up to 100Mbps' internet access from their homes and businesses. If the project goes according to plan, it could either make Bournemouth an attractive place to work and live or it could give a kick up the bottom to BT et al to bring high speed broadband to the rest of the country.

Talking of bottoms, I should mention that the cabling is being installed in the city's sewers by the misnamed H20 Networks. Shouldn't that be CH4 Networks? Oh well. At least the Bournemouth project itself goes under the moniker 'fibrecity'.

In terms of speed, impact on the environment, security and cost, this approach beats the digging-up-of-roads method hands-down. A couple of kilometres of broadband can be laid in four hours at a cost of less than a third of conventional approaches.

The backbone capacity is described as 'unlimited', which suggests that 100Mbps is theoretically possible. So what would it mean in everyday life? Video, videoconferencing and IP telephony without hiccups for a start. Fast uploads and downloads of all manner of information, suggesting the possibility of offloading hefty computing activities to the 'cloud'. Remote visual monitoring of people, equipment or property. And, for those so-minded, vastly improved multiplayer games and other virtual experiences.

Without wishing to be a wet blanket, I should point out that not every provider of services to the internet wants to gear up for high speed. It will cost a lot of hard-to-recoup money. Others will see an immediate commercial value - video rentals, online training etc - and will move swiftly. We'll end up with a two-tier internet in the short term and the good citizens of Bournemouth will be watched as closely as laboratory rats.

Oh darn it. I didn't mean to mention rats.

Posted by David Tebbutt | May 9, 2008 News & Reference | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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. 

Posted by mchillingworth | December 6, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | December 4, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | October 16, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, General, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, News & Reference, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | October 11, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | September 25, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, General, News & Reference, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (1)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | September 17, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (3)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | September 13, 2007 Arts, Humanities & Social Science, Company & Financial Information, Electronic Document & Records Management, Enterprise Content Management, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, Market Research Information, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)  

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.

Posted by mchillingworth | August 23, 2007 Company & Financial Information, General, Information Management, Legal, Tax, Regulatory & Patent, News & Reference, Professional Development, Science, Technical, Medical | Permalink  | Comments (0)