I just found this blog. It’s from a guy with terminal cancer, and it is absolutely hysterical. “All things are possible - ok, maybe not probable, but I still do the lottery.” I go in for my lung biopsy tomorrow morning… you can find out how it goes on my step mom’s blog. I’m excited to finally find out whatever it is that I’m going to find out….
The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has written a critical comment on the draft RCUK policy. The comment is not online, but Stevan Harnad quotes its major arguments and offers a point by point rebuttal on his blog. Stevan has also issued a version of the rebuttal as an open letter to Ian Diamond, Chair of the RCUK Executive Group. Excerpt from the
The Open Society Institute (OSI) has issued a call for proposals for its 2006-2007 International Policy Fellowship program. OSI will fund policy fellows from Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East to work in any of five areas. Here’s how it describes one of them: ‘Open Content & Sustainability. Open Access publishing
Editorial from the director of the King County, Washington Office of Emergency Management on the gutting of FEMA. Who’s the bigger threat? Terrorists or God?…
Critiques and rebuttals continue in UK open access debate, CORDIS News, August 31, 2005. An unsigned news story. (Thanks to Richard Poynder.) Excerpt:
The controversy in the UK over whether to make research papers available on the Internet free of charge has heated up over the summer, following an announcement by the UK research councils (RCUK) that it intends to make free access a condition of funding grants. The announcement has drawn critiques and counter critiques from the research community. Leading the argument against the proposal is the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) a non-profit publishing association. RCUK has many supporters however, including leading academics such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web….In a letter from ALPSP, Executive Director Sally Morris claims that the arrangement would have ‘disastrous consequences’ for journals. In a letter of rebuttal from a number of academics, the claim is rejected as ‘all objective evidence is contrary to this dire prediction’. The letter contains a point-by-point rejection of all of ALPSP’s concerns. While ALPSP argues that a policy requiring universities to self-archive their research articles in freely accessible repositories would cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, leading to the collapse of scholarly journals and the quality control and peer review process, the signatories of the letter of rebuttal believe the opposite to be true. ‘[N]ot only do journals thrive and co-exist alongside author self-archiving, but they can actually benefit from it - both in terms of more citations and more subscriptions,’ reads the letter. They cite the Institute of Physics in the UK and the American Physical Society, neither of which have identified a loss of subscriptions as a result of self-archiving. The letter urges RCUK to implement its self-archiving mandate without further delay, and then to pursue discussions with stakeholders on how institutional repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers. A recent international survey also found that over 80 per cent of researchers would be willing to submit their articles to institutional open access repositories.
Hoping to spark old-fashioned conversation in it’s chic coffee bistros, Starbucks started quoting famous Americans on their dixie cups, some of them with a bit of biting edge to them, and America’s Prude Coalition Factory is all in a sniffle over it. After all, you don’t want people discussing things unless it helps sell somebody’s swag, and preferably the swag from my agenda.
It’s all pretty humourous and I do hope Starbucks doesn’t just not back down, but takes the bull on by the horn and escalates the issue, quoting all sorts of unsavoury we’d rather not think about that and how dare you say that in front of the womenfolk sorts of literate cafe culture fare. Bravo.
Funniest of the bunch, tho, hands down no contest, just has to be this Leo Hindery biz-pundit fellow, a prime example why pundits aren’t worth a runny loo, and brace yourself for the punchline that comes when you get to his credentials. Where do the newspapers find these people?
“There are many religious-based social issues that are so hard for society to address right now — things like abortion and capital punishment — they’re better left for another time,” said Leo Hindery, author of “It Takes a CEO: Leading with Integrity.”
[ Tempest brews over Starbucks cups ]
Within every culture, there is a public domain –a lawyer-free zone, unregulated by the rules of copyright. Throughout history, this part of culture has been vital to the spread and development of creative work. It is the part that gets cultivated without the permission of anyone else. This public domain has always lived alongside a private domain—the part of culture that is owned and regulated, that part whose use requires the permission of someone else. Through the market incentives it creates, the private domain has also produced extraordinary cultural wealth throughout the world. It is essential to how cultures develop. Traditionally, the law has kept these two domains in balance. The term of copyright was relatively short, and its reach was essentially commercial. But a fundamental change in the scope and nature of copyright law, inspired by a radical change in technology, now threatens this balance….wealthy countries everywhere are pushing to impose even tighter restrictions on the rest of the world. These legal measures will soon be supplemented by extraordinary technologies that will secure to the owners of culture almost perfect control over how “their property” is used. Any balance between public and private will thus be lost. The private domain will swallow the public domain. And the cultivation of culture and creativity will then be dictated by those who claim to own it. There is no doubt that piracy is an important problem –it’s just not the only problem. Our leaders have lost this sense of balance….The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.
UNESCO has issued a press release to preview the Information Commons for e-Science workshop to start in Paris tomorrow. One of the four workshop objectives is to “Identify and analyze institutional, economic, policy, and legal benefits/drawbacks to providing public access to and unrestricted access of publicly funded scientific information.”
France pushes for European books online, EurActiv, August 31, 2005. An unsigned news story. Excerpt:
While Google has announced a break in its project to scan 15 million books, France is speeding up its rival venture for a European Digital Library. At its second meeting on 30 August 2005, the Library’s Advisory Council set up a number of working groups, which are to deal with issues such as financing, editorial choices, private sector co-operation and choice of a search engine. “We hope to be able to proceed quickly to taking decisions, based on the findings”, Culture Minister Pierre Donnedieu said. An interim report is to be presented to President Jacques Chirac, who takes personal interest in the project, by the end of the year. While the Library’s Advisory Council is composed of Frenchmen only, France is seeking co-operation from its European partners and from EU institutions, Mr. Donnedieu said. The minister also hopes for co-financing of the project by the EU. The Library project was announced by Mr. Chirac in May, together with the project of a French-German search engine, as “an essential asset for Europe in order to seize its place in the future geography of knowledge”. So far, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Spain and Italy have reacted positively to France’s invitation to get involved in the project. On several occasions, France has pointed to the growing importance of digital content and to the risk of this domain being dominated by US-based enterprises, such as Google’s Google print service.
Abstract: Google Print does not “change everything” regarding the need for professional cataloging and classification of books; its limitations make cataloging and classification even more important to researchers. Google’s keyword search mechanism, backed by the display of results in “relevance ranked” order, is expressly designed and optimized for quick information seeking rather than scholarship. Internet keyword searching does not provide scholars with the structured menus of research options, such as those in OPAC browse displays, that they need for overview perspectives on the book literature of their topics. Keyword searching fails to map the taxonomies that alert researchers to unanticipated aspects of their subjects. It fails to retrieve literature that uses keywords other than those the researcher can specify; it misses not only synonyms and variant phrases but also all relevant works in foreign languages. Searching by keywords is not the same as searching by conceptual categories. Google software fails especially to retrieve desired keywords in contexts segregated from the appearance of the same words in irrelevant contexts. As a consequence of the design limitations of the Google search interface, researchers cannot use Google to systematically recognize relevant books whose exact terminology they cannot specify in advance. Cataloging and classification, in contrast, do provide the recognition mechanisms that scholarship requires for systematic literature retrieval in book collections.
I find Japan to be extremely “faddy” and the media and consumers tend to jump onto new toys very quickly. Trends tend to die very quickly as well. Things that you are excited about only temporarily are often referred to as “my boom”. For example, you might say, “blogging is ‘my boom’ right now.” There are now television ads about blogs. The other day I heard a radio commercial where they read out the URL, but added that you could post comments and send trackbacks. Yes. Trackbacks. I have yet to hear a radio commercial in the US on a normal major FM show (maybe there are some) asking people to send trackbacks a site. It wasn’t even a geek site. I think everyone here is finally jumping on the bandwagon.
That’s why it’s not strange when reports constantly ask me whether I think blogging is a fad, assuming that this “fad” will disappear along with the tamagocchi and pokemon in due time. Many reporters still look at me a bit skeptically when I try to explain that it is a trend, not a fad or some cool new toy. Watching the Japanese consumer machine trying to devour this one will be interesting.
Having said that, I’m sure many people outside of Japan also feel that blogging is just a fad.
I saw a very insightful post from Konstantin Guericke, CoFounder of LinkedIn on MyLinkedInPowerForum. He writes (reposted by permission):
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 22:09:35 -0700
From: “Konstantin”
Subject: The power is in the network you already haveVirtually all professionals nod enthusiastically that “relationships matter,” but only a small group heeds the advice below. They start networking when they have a need. But that’s a really bad time to do it.
One of the core networking principles has been that you need to network proactively, meaning meeting lots of new people and build relationships, so you have people you can fall back on you need a job, an expert, an investor or a business partner. And you have to network with lots of people because you just don’t know what kind of relationship you may need.
And many networking sites try to encourage this old way by being a sort of virtual networking event where you can get to know lots of people.
LinkedIn turns this on its head by focusing on relationship management and giving members access to the people you need through the people you know.
The people in your personal networks are contacts on demand. As long as you have strong relationships with, say, 100 people, you have on-demand access to hundreds of thousands of people-far more than you could ever meet through networking.So, what this means is that LinkedIn obviates the need to network in the traditional sense. Unless you are a young professional just getting started on your career, you already have a network just from working-this is a network based on co-workers, bosses, clients, business partners, investors, etc. And this network is strong because these people know the good work you have done and are capable of doing.
In the past, this network was often insufficient because it was just 30 or 100 or 300 people, depending on the type of profession and length of your career. The person you needed would often not be among this group. But through LinkedIn, you have access to an on-demand network, so once you have brought the group of people who know you and your work onto LinkedIn (and these days, many are already on, so it’s much easier than two years ago), you can just relax and know that you can reach the people you need when you need them-without having to get to know them all “just in case.”
This is a fairly radical notion that transcends most existing networking philosophy. And it allows you to focus on working, rather than networking.
Once the network of people who know your work is built, when you need someone, search and you will find. Ask for an introduction, and you will get in touch along as your connection provides a strong introduction and you have a win-win proposition.
As you help your connections reach the people they want to meet, you strengthen your bonds with both parties you are introducing. The best way to expand your list of connections is simply to continue to do work and do it well. Your connections list will grow, and each connection will be an avenue to thousands of new contacts that are accessible on-demand, when you need them.
-Konstantin
Konstantin Guericke
VP Marketing and Co-Founder, LinkedIn
Professional Profile
This is very consistent with some of the themes in our book. I think that spending endless hours chatting at cocktail parties or chatting in online communities is a waste of time from a professional point of view. It’s defensible as recreation but not for business development. Whatever your job is, do your job well, and success will flow from that. What counts is not the number of people who know you, but the number of people who know you, trust you, and will pay you to do what you do.
One of the things that happens as we get more and more blogs out there is that existing bloggers spend less time reading new weblogs, and there are some really great ones out there that are being overlooked.
Blogger Nir Ofir dreamed up the idea of BlogDay to address this. To participate in BlogDay:
I’m off to find 5 new bloggers. If you decide to participate, feel free to provide a link to your BlogDay post in a comment here.
Oh, and this will be my first entry using Technorati tags — I hope I get it right! 
Tags: BlogDay2005, Blogging, Blogs, Events