Technology Blog

Andrew Shaindlin (who contributed a sub-chapter of The Virtual Handshake) just wrote a good piece on Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations : How third party social and business networking sites can benefit alumni online communities.

One of the great ironies (and brilliant aspects) of TheFacebook is that it has monetized the networks of Harvard, Yale, and virtually every other university in the US—without paying them a dime! Andrew wrote this piece to explore how university alumni communities should respond to these new services.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations

From Jason Dowdell (via Claire Delong of Accolo): Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn writes:

There are two types of acceptance rates…

1.) Those from invitations
2.) Those from introductions.

Invitations to connect are generally from people you know and trust already, like former co-workers, classmates, etc.. By accepting an invitation, you agree to make introductions for the person when he/she wants to meet people you or your contacts know. Of the people who send over 10 invitiations, 7% have an acceptance rate of 90% or higher. These kinds of conversion rates are unthinkable in traditional marketing, but only possible via word-of-mouth marketing where there are well-established relationships and bonds of trust.

Introductions are contact requests from people you generally don’t know and who are contacting you about doing business via an introduction from someone you know. When accepting a contact request, you are providing your contact information, so you can start a dialog about the opportunity via phone or email. When people receive an introduction, they accept it (meaning they provide their contact info to the sender) 84% of the time. This is quite amazing given that they generally don’t know the sender, and it’s a testament to the fact that business users realy heavily on social filters — they are much more willing to give their attention and respond favorably to someone who comes introduced (even if the sender is just a friend of a friend of their connection) than if they get contacted directly via phone or email where nobody is vouching for the sender and where they can’t easily look up the profile of the sender. It also shows that most users are careful which people they let into their LinkedIn network and that they give signficant weight to the fact that one of their LinkedIn connections is recommending the sender, based on their direct knowledge of the sender or based on the recommendation provided about the sender by someone they know and trust.

What comparable data can other services provide? Any ideas?

This post was written by David Teten, source: Social Networking Acceptance Rate Stats

source: Phishers Snare Victims With VoIP

Are you a student, and interested in earning $4,500 for contributing to open
source, and fighting spam, over the course of the summer?

If so, get thee hence to the Google Summer of Code
2006 site, and propose a project!

Last year, we in SpamAssassin didn’t get it
together to mentor SoC projects. This year, however, we have a few prospective
mentors (including myself), and a few sample project
ideas lined up; we’re all
ready to go! Here’s the Student
FAQ. Be quick; applications end
in a week and a bit.

Here’s hoping we get some interesting submissions

Tags: apache google gsoc2006 spamassassin summer of code

This post was written by Justin, source: SpamAssassin in the Google Summer of Code 2006

Library Student Journal is a new peer-reviewed, OA journal published by LIS students at the University of Buffalo. It expects to start accepting submissions in May –which starts tomorrow. (Thanks to Sabina Jane Iseli-Otto.)

Update. I just learned that Buffalo LIS students have also created The Firebrary, an OA digital library of the Buffalo Fire Historical Society. (Thanks to Jessica L. Fadel’s announcement on Diglib.) Is it something in the water?

source: New OA journal by and for LIS students

• Your Tube, Whose Dime? - Forbes.com
  YouTube’s bandwidth bill ‘may be approaching $1 million a month’. holy crap (via waxy)
  (tags: via:waxy video internet youtube business bandwidth cdns)
• ZoomIn
  a really nice Flickr-like take on mapping; every street has user-contributed location geodata included; open REST API; social aspects; Google-friendly. Best mapping site I’ve seen
  (tags: geowanking geodata mapping new-zealand web)
• ‘Everybody loves Eric Raymond’ source available
  ‘Everything needed to make this episode is available in the eler-source directory in a bzipped tarball. … Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license’
  (tags: creative-commons eler jokes funny open-source comics)

Tags: 

This post was written by dailylinks, source: links for 2006-04-29

Here’s what happens when you search for single letters on Google:

• A: Apple
• B: BHPhotoVideo.com
• C: C-SPAN
• D: D-Link
• E: E! Online
• F: FuckedCompany.com (probably due to being referred to as ‘F***edCompany’ or similar)
• G: Gmail (not the main Google site, interestingly)
• H: H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online
• I: iTunes
• J: Jennifer Lopez (really!)
• K: K Mart
• L: the Council of Europe (?!?)
• M: Texas A&M University
• N: AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer: Blue Web’n Homepage
• O: O’Reilly Media
• P: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• Q: Q4Music.com, the website for the UK music magazine ‘Q’
• R: The R Project For Statistical Computing
• S: McDonald’s (note the apostrophe-S!)
• T: AT&T
• U: The University of Arizona, Tucson Arizona
• V: V for Vendetta, the official site
• W: W Hotels, a subsite of StarwoodHotels.com
• X: X.Org
• Y: Yahoo! Messenger (not the main Y! site)
• Z: A To Z Teacher Stuff

Interestingly I got to see the new Google search results page, with the
sidebar, once. It must be in the process of rolling out…

Tags: google letters searching

This post was written by Justin, source: Single-Letter Google Hits

Paul G. Haschak, Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication:…A Webliography, Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, Spring 2006. The full title is Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication –Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations, Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items– A Webliography. Excerpt:

Since World War II, we have seen a proliferation of scholarly materials. In particular, there has been a tremendous growth in the size and cost of the primary journal literature. With prices continuing to rise at a rate greater than the general price index, the current scholarly communication system is becoming more and more unaffordable. The rise in the cost of serial subscriptions has forced academic libraries over the last several decades to cancel existing serial titles, add fewer and fewer new serial titles, and buy fewer and fewer books. In is apparent, that the crisis in the scholarly communication system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens our academic faculty’s ability to do world-class research. With current technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to scholarly articles.

PS: Most of the sections are well-done and I commend Haschak for his work. But I have a few nits to pick. He includes my Guide, which I stopped updating in mid-2004 (conspicuously declared on the front page), and BMC’s Open Access Now, which ceased publication in late 2004. On the other side, he excludes Open Access News, which I update every day, even though he has a section devoted to blogs and news.

source: A new OA webliography

Einar Fredriksson and Björn Ortelbach have written a Conference Report on APE 2006: Academic Publishing in Europe (Berlin, April 4-5, 2006). (Thanks to Arnoud de Kemp.) Excerpt:

Dr. Jurgen Renn (Max Planck Gesellschaft, MPG) gave his opening address on behalf of the MPG President Peter Gruss. He reflected on the current scientific journal, the MPG’s role and attitudes towards the current academic publishing process. Costs for the dissemination of scientific information have become research costs. He saw “open access” as a paradigm shift (of the order of Internet and the Web) and contrasted it with “toll access” currently practised by publishers. New media haven’t been optimally used by academic publishers, and examples of systems developed and run by scientists themselves were suggested as alternatives. He stressed that people need to look for new models. If we keep mapping existing structures to a new medium, we will create and not cross boundaries. Dr. Renn stressed that “open access” is not directed against publishers but is rather a transformation process towards a better infrastructure which publishers can also exploit. The development of “open access” should focus on long-term preservation and quality control….

Vitek Tracz (Chairman of the Science Navigation Group) had his address read by Dr. Matthew Cockerill: it started out by stressing the necessity of academic publishers to reinvent themselves. Offering added value has to become the focal point. In order to do this, standardisation will be necessary. The new generation of Internet companies like Skype, eBay, etc. illustrate that information can float freely while you can exploit higher level services. It has to become recognised that paper-based and the emulation of paper-based publications are not the future. Knowledge structuring, tools for knowledge evaluation, collective knowledge of communities, semantic enrichment, mining tools, were all seen as fair game for the future publisher….

Dr. Johannes Fournier (Deutsches Forschungs Gemeinschaft -DFG, representing Dr. Gudrun Gersmann, Library Committee of DFG) explained, that this Committee has increased its mandate to include research information and the building of digital research resources. It is part of the mission of DFG to supply the necessary German and international information to German scientists, and during the past years an amount of 27M Euro has been spent on national licences. Open access was seen as a way to reduce the costs for information. Scientists will determine the future developments of academic publishing: electronic publishing is only a part of the general changes in the research area. DFG will assist in the establishment of new publishing organisations, but can only supply initial funding and not maintenance. The speaker saw collaboration with publishers necessary and desirable. Freely available information could form a basis to be used by publishers, and sold at their own risk to a broader public.

Dr. Matthew Cockerill (Publisher, BioMedCentral Ltd., London) presented his company’s route to become a profitable enterprise. This would be based on open access to its publications – whereby the authors or their employers/funding-agencies are required to pay a fee per article published. A fee of around 1000 Euro is seen as adequate at this time, and some 400 institutes, paying for 69% of the currently published articles, are currently supporting the company. 65 funding agencies were recently contacted for a survey, to which 23 so far have responded – mostly favourably. The speaker also mentioned other companies employing the “authors-pay” principle, with comparative prices, and suggested that at a level of 1-2000 Euro per article such efforts could become sustainable….

The general debate in the closing panel was largely driven by the issue of Open Access. The pros and cons in the lively discussion showed a wide spectrum of opinions.
The base for the discussion was Dr. Renn’s demand to publishers to allow an open access model. Renn explained that open access is the wish of the customers, the scientists, and that it is the enabler for new form of science. The discussion was continued by Jan Velterop (Springer) who pointed out that it is very easy to make information freely available. Therefore, Velterop claimed, there are no good arguments against open access. In this context, Renn emphasised that not only information is closed up currently, but that publishers invest to close up information. Mathew Cockerill (BioMed Central), supporting Renn’s initial argument, explained that open access is “the only way to allow the full resources of academia to throw that creativity at finding the best ways to discover content and put that content in context”.

source: Report on the APE 2006 conference

I love to read blogs, but increasingly, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all the blogs I’d like to read because there is just so much good stuff out of there. And, of course, it’s all mixed up with a lot more stuff ranging from merely mediocre to just plain pointless.

Recently, I’ve particularly become a fan of the “blog carnival” format, a weekly traveling roadshow of the best of the blogosphere on a particular topic. I got overwhelmed trying to keep up with the dozens and dozens of good blogs out there, and just setting up search feeds on keywords wasn’t giving me a good variety.

Blog carnivals, though, give you a very concise view of some of the best of the blogosphere on various topics. Here are some that you may find particularly relevant:

• Carnival of the Capitalists - 50+ weekly posts about economics, entrepreneurship, personal finance - basically anything having to do with money. I hosted this week’s edition.
• Carnival of Marketing - Seven editor-selected posts on all things marketing.
• Carnival of Entrepreneurship - Inspired by both of the above, I started this back in February and it’s going great guns. If you have a blog, I’m always looking for submissions and hosts.
• Carnival of Business - Newly launched this week.

To learn more about blog carnivals, including what they are, submitting articles, and a list of all known blog carnivals (here’s another), visit BlogCarnival.com. This site is a one-stop resource where you can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual carnivals, submit posts to multiple carnivals, and have some great tools for managing a carnival if you already run one or want to start one.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Blog Carnivals - Keeping Up with the Best of the Blogosphere

Stevan Harnad, Dr. Ian’s Gibson’s Paradoxical Historic Role in the Transition to Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, April 29, 2006. Excerpt:

Dr. Ian Gibson has written the foreword to Neil Jacobs (ed.), Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects, Chandos Publishing, forthcoming 2006 [PS: blogged here yesterday].  A scientist and British MP, Ian Gibson’s role in the Open Access (OA) movement has been a remarkable one, and he will certainly get the historic credit for having shepherded-through the landmark UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology’s recommendation to mandate OA self-archiving.  Historians and sociologists of science will find it especially interesting that Ian has done what he has done despite the fact that much of his admirable populist rationale for OA will prove to have been completely wide of the functional mark (though perhaps not of the practical, political mark).

In the PostGutenberg Era, OA will be seen clearly to have been a research community objective and a research community benefit, in making research accessible to all researchers who need to use it, not just to those whose institutions can afford the journal in which it happens to have been published (as in the Gutenberg Era). OA may or may not eventually lead to publishing reform, but in and of itself it will become clear that OA was not and would not have been provided by researchers merely or primarily in order to reform publishing, nor in order to make journals more affordable….

The idea that OA is needed in order to break journal publishers’ “monopoly” may hence prove to have been one of OA’s actual intermediate selling points, in inspiring indignation and action, but it will also prove to have been a specious point.  Missing the mark too is the notion that OA is needed to feed a “hungry” public with the content of peer-reviewed research journals….It is through researchers using, building upon and applying the fruits of research that the general public benefits from OA, not through reading it through for themselves….[N]o researcher’s institution anywhere can afford all the journals that could contain articles that any researcher might ever need, and, a fortiori, none can afford all the peer-reviewed journals there are (24K). And this would still be true (please note carefully!) even if all journals were sold at cost (zero profit, hence no point blaming monopolists and price-gougers).

And Ian is even off the mark insofar as “free-riding” is concerned. His own committee’s (spot-on) recommendation was that all researchers should be required to self-archive their own published research article output in their own institutional repositories, free for all. Publishers have filled Ian’s ears, no doubt, with apocalyptic alarms about the possibility of rival publishers free-riding on and underselling that free content: Utter nonsense, because based on a profound misunderstanding of the Web, of OA itself, and of what comes with the territory:  For if/when all articles are available free for all on the web, it is absurd to imagine that any free-riding rival publisher will be able to sell them, to anyone!…

So let [everyone] keep fighting for (or against) OA on the grounds of journal affordability, public accessibility, or what have you, if they like. Just as long it is Ian’s own remedy that the proponents promote: mandated self-archiving in the researcher’s own IR.

source: Harnad on Gibson

SPARC Europe has named the Wellcome Trust the first winner of the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. From the announcement:

As part of the Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication: Beyond Declarations - The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication held in Lund, Sweden, the Wellcome Trust was presented with the first SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe initiated the Award to recognise the work of an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems. In making the Award to the Trust the judging panel noted the Trust’s truly groundbreaking work in scholarly communication, from the commissioning of incisive research into the market, through to the formulation and implementation of clear policy in support of the widest dissemination of the research outputs funded by the Trust.

Dr Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust said ‘We are very honoured to receive this award from SPARC Europe which recognises our activities in the promotion of the ‘open-access’ model of science publishing. Ensuring that the outputs of research are freely available and shared as widely and as rapidly as possible is vital in order to facilitate the translation of research into practical improvements in health.’

Dr Bas Savenije, Chair of the SPARC Europe Board, praised the Wellcome Trust’s ‘major contribution in implementing strategies for open access towards the widespread availability of research. They have shown the way for funding bodies and we hope that others internationally will emulate them.’

Following the success of the first Award, SPARC Europe has decided to make this an annual event and it is expected that the second Award will be presented at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications (OAI5) to be held in Geneva in 2007.

source: SPARC Europe honors Wellcome Trust for its OA work

Don’t worry, I learned my lesson from BOB. Shamed once, this round there’s no way, I won’t tell you anything, I won’t link to anything and I won’t dare quote any agent blurbs, prices or photos, but … if, say, you were, suppose, of the mind, so to speak, to, like, buy me a slice of an island just off the Oliphant shore on Lake Huron, then, I have heard, but can’t really say, but I have heard that the following randomulated paragraph may give some essential clues of mutual benificence to us both:

The Twon of South Brcue Piseunlna hvae 9 ppretiroes for slae on Crbeanrry Inlasd in Lake Huron wset of Wraiton, Otranio. Tneedr peckaags can be onietbad form the wsbitee at hhscstatpbit:wuncneuul/..o/rpewwom/
[ South Bruce Peninsula Crier ]

But you didn’t get that from me, see?

source: Buy me an Island

Stevan Harnad, Why we’re doing well, The Independent, April 27, 2006. A letter to the editor. It’s not online at the newspaper site, but a version is online at Stevan’s blog:

The reasons for the University of Southampton’s extremely high overall web-metric rating are four:

(1) U. Southampton’s university-wide research performance

(2) U. Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) Department’s involvement in many high-profile web projects and activities (among them the semantic web work of the web’s inventor, ECS Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) work of Prof. Nigel Shadbolt, and the pioneering web science contributions of Prof. Wendy Hall)

(3) The fact that since 2001 U. Southampton’s ECS has had a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made Open Access on the web by depositing it in the ECS EPrints Repository, and that Southampton has a university-wide self-archiving policy (soon to become a mandate) too

(4) The fact that maximising access to research (by self-archiving it free for all on the web) maximises research usage and impact (and hence web impact). This all makes for an extremely strong Southampton web presence, as reflected in such metrics as the “G factor“, which places Southampton 3rd in the UK and 25th among the world’s top 300 universities or Webometrics,which places Southampton 6th in UK, 9th in Europe, and 80th among the top 3000 universities it indexes.

source: Self-archiving raises online profile of Southampton University

source: Alma Swan on researcher perspectives on OA

• Irish Free Software Organisation (IFSO) event
  tomorrow afternoon, Federico Heinz and a talk on GPLv3 from Ciaran O’Riordan
  (tags: ifso free-software gnu gpl federico-heinz dublin ireland talks)
• Valleywag: Alan Ralsky might rat out a massive hacker/spammer network
  could be interesting if true
  (tags: alan-ralsky anti-spam spam valleywag doj feds spam-kings)

Tags: 

This post was written by dailylinks, source: links for 2006-04-28

Anne Culver, The Next Form of Text, Minnesota State University Mankato Reporter, April 27, 2006. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt:

Free textbooks. No, it’s not too good to be true. Ever since a St. Paul-based internet company began offering downloadable textbooks that contain advertisements, the concept of kicking costly textbooks to the curb seems within reach.

Freeload Press offers about 20 accounting and finance textbooks, study guides and worksheets, which can be downloaded from the company’s Web site, freeloadpress.com, as free Adobe PDF files.

Tom Doran, founder and CEO of Freeload Press, said the company came out with its first textbooks for class use this academic year. While no MSU professors currently use online textbooks in their curriculum, Doran said several MSU students have discovered the site on their own and downloaded textbooks.

“[Students] love it,” Doran said. “We’re getting rave reviews. I’ve been in publishing for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Not only do we look pretty good in the students’ eyes, but so do the instructors.”

Advertisements in the textbooks, which include fast food restaurants and photocopying services, are limited to 50 ads per 600-page textbook. Doran said the placement of the ads is “really subtle,” as they are embedded in the text in what he calls “study breaks” at the end of chapters.

source: More on Freeload Press

source: Bailey biblio, version 62

source: Punjab Agricultural University university digitizing its research for OA

Leo Waaijers, From Libraries to ‘Libratories’, Liber Quarterly, 16, 1 (2006). Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.

While the eighties of the last century were a time of local automation for libraries and the nineties the decade in which libraries embraced the internet and the WWW, now is the age in which the big search engines and institutional repositories are gaining a firm footing. This heralds a new era in both the evolution of scholarly communication and its agencies themselves, i.e. the libraries. Until now libraries and publishers have developed a digital variant of existing processes and products, i.e. catalogues posted on the Web, scanned copies of articles, e-mail notification about acquisitions or expired lending periods, or traditional journals in a digital jacket. However, the new OAI repositories and services based upon them have given rise to entirely new processes and products, libraries transforming themselves into partners in setting up virtual learning environments, building an institution’s digital showcase, maintaining academics’ personal websites, designing refereed portals and – further into the future – taking part in organising virtual research environments or collaboratories. Libraries are set to metamorphose into ‘libratories’, an imaginary word to express their combined functions of library, repository and collaboratory. In such environments scholarly communication will be liberated from its current copyright bridle while its coverage will be both broader - including primary data, audiovisuals and dynamic models - and deeper, with cross-disciplinary analyses of methodologies and applications of instruments. Universities will make it compulsory to store in their institutional repositories the results of research conducted within their walls for purposes of academic reporting, review committees, and other modes of clarification and explanation. Big search engines will provide access to this profusion of information and organise its mass customisation.

PS: The same issue of LQ contains a report by Raf Dekeyser on The LIBER Workshops on the “Open Archives Initiative” at CERN, Geneva. But it doesn’t even have a free abstract online, or not so far.

Update. Waaijers published the same paper in the December 2005 issue of First Monday. (Thanks to Kimmo Kuusela for pointing this out.) I don’t know the explanation.

source: As libraries incorporate OA, they become libratories