World of Ends.

Two members of >the other Gang of Four are at it again: Doc Searls and David Weinberger have teamed up to produce World of Ends, another manifesto on the Internet and how to relate to it. [Advogato]

keep an eye on it folks…

Blogs and academics. A heterogeneous collection of links to pages relating to blogs in academia. Many links I've never seen previously, along with a few old-time favorites of mine. [Seb's Open Research]

list list list

Scholarly journals are not where the interesting action is.

Making money. Elsevier's Pieter Bolman, interviewed by Information Today in The Future of Journals, claims that journal publishing is not about the “sharing of ideas” – that new ideas are shared at conferences and through personal interaction, while journals are useful as the official record, or a stake in the frontier for researchers. [...] [HubLog]

Exactly. As Andrew Odlyzko wrote, “Journals are not where the interesting action is“. And this is why I find it more exciting to investigate the evolution of informal scholarly communication media such as personal knowledge publishing and wikis, especially as these developments occur synergetically with what happens in the wider world.

[Seb's Open Research]

journals have been dying for many a year, but they also are necessary for so many things in academia.

SXSW 2003 Wrapup.

Heath Row's coverage of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival beats the crap out of all instances of event/conference/symposiumBlogging I have seen so far. Kudos! Here are the reports that connect the most into my interests:

• Richard Florida: the rise of the Creative Class, pointing out the correlation between the Bohemian Index, the Gay Index, and the health of local technology industries. Diversity is good, baby.
• Beyond the Blog with a bunch of Movable Type folks. Says Anil Dash on contributing content in many different places: ”I almost resent that someone else controls what I've written. The tools need to evolve so I post to this one place, and it's posted somewhere else.” Mark these words.
• Digital Aboriginal, on the shift back to an oral-like culture. “If we're approaching the characteristics and number of words of an oral tradition, what does that mean? In an oral tradition, reputation is extremely important. Relationships are extremely important. Intimacy is extremely important.”
• Jon Lebkowsky, Adina Levin, and Nancy White: Effective Social Networks.
• Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal.com), Scott Heiferman (MEETUP.com), and James Hong (HotOrNot.com): Trends in How the Internet Connects People. “I showed up at this Howard Dean Meetup and there were 400 people in a New York bar. It was fully acknowledged that no one would be there if the idea hadn't spread through the viral nature of the Web.”

[Seb's Open Research]

more interesting stuff to look at when i have time.

Ecology of Tools. How a dozen companies work together on a ten-minute task that makes the Web a slightly nicer place. [Mark Bernstein]

tools are important for the itnernet, but standards are the fundamental undergirding of tools

Take this tech job and shove it. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities out there — if you have 10 years of experience and are willing to work for free. [Salon.com] [[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

yup, and to think Johnny Paycheck is dead.

More Social-Network Mapping Tools.

I wrote yesterday a column named “New Social-Network Mapping Tools Are Emerging.”

Slashdot mentioned it, and their readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools.

First, I need to make some corrections about Valdis Krebs, the developer of InFlow, a software tool I talked about in this previous column. He wrote me to tell he never worked at IBM. On the contrary, IBM was his first big customer. And, while this Discover article stated that “Krebs has spent most of the last 15 years honing his mapping software,” he told me “the first working version [w/o visuals] was written in 2 weekends… on a 512K Macintosh… using Prolog.” Finally, InFlow is designed to analyze not an individual e-mail box, but groups of them.

And now, let's browse through the excellent suggestions in no particular order. [Please note that I intentionally removed all e-mail addresses.]

• Raffi Krikorian urged me to take a look at a quick hack he put together a year ago called email constellations. “This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualization tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure.”
• Stefano Mazzocchi sent me a pointer to his Apache Agora visualizing social networks. There, you can see a data cloud “generated by processing three months of e-mail traffic on three Apache development mail lists.” [A bit of caution: you might have to stop and restart your browser after using it.]
• Jonathon N. Cummings alerted me about the NetVis Module which allows a dynamic visualization of social networks. “The NetVis Module is a free open source web-based tool designed to simulate, analyze, and visualize social networks using data from csv files, online surveys, and geographically dispersed work teams.”
• Rev. wRy mentioned EtherApe, a graphical network monitor for Unix.
• J. Maxwell Legg wrote about his freeware inGridX tool. “inGridX started life as a repertory grid creative free software offer to Kellian decision support consultants who make inferences about meanings by looking at the spin derived from a grid of elements and constructs. inGridX uses Principle Component Analysis as the basis to materially implicate a grid's digital effects.
• The NameBase people pointed me to their Proximity Search tool which “generates social network diagrams of the ruling class.”
• Steve Wolff asked me to check his Surf3D Pro tool. This is a freeware program which promises to reduce “search time by over 80% in comparison to what it normally takes you to click through and evaluate search engine results.” It has specific agents for Google Usenet groups, eBay auctions, Yahoo! Boards and others.
• Arthur Embleton and Gustavo Muslera both recommended KartOO visual meta search engine. It is similar to the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, but it doesn't require Java and uses FlashPlayer to draw interactive maps. Dazzling!
• Finally, a reader named xynopsis talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, “The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?,” I already explored this very funny tool.

As I already said, if you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, with Slashdot readers' help, March 16, 2003

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

more handy tools here…

Queen of Engines. Last night I had the good fortune to attend a screening of To Dream Tomorrow, a new documentary of Ada Byron Lovelace directed by John Fuegi and Jo Francis. The film is an extraordinary piece of work and a must… [Matthew G. Kirschenbaum]

sounds like a great flick….

How to write a book in 10 days. Dedicated to aspiring writers, the author of 12 books and several hundred articles shares his technique for writing an entire book size manuscript in 10 days. [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

I'll have to try this. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

this looks really handy…

Steve Lawrence's paper online or invisible has bee …. Steve Lawrence's paper online or invisible has been referred to before in this blog. But its conclusion is so important that the paper is worth highlighting again:

“Articles freely available online are more highly cited. For greater impact and faster scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.”

His paper concludes:

“Free online availability facilitates access in multiple ways, including online archives, direct connections between scientists or research groups, hassle-free links from email, discussion groups, and other services, indexing by web search engines, and the creation of third-party search services. Free online availability of scientific literature offers substantial benefits to science and society. To maximize impact, minimize redundancy, and speed scientific progress, author and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.”

[FOS News]

In the March issue of Information Today, Dick Kase …. In the March issue of Information Today, Dick Kaser interviews Pieter Bolman about open-access initiatives. Bolman is vice-president and Director of STM Relations at Elsevier and former CEO of Pergamon and Academic Press. Kaser lobs some softballs, and Bolman hits them. A valuable window into what commercial publishers are thinking about the prospects of open access and how publishers have been misunderstood by researchers and librarians. [FOS News]

Two views – one from a 'proprietary' publisher and one who promotes open access. Which one will win? My view – The day of the $8000 yearly subscription business model is over and publishers will have to readjust to compete. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

I agree, subscription is dead, but given the fiscal support of universities and publishing through those universities, I don't think there is any other model out there that is sufficient. cost recovery is all there is or close things down.