Jan
30
Someday, when I’m dreaming …
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Apologies first for linking blog entries with song lyrics. Memo to Self – kick this silly habit. Response from Self – but your whole information behaviour is just a series of silly habits, so why quit a comparatively harmless one? (That’s the trouble with Self, I find. Such a smart ass. Makes the whole idea of an interior dialogue so pointless and frustrating.) But habitual information behaviours is not a subject to be given up lightly. The way we learn, absorb, research and find content contentment is intimately bound into habitual patterns of finding out, and some internet innovations work with those patterns – while others work radically against them. I remember returning from the US some years ago, newly signed into Twitter and LinkedIn, and wondering if these would ever become parts of my habitual behaviour, and, lo, it comes to pass that they are lungs through which I breathe. Yet I thought the innovation which would most change my life was going to be StumbleUpon, and I find that I have changed machines and not re-installed it.
So here I am, back in the US again (an experience that happens most months, admittedly) and once more we are in a firestorm of service innovation. During a trip which will take me to New York (twice), San Diego and Nashville, I find a constant reminder of the atmosphere around the internet boom of the early years of this century – and the way it continued despite the dotcom bust. I heard an investor yesterday talking about the “new bubble”, while governments and bankers are still meeting to resolve the last one (whose predecessor was the one whose subsequent regulatory adjustment would bring to an end, in our lifetimes and forever, the cycle of boom and bust…)
So what will this round of hyper-invested, hyper-hyped internet launches do to my habitual behaviours? Quite a bit, perhaps. I have now encountered three, new to me as a user, which could fit that category. I am sure they will be familiar to many of you already, but here are some random reactions from a new user:
- I was really impressed by Qwiki (www.qwiki.com). Loved the Vimeo. delighted to see the return of Dr Louis Monier of AltaVista fame. I have signed up to the Alpha because it seems to me that the idea of defining topics and people in short clips, and then turning them into audio as well as text and maps and video equates very well with the way people learn, and with the demands of mobile access. If you are English, enter the topic “Eustace Folville” and you will see what I mean. If this catches on then it becomes an instant referencing point for learning processes. At present the charming American computerized voice lacks all pronunciation skills, but the service does answer the teacher who said to me at BETT that “my kids are too lazy and don’t read well enough to copy Wikipedia”! And if you are a Publisher and reading this blog, go straight to the “For Publishers” section on this site: you have around a day to decide whether you catch at the new bandwagon – or not!
- I shall certainly use www.unsubscribe.com to hoover away all of the persistent marketeers who still litter my email with unwanted marketing messages. Yes, you know who you are! Toner Giant, the Kiawah Island marketing department and others! I have tried to unsubscribe but you seem not to hear. Now we have a service that will message you back until you desist, and remove you from my inbox. I can do as many of you as I like for $20 a year, and the whole thing works on a downloaded extension to the email client which produces an “unsubscribe” button alongside each email. The internet world creates its own vices and compensates with its own correctives (the founder calls his service “email hygienics”). In October they raised $2.1 million in a funding round led by Charles River Ventures.
- And I would love Spokeo (www.spokeo.com) to work – and globally. I know that it will recreate the privacy wars , and that what it does is probably illegal in most of Europe, but I think that we all want to be able to work in a directory context where we enter one piece of information and get all the others in terms of directory access. How often I lack an email address, and even the invaluable LinkedIn cannot help, or urgently need a street address, or a location map, or to know which email address is current. I am often less concerned about social network membership, personal wealth, or photos and videos showing the individual on the web. But Spokeo searches and combines all this, and frighteningly well in the US, so that if I resided here I would want to be able to specify exactly what connections it made, especially between personal and business connectors. But what it is doing is something that the phone companies never managed to do online, and it is a solution, again, which fits a mobile access world like a glove. And £2.95 per month.
My previous generation having reached maturity with the LinkedIn IPO last week, I shall be interested to see how this new generation fares. Qwiki may be the StumbleUpon of my new crop, of course, but I would not bet upon it. Service innovation succeeds on the network because specific behavioural requirements are met, because service pricing and conditions of use are appropriate and because users recognize its place in their own personal “workflow” of active transactional engagement with the world around them. All that and something else too – they must feel good using it and feel that others think they look good as a result. Get to that last homebase as well and services score. I shall watch my new trio like a hawk!
Jan
18
Two is a Trend
Filed Under B2B, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Different origins, different side of the market, different impetus for creativity, similar result. I had a great deal of mail of one sort or another after writing “I wish I had done that…” just before the holidays. In that piece, wrapped around the launch of Digital Science Ltd by Macmillan/Nature, I tried to exemplify the continuing drive to workflow in producing sustained responses to the demand for solutions. But the topic was not Lexis for the insurance industry or Thomson Reuters GRC for financial services, but how you run research procedures in a lab in a more productive, effective and compliant way. And the science research market is vitally important, not just because of the impact of science on our society, or because a segment of that society now cries “foul” at unwelcome results before trying to technically discredit unpalatable truths, but because the science community is the historic belwether of change in the networked society. They had it first.
So I was fascinated to find in my mail a kindly note from one of the founders of BioRAFT (www.bioraft.com). He pointed out that the problems tackled by Timo Hannay and his team at Digital Science were content-orientated just because the angle of approach via Nature was publishing derived. But there was a number of ways of examining these issues. One, and I am now persuaded that it is a very valid one, is to look at them from the viewpoint of lab technicians and lab management and maintenance. I have always been told that over two thirds of searchers in the scholarly literature seek not research results which support or destroy their own findings or direction of enquiry: instead they are looking for experimental techniques which pass muster, yield compliance, and cannot be easily over-turned by critics. Results are important, as is data derived in research mode, but nothing stands up if the technique is faulty and the experimental warcraft is holed at the waterline.
Obviously good literature research helps to ensure the appropriate selection of experimental techniques. But it does not stop there. BioRAFT seeks a unified system of management in research, and its proponents are research managers who clearly pride themselves on creating solutions with an “intuitive approach which even the most hard-nosed PI will use and value”. This is researcher-for-researcher solutioning, grounded in lab procedures, with a strong bent to community, to quality outcomes and to innovation to make it all work. Solutions can be customized, genuinely difficult compliance issues managed (take a look at the “NIH Guidelines for Research involving recombinent DNA modules “if you doubt the size of the compliance Himalyas in this sector), and biosecurity and biosafety can be married to simplicity in use.
Otherwise BioRAFT (it stands for Research Applications and Financial Tracking) Inc. is a neat start-up, based on the east and west US coasts and in Lebanon, very into Open Source and full of good sentiments about sustainability. Is it publishing? No. Does that matter? No, it is to be welcomed. The solutions in question will only be created by the content people coming over the bridge from one direction and the research laboratory procedures people coming in the other. And we are trying to build a bridge here, which, if you start from both banks simultaneously, means sharing data and materials to ensure that the structure meets up midstream. It seems to me therefore that Digital Science and BioRAFT may potentially be partners in some contexts, and that there may be a great many more sectoral BioRAFT’s out there than the content community suspect.
This experience re-inforces a long held prejudice: we are only just scratching the surface. BioRAFT claims a genesis in 2003, which is honourably aged but cannot disguise the fact that it is now that take off appears imminent, because it is now that the research community, like so many other networked groupings, are beginning to believe that there has to be a smarter, more consistent and more auditable way of doing things in the network. And if networks create the methodologies for releasing the accumulated experience of communities into insight and understanding, then BioRAFT is a good exemplar. It takes a long time to get started and then everything goes with a rush. BioRAFT and its founder Nathan Watson are participants to watch.
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