Lightstreamer: Next Generation Push

Search update: an interview with Amanda Spink and Peter Norvig on AI and search. Both excellent, timely, more interesting than anything in the printed media, and freely available. A nice analogy about libraries, intelligence and Google at around 47 minutes on second item.

This headline is too good to ignore.....TVover.net - Create Your Own Internet TV Channel...for free

Applications built on top of the Google search platform just keep coming. Here is Vulnpedia - a Security Search Engine. It is interesting to note that the Google platform has successfully launched search applications. But it had to buy a video sharing platform despite having developed one of its own.

Larry Sanger on the role of expertise in Web 2.0

Google's custom search has only been out a couple of weeks but it it is catching on. Here is LISZEN which ocusses on 500+ Library Blogs.

Blog as corrective: sompare this with this

According to Steve Jobs the Whole Earth Catalog was a conceptual forerunner to search engines of today.

Timo Hannay - the scientific paper of the future (large PDF). Many of the features require the sort of accessibility that only open access can give.

MySociety has a very neat list of sitejobs for volunteers, divided up into technical, design and non-technical sections.

howto: integrate Google Maps into java web applications

A proposal to W3C for agile XML

Tim O'Reilly: Search Startups Are Dead, Long Live Search Startups: "We're entering the platform phase of Web 2.0, in which first generation applications are going to turn into platforms, followed by a stage in which the leaders use that platform strength to outperform their application rivals, eventually closing them out of the market. And that platform is not enforced by control over proprietary APIs, as it was in the Windows era, but by the operational infrastructure, and perhaps even more importantly, by the massive databases (with network effects creating increasing returns for the database leaders) that are at the heart of Web 2.0 platforms."

The Tibco Ajax Toolkit is freely available, at least for now.

now you can scan your books into LibraryThing

Open Geodata: Complete UK Maps from 1950s online

News here that the American Cancer Society raised $40,000 real dollars from a walkathon in Second Life.

Clock watching using OpenLaszlo a Rich User application toolkit - it's all in the browser.

Content management: IBM likes Drupal, publishes 9 tutorials

Bokardo: The Paradox of Choice: What’s Easiest to evaluate gets attention. Blogging from here, recommended.

The best $7.99 you'll spend on OPML - Getting Acquainted with OPML

It's been widely reported, but google has a native not acquired roll your own search engine

In City Lights bookshop yesterday I picked up a copy of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences which includes the obvious but startling quote that all taxonomies are folksonomies.

Notes on Aza Raskin's Death of the Desktop

This model licence, part of the JISC Copyright toolbox, will enable authors to retain rights to self archive.

Microsoft and RSS: The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft catering to masses: "But most people still don't understand this remarkable technology, and Microsoft will finally take it mainstream — first with IE7, then with feeds in Vista and Office 2007." Reported from the Caffee Trieste in San Francisco - great coffee, free wi-fi, just around the corner from City Lights Bookshop.

Here is a roundup of UK Google Maps Mashups from Google Maps Mania

Om Malik/CNN: The Internet browser is the new OS - October 1, 2006

InFact Book Search - Top 10 - Search, explore and download free ebooks online

watching the web flow in with LiveMarks is quite hypnotic

Software projects and Ajax: some advice rom a reputable source.

How to: add an API

noted: "41.6 percent of retailers will incorporate blogs or RSS feeds into their holiday marketing strategy - and 79.5 percent will use viral marketing at social networking sites."

Does this interface remind you of anything?

Robert Cringely on the containerisation of computing power and an anecdote on the origin of Sun computers. With further detail from the CEO of Sun.

Ross Mayfield: SocialText Aims To Be Best Of Breed Office Software: "enterprise software incumbents will enter the market next year. For example Microsoft's Sharepoint will bundle in blogs and wikis and IBM Websphere will have wiki modules. But Ross' theory is that there are a number of 'best of breed' web applications that are well positioned to compete against the big companies.

SocialText itself is positioning itself as 'best of breed wiki application'. Other best of breed apps mentioned by Ross were SixApart (blogs) and Newsgator or Attensa (enterprise RSS). In contrast Sharepoint, said Ross, is a suite that is 'trying to be everything to everybody'. So he believes there is still room for best of breed web innovation."

GTD on a Mac: Kinkless

Office 2.0 - Scrybe offers advanced 'Office' functionality in a browser, but what sets it apart is its offline mode. EditGrid looks like a very effective browser based spreadsheet

Instructables: step by step collaboration

Peter Suber's Open Access News continues to be the best source of news on open access. His colours are pinned firmly to the mast, but the coverage is detailed, well-informed and wide-ranging. In the last day or so there is news that the US lawsuits by the Publishers Guild and McGraw Hill against Google have been merged, that Biomedcentral has strengthened its editorial staff; the University of Zurich is taking practical steps to helop implement Open Access; a report from the Open Scholarship conference in Glasgow; and notice of an article in Information Technology and Libraries which shows how short sighted the action against Google is. How else could anyone keep up with the newsflow on Open Access? By comparison, the coverage in a magazine like Information World Review looks slow and partial even though it has improved a lot recently.

These may be confusing times for identity management on the Web. The key to user centric identity management is owning a URL that is you. OpenID has this. But as this post shows, it's not the only game in town. This may help, and this by Kim Cameron is a founding document.

Michael Cross: "But this is not the time to stop the programme. We need a change of mood. Instead of trying to drive the whole English NHS, we should help self-selecting communities of organisations to be innovative islands of e-healthcare, and place more contracts with home-grown innovative companies."

Now online: The complete work of Charles Darwin

Internet Explorer 7 is out

The NLH funded Health Library and Information Service Directory, developed with the Health Libraries Grouyp and the Royal College of Nursing, is part of the National Library for Health middleware service. It will enable users to identify neighbourhood access points (also known as libraries)

Koha an Open Source Integrated Library System in use in parts of the NHS, has a new release.

From Very Short List: A world-changing, true-life medical mystery tale.

Slow knowledge: we are in the second National Knowledge Week for Breast Cancer. As part of the long term strategy of the National Library for Health, knowledge weeks provide an annual summary of what's usefully and reliably new. Unlike the supply side, which in various ways markets the idea of the breathless onward march of biomedical knowledge, the NLH proposition is that not much new knowledge of value will occur in any one year.

Microsoft Live Search has released some new advanced search operators, which I like. But you have to wonder if they will catch on.

Tony Hoare, a British scientist working for Microsoft, recently made a fellow of the Computer History Museum, on the requirements for treating software engineer as a mature discipline

Timo Hannay, Director of Web publishing at Nature, on making the most of the Web as a scientific communications medium

This reference to Amazon's ability to keep the joint running opens the door to a discussion on utility computing in healthcare.

how to: sync google calendar with your phone

Simp[ler than Ajax - Flapjax

Alf Eaton has created an authoring tool to convert PubMed IDs into Wikipedia fromat references

According to the Guardian newspaper, 6.6% of the public have used an RSS feed, and more than 2/3rds have tried some kind of digital activity. That's pretty impressive - soon one in ten people who use the Web will be using RSS.

Office 2.0 - The Esther Dyson comment is interesting, near-time is worth a look, and maybe wikiflow will become a word we start using. Lots of annotated links here. POdcasts here.

If you didn't get to the Office 2.0 conference the next best thing is to read the blogs

Reuters has opened an office in Second Life

I should have noted the passing of Enid Mumford. As a British woman working at a high level of distinction in IT she was noteworthy. She would have had a distinctive perspective on the National Programme for IT. Her book on Designing Human Systems is available online. In 1992 she gave me permission to use her questionnaire or a project I was doing to look at ways in which IT systems for physiotherapists at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol could be improved. When the head of physiotherapy saw the questionnaire she refused to let it be distributed.

Transorming the Web one Widget at a time.

Wild Apricot: Web 2.0 style CRM for non-profits.

Writely is now Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I've been using Writely for a few months. Now its had the Google makeover and it looks fine.

Will Google Office’s solution to the “offline” problem mean trouble for MS-Office? - a nod towards Dave Winer's local web server solution. (ie a web server installed on the local machine)

How to: Geotag your photos with Zonetag and Bluetooth GPS

DirectGov: little impact of an advertising campaign

Platform beats application: On-demand customer relationship management software firm salesforce.com has announced that it will make its Apex programming language and platform available to users and developers.

SingleFeed - gives sellers a simple way to surface their content in miltiple shops - "SingleFeed is an online, self-service, web application that empowers you with a simple way to perform data feed creation, management, submission, and optimization. No matter what level of experience you have with data feeds, we can save you time and money working with data feeds and the shopping comparison engines." But only in IE

On question answering facilities in search engines: "This is the first article in a four-part series on the special information sections creeping into general search results, usually at the very top of the search engine results page (SERP). Ask, featured in this article, has Smart Answers. In the next three installments, I will also introduce Yahoo! Shortcuts, Google Onebox results, and Microsoft's Instant Answers. These articles will be brief introductions to the services with a lot of examples for you to explore."

The electronic Journal of Health Informatics uses the Open Journal Systems platform.

Jeremy Zawodny: a list of Amazon S3 backup tools

Skype TV: "Kazaa and Skype have started accepting signups for a peer to peer video streaming service they say will deliver high quality full screen TV across the net."

Presentations from Beyond the OPAC : future directions for Web-based catalogues are now available in MP3 and Powerpoint format

Servers for Hire: an interview with Jeff Bezos on Amazon's approach to utility computing

Venture capitalists wish list, includesthis:

Patient Monitoring to Go

The Investor: Corey Mulloy, general partner, Highland Capital Partners

What he's backed: AccentCare, Archemix, Yoga Works

What he wants now: An engineering team to design implantable wireless devices capable of 24/7 patient and data monitoring for conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

Companies like Medtronic and Boston Scientific have multibillion-dollar R&D pipelines for medical devices but are increasingly finding it cheaper to simply acquire early-stage companies--so a startup need only get a product to an early testing stage, and can then let a bigger player worry about taking it commercial. Mulloy considers implantable hardware an ideal target market, since it can exploit recent advances in low-power wireless chipsets, materials, and microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS. A device designed to monitor a diabetic patient, for instance, might trigger a bedside alarm for spikes in blood sugar levels, send continuous data to a doctor, or both.

"HMOs are looking for ways to proactively manage individual diseases like congestive heart failure and diabetes," Mulloy says. "These kinds of devices take us toward that."

What he'll invest: $10 million over three years for a functioning prototype, software to manage wireless data, and early-stage trials

Send your pitch to: lmontilla@hcp.com. -- M.V.C.

Google Groups 3 beta at groups-beta.google.com

Health Wonk Review: Health Wonk Review is a biweekly compendium of the best of the health policy blogs. More than two dozen health policy, infrastructure, insurance, technology, and managed care bloggers participate by contributing their best recent blog postings to a roving digest, with each issue hosted at a different participant's blog. For participants, it's a way to network and share ideas, and for those readers who don't live in this space every day, it's a way to sample some of the latest thinking and the "best of the best."

Outsourcing analysis: "8 out of 10 organisations seek to renegotiate their outsourcing deal". "I would like to see a more widespread adoption of partnership style contracts. The IT and outsourcing industry is currently paying the price for taking advantage of naïve customers in earlier times. The customers then wised up and have sought very onerous contracts.

The problem with this hardball approach is that if there are initial problems with the project (almost inevitable) then the tough contracting method engages the wrong side of a commercial organisation to get things resolved. A supplier who has a financial upside to solve problems is much more effective than one that is worried about legal action. At some point the supplier will make a decision to walk away from the contract, this is not in the interests of either party as the NHS procurement team may have come to realise. A recent report published by OGC cites complaints about increasingly onerous terms and conditions that have caused many suppliers to be more selective about the projects they bid for and qualify out of others. I hope that these comments are taken on board and the market settles at a more reasonable position.

So what’s the answer?

Unsurprisingly there is no easy answer, although a good business plan for the project and decent due diligence are good starting points.

Another common trap to fall into is to fail to seek end user buy-in (particularly difficult in the public sector where there is more resistance to change). This criticism has been levied at the NHS project. However, if you believe the statistics, the single most effective thing that can be done to ensure success is investing in an end to end governance process, built into the contract and operated religiously with experienced people throughout."

share your slides in YouTube style

MultiMap 2.0 has good European coverage

Google: gadgets for web pages

Skype TV: "Kazaa and Skype have started accepting signups for a peer to peer video streaming service they say will deliver high quality full screen TV across the net."

A series of videod lectures about search from UC Berkeley

New York Review of Books has a review of recent books about Google

As Peter Suber notes: Today was a big day for a handful of OA policies

An overview of some of the advanced features of Windows Live Writer a browser based blog oriented word processor. Needs Windows XP and .Net Framework.

MPET in the news: "Mr Ribeiro's concerns came as the Council of Deans, which represents nursing and health faculties in higher education, warned that it too was seeing cuts of up to 30% in the MPET budget.

A crisis meeting held last week on the position of all 60 universities providing healthcare education heard that SHAs were on average providing funding for 10% fewer students, with reductions of up to 25% for individual universities in the east of England, London, south central and south-west SHA areas."