Micro web services

Intresting to see the equivalent of a microformat - ControlC: Turning Cut & Paste Into A Web Service - is a micro web service, which does interesting things with one tiny activity.

Google Search

I think it can be said that I'm a Google fan-boy. I like their approach; I can see the links with Otlet and La Fontaine; I like the challenge they've laid down to librarians.

I see from my Google history that I use Google a lot - sometimes over 150 times a day - just in the course of work or home life. So anyway, they do search right, and e-mail, and calendaring, and Picassa, and Reader. But Orkut and Open Social? And Checkout? And Base? And Google Health? - hope that's more interesting than it looks. Google Experimental Search is about changing the user experience when results pages come in.

Using your social graph to improve search results

Delver Comes Out Of Stealth With a New Twist on Social Search
- one to watch, or at least an idea to watch. Delver uses the shape of your social presence on the Web to tailor search results.

Facebook Extends Platform to the Web - The Unofficial Facebook Blog

Unofficial Facebook Blog: Facebook Extends Platform to the Web

Wales urges librarians to help build better Wikipedia - Information World Review

Jimmy Wales in Information World Review: “Librarians are not engaging with the Academies”

Packaged apps

Dave Winer Scripting News: 1/22/2008 makes a point about the next stage in the evolution of packaged applications in a piece about transferring costs from infrastructure to content creators. We agree with this!:

"The next step after that will be packaged applications that deploy through Amazon that you can buy for shrinkwrap prices. Yesterday I downloaded a Jabber server from Jive Software. Nice, but it would be so much nicer if, instead of installing as an app that runs on one of my machines, it deployed to run on one of Amazon's. If would take care of backing itself up, controllable through a web interface of course, to S3. Give me a small, simple desktop app that burns a DVD of my data, so I can have something local to put in the safe deposit box, guarding against the possibility that Amazon goes away or S3 loses data. This is so rational, we have to be going in this direction. When we do, it'll mean that the magic of the backroom scaling expert will become a commodity you can buy cheap. Another priesthood goes poof."

ProQuest gets a search widget

Makes sense - hope it works well. Here are the details

Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

Some more information on Blogger Becoming an OpenID Provider

Teclast M30 OLED - you will want this!

for $80 - that's an interesting price - Teclast M30 | OLED-Info

From OED to RSS via RDF

ACM Queue A Conversation with Tim Bray: Searching for ways to tame the world’s vast stores of information.

This is an old interview but full of interest, including the moment at which the OED might have become Wikipedia, and a note on what Udi Manber did before he was Googled.

Google goes OpenID Via Blogger

Makes sense - Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger . So now (or soon) you can use your blogger ID as an Open ID. Will Google allow Blogger (or other) Open IDs instead of Google IDs?

Stockport Primary Care Trust loses 4,000 patient records on memory stick

Can this really be true? Stockport Primary Care Trust loses 4,000 patient records on memory stick

"The Google Generation"?

Is it something about the format that makes this report on the Google Generation and libraries difficult to read in depth? Perhaps it's that some of the language seems a bit stale - virtual libraries for example. The report makes the now familiar points that libraries need to clarify and simplify their offer, and get in the flow. Beyond that not a great deal.

OpenID 2.0 Triples Adoption With Yahoo Support

OpenID 2.0 Triples Adoption With Yahoo Support

Gartner on Project Management

Planview - Blogs - Enterprise Navigator: "Supporting discussion implicates the heavy emphasis placed on traditional canned project management approaches as complicit in creating over-engineered processes and templates in lieu of cultivating real expertise that actually improves project performance."

Library of Congress Flickr experiment

Nice to see the Library of Congress using Flickr to enable users to enrich its collection: Flickr: Photos from The Library of Congress

On shared services in the NHS

Public Accounts Committee 12th December 2007 Uncorrected Evidence 90: "Q10 Chairman: Peter Coates, how can you expect NHS bodies of the type we were looking at yesterday to sign up to shared services when you yourself will not make that commitment?

Mr Coates: We are making that commitment. SBS currently have a proposal with the Department of Health to move across to shared services and we expect to sign a contract in the near future.

Q11 Chairman: It rather begs the question - and by the way the reference to this is paragraph 2.17 - why have you not done so up to now?

Mr Coates: Because the Department of Health decided they wanted to design bespoke system based on Oracle ---

Q12 Chairman: Please speak a little louder, I am having difficulty hearing what you are saying.

Mr Coates: The Department of Health decided that they wanted a new bespoke system to move across to Shared Business Services to maintain once they had built the system, and that took some time. There was transparent discussion between SBS and the Department and that has now come to an end and we are now discussing final terms, et cetera.

Q13 Chairman: So the industrial-capacity, bespoke Oracle system that we were shown yesterday, and we were given various assurances about, was not good enough for your purposes; is that right?

Mr Coates: For the Department's purposes they want

ed some refinements in it that Xansa, who support the Oracle software at SBS, could not offer.

Q14 Chairman: What could they not offer? After all, they are dealing already with a very complex system, I do not know how many trusts they are dealing with so why could they not deal with your organisation?

Mr Coates: It was to do with the report writing software. I am not familiar with the detail, I am afraid.

Q15 Chairman: Is there anybody in this room who could tell me?

Mr Coates: I can offer you a note on it by all means.

Q16 Chairman: Do you not think it might have been useful for you to have briefed yourself before you came to this Committee so you could have told us? It is a fairly obvious question. Have you got an official behind you, perhaps they can help us? We do not mind who answers these questions.

Mr Coates: I have got nobody from the Department here with me.

Q17 Chairman: Okay, do a note for us then.

"

Sun acquires MySQL

Worth noting: Sun acquires MySQL Although MySQL is just an open source database it is the database inside YouTube an some other Web 2.0 giants. Interesting to watch this develop over the next year.

Has anybody seen someone else's medical record

Dr Amir Hannan, a GP from Hyde in Cheshire, advocating the use of personal health records.

NISO to Develop Standard Identification for Institutions - National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

NISO to Develop Standard Identification for Institutions
useful but how soon?

Google, IBM and VeriSign in talks to join OpenID

Techcrunch UK is reporting Google, IBM and VeriSign in talks to join OpenID
There have been lots of 2008 will be the year of X articles. I hope its the year of The Internet Identity Layer.

Sharing Medical Records

Last week I asked my GP Practice for a opy of my medical record. The request is currently with the practice manager and I will update the blog when I have news.

IT's alive!

Nicholas Carr: "If we look at the end game - a decade or two down the road for big companies; sooner for smaller ones - it's hard to imagine that the 'IT department' as we've come to know it will still exist."

Semantic web inaction

The recent article on the semantic web in Scientific American (paywall) lacks a sense of the real. Will the hip-hop community spend time 'agree[ing] on common schemes for representing information they care about'? I don't see this happening. FOAF? I remember rushing out and creating a FOAF file years ago, and nothing nothing happened as a result. But exposure on the non-semantic Facebook has led to a few real world FOAF experiences. And no mention in the article of OpenSocial of Facebook markup language or OpenID. Whatev er their limitations they are part of the environment. Is DOI really a tagging system? Linking schemas? Anyone who has tried to knows how difficult this is - see UMLS. The problems of cross-schema mapping don't go away in the semantic web. Same with decision support. The eBay example is pretty much possible now without the support of RDF. I searched Google for 'sitcoms set in New York' and got back a pretty comprehensive listing via the NY Times. (3rd result in my list)

At almost every turn the argument either unintentionally highlights the obstacles to progress or glosses over the modest advances being made in the non semantic messy-web. There are signs though of semantic web enthusiasts coming to terms with modest real world advances and my 131 cents worth is that the vision set out in the original Scientific American article will be achieved quicker if the high ground is abandoned: later Wittgenstein not early Wittgenstein.

Building services with Amazon S3, EC2 and OpenID

Morph helpME is using Amazon S3 and EC2 to "streamline the way you publish and present visually appealing help and training sites that can be accessed anytime and anywhere
via the web. Morph helpME automatically formats, structures and creates menus,
enabling faster deployment of new content."

Sign up options include OpenID

Virtually in Manchester