The “h-index”: An Objective Mismeasure?
A “mystical belief” in simple math and hard numbers like the h-index can mislead smart people.
The Future That Never Was
For a lighthearted and informative time, I’d recommend a visit to Paleo-Future, a blog providing “A Look Into the Future That Never Was.” Does this look like a city near you? At Paleo-Future, you’ll see predictions from Criswell, drawings of […]
OA Author’s Fund — 1% Solution, 99% Ideology
We are seeing a publishing model that has roots in cold, hard currency transformed into an idolatry of ideology.
Britannica’s Tepid Move
Image via Wikipedia Forgive me, but I think the recent news that the Encyclopedia Britannica is adopting a modified Wiki approach reveals not a brave embrace of new online realities, but rather a tepid response to the threat they are […]
The Syllabus — Key to Changing Student Research Behavior
Cornell initiative to develop information skills in the classroom. Is there an easy solution for the Google generation?
AP vs. Blogs: Spoiler Alert!
The AP is taking on blogs. They won’t win by fighting.
0 = Initiate Final Algorithm
You may have heard of this elsewhere, a site called “You’ve Been Left Behind” (www.youvebeenleftbehind.com). It’s been created in anticipation of the Rapture. The site will store many megabytes of documents and send these materials under certain conditions to up […]
Applications, Not Publications
Don’t develop publications, develop applications!
Alex Wright on “The Web Time Forgot”
If you attended the keynote for the SSP’s 2008 Annual Meeting, you heard Alex Wright of the New York Times give a fascinating talk about Paul Otlet. Now, in an article in the Times, Alex drills down into some of […]
The End of Returns
NPR report: The practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold books back to the publisher may be nearing an end.
Information Overload = Too Much Dog Food
An old Silicon Valley maxim exhorts technology firms to “eat their own dog food” (aka, use their own technology). Now they’ve realized they’re eating too much. And so are we.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nope!
In the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr writes that the Internet is making us stupid. Could it actually make us smarter?
Read at Work — Clever, Clever, Clever!
Thanks to a Twitter from Jill O’Neill, I was introduced to a very clever little gimmick that turns out to be more than a gimmick. Read at Work is a parody of Windows that buries poems, novels, and satires in […]
Office 2007 and Web 2.0 Expo
Over the last year, Microsoft has really engaged with the STM publishing community and has been maintaining a steady dialog on how they can help publishers start to use OOML and the OpenXML (DOCX) format. I had the honor of […]
Open Access 2.0: When Free Gets Expensive
Joe Esposito’s new article in the Journal of Electronic Publishing is not your typical Open Access diatribe loosely held together with non-sequiturs, nor is it a pronouncement of how-we-done-good in our company/library. It is a cogent argument based on the economic theory of attention.