The Web Fills Up = Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Demonstrating that Aristotle’s assertion “Nature abhors a vacuum” applies even to online resources, a recent report from WebSiteOptimization.com illustrates how Web 2.0 has created enough content and interactions to begin to fill the capacity generated by broadband access. Yet, broadband […]

A Twitter Experiment

Life is an approximation of reality. What we know and what is possible are two different things. Experiments help test and bridge the gap. With that spirit, I’m experimenting on this blog with Twitter now. You can find a link […]

Rockefeller Press Policy Leaves Open Questions

This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but of interest to scholarly publishers, and I found myself doing a lot of thinking and digging about this for some reason. The announcement by Rockefeller Press that they will leave copyright […]

SUSHI — Raw Data Gets Sliced and Served

SUSHI (the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) was launched in 2005, and is now well on its way to becoming a NISO standard. A new article in Learned Publishing by Oliver Pesch from EBSCO outlines the history, purpose, workings, and […]

ShopText Melds Magazines With Digital

Image via Wikipedia Hearst Magazines recently announced it’s rolling out ShopText, a system that uses text messaging to link print products with online. Readers of print can text a keyword to a number, and receive samples, buy products, or access […]

Is Twitter’s Hockey Stick Meaningful?

While it may be a fluke, it may be meaningful that, as Hitwise notes, Twitter has hit the hockey stick in growth, a tipping point of adoption and use that may herald a more mainstream place for the micro-blogging platform.: […]

Wikidemia — Scholarship and the Internet

“Wikidemia” is a term I hadn’t heard before I read this very interesting roundtable discussion from the UPenn Department of Romance Languages. At the heart of the discussion is the notion that scholarship without the Internet and its collaborative tools […]

Exploit Your Cognitive Surplus!

Image via Wikipedia One question I’ve been asked consistently since I’ve started writing this blog for the SSP is, “How do you find the time?” In some cases, it’s said with wonder. In some cases, it’s stated with what I […]

Web 2.0 — The Vital Echo Chamber

Skeptics keep you honest, and should be celebrated. A skeptic about Web 2.0 is David Crotty, author of the Cold Spring Harbor Protocols blog “Benchmarks.” In a recent post, he pointed me to a review of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes […]

Free and Not Free: The $500K iPod

Last week, I wrote about the new “racetrack memory” described in a recent Science paper. The commercial application of such high-capacity devices naturally falls toward high-demand media like music and movies. An interesting tangent of this is that while the […]

Fed Up, Librarians Feed the Patrons

In a display of customer-centric thinking, librarians are allowing food in their buildings and even introducing cafes, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. As libraries change, they are catering more to their customers. Taking down the […]

Is the Age of Anti-Plagiarism Software Upon Us?

Last Friday, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about the emerging anti-plagiarism software marketplace, with CrossRef’s CrossCheck spotlighted. It’s a good story that broadens nicely upon the CrossCheck angle. Defining plagiarism is potentially fraught with difficulty, but it […]