In this way I can easily keep my “finger on the pulse” of a wide variety of communities - sure beats having to read dead-tree publications, go to conferences etc. Plus I get to do most of the skim-reading when on a plane, which turns out to be quite convenient.

RSS, Attention and Flocking Behaviour at D’Arcy Norman Dot Net: “Why scan so many feeds? To me, it’s about patterns. Keeping my peripheral vision (peripheral mind? is there such a thing?) pouring over more information than I could ever consciously absorb. And being able to pick up on subtle variations in the attention of the flock that I am a part of, as well as other related flocks.”

A very important point - almost all the analysis I’ve seen about ELN technologies is of the either/or variety, the truth is all successful ELN implementations involve a variety of technologies from a number of sources.

In the few cases where an organization has chosen to believe a vendor’s claim that they can provide everything, when you look at what happens on the ground, the end solution is still a series of integrated, complimentary tools from different sources. Interestingly, this is often done in an informal way and the ELN team may not even be aware of it.

Binary arguments are a useful analysis tool, but only that. For project implementation, better to recognize what’s going to happen anyway and run the project in a way that benefits from and supports diversity rather than constantly fight against the natural order of things.

Therefore, the major difference in worldview between open source advocates and proprietary software license advocates is explainable as a differing opinion on the correct value of the volatility of maintenance and upgrade pricing. People who believe that the pricing on maintenance is stable and unlikely to change see greater intrinsic value in the software. People who fear that the pricing is subject to large fluctuations see no intrinsic value in the up-front license; stripped of the options, the license value approaches $0.

For the open source movement, perhaps a better way to position the change that OSS is making is this: we’re converting warrants on future maintenance and enhancements into options, which means that instead of having a sole supplier (warrants), we have created a third-party market (options) of these derivatives.

What an interesting way to look at things…. and very powerful. What happens to Enterprise Software when purchasing departments begin to do these calculations?

I have a sense that the world of “managing large amounts of information to the benefit of lots of people” is rapidly changing. There are some traditional approaches which people are trying to implement in the ELN world which aren’t getting much leverage, and there are some newer (whackier) approaches coming from the Internet world which might prove to be very powerful in certain ELN applications.

What I do know is that users instinctively rebel against categorising their “stuff” too finely, so a lot of well-intentioned systems aren’t working as intended - not because they’re badly implemented, but because users don’t think like that (The “Toaster” problem rears it’s ugly head). At the same time, simple collaborative tools like del.icio.us and clones, together with the “Tagging” meme that’s going around at the moment, seem to be effortlessly sorting out something as messy as the Internet.

If you want to know more about del.icio.us then this screencast is a great introduction and is what gave me my “Ah hah!” moment.

Interestingly, I had written this entry and just went to John Udell’s blog to find the correct link to the screencast. Turns out his most recent entry is about Connotea, a del.icio.us-like service for the scientific community.

The WorldWideWeb is where Moore’s Law met Metcalfe’s Law. Information management - the way we find out what we want to know - went from hierarchical to flat in just a few years as a result. We now assume - usually correctly - that we can find any particular piece of data from a railroad schedule in Estonia to a quote by an Argentine novelist on the Web within minutes of wanting it….

…we all assumed that most people would approach information through the categories they assigned the information to….To put it mildly, we were all wrong!

People don’t think hierarchically - at least most people don’t. We think in terms of associations….

When we were working on our first ELN projects (in the Mid-90’s) categorization and hierarchy was on everyone’s mind. Before a scientist created an experiment we had them fill out all sorts of metadata about it, and we’d have day long meetings as part of the implementation where the records management, library services, IT, and the user representatives would thrash out what they needed to have for each project. We’d be trying to keep the amount of metadata down to a few elements (at some point the users just put anything into the field because they’ve had enough of filling in silly boxes) but there was still a huge amount of pressure. Then, once we’d figured out all the metadata, we’d get into yet more meetings about how the information should be presented. An awful lot of pain for everyone involved….

Fast forward to today. Our ELN can still capture and track metadata, and show the content of the system in different ways (e.g. you can drill down by project). But it is much less of “thing”. I guess it must come up only 50% of the time, and when it does they only really want a few items - generally, what they need to implement a records management process and maybe make the list of documents pretty. Sure, we’ve improved the product so the whole metadata issue is less hassle - we can now extract most of the metadata transparently rather than bugging the user, and we’ve got a more open framework to manage it. But even so, metadata is less on people’s minds.

I’m not saying metadata isn’t important, because it is. But is isn’t as big a thing as it was. Partly that’s because we’ve got better tools (primarily more CPU/Memory/DIsk), partly because we’re comfortable using Google and know that full text search really does work even on large bodies of content, but also because people realize that acquiring metadata isn’t cost-free. So the tradeoffs have changed - and most importantly, we’re all members of the Google generation.

The great thing is that ELNs are becoming much more lightweight. Less disruptive to the existing processes (but still delivering huge amounts of benefit), and cheaper/quicker to install too (because we’re not spending 2 days in meetings to figure out how to configure the thing).

Thanks Google