Is Yahoo! shutting down Del.icio.us?

We use Del.icio.us for social bookmarking and have been fans for some time - but the rumours have been rife about whether Yahoo! will be shutting it down.

This excellent post from Alexia Tsotsis has an update from the Delicious blog, saying:

“No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.”

Good news.

Enterprise Search – panacea or pain?

Search can be seen by many as the answer to all of our information retrieval problems, but I have always thought that it depends how it is applied – one of my favourite phrases is: “rubbish in, rubbish out”. Search is only any good if it is pointing at good content, and it intelligently utilises what is known about both the documents and the searcher.
An excellent post by Venkatesh Rao this week focused my mind on this issue once again.

There has been much discussion on search over the years, some good points can even be found in the posts advertising search software. Such as this; “The Business Value of Enterprise Search 2009 A review of cost effective solutions for managers” advocating Oracle, which has the line: “A common flaw in the use of information search technologies is overconfidence in the results”.

I have always been enticed by semantic searching, and again there is a lot on this topic out there. Pandia Search Central is a an interesting one to follow, and they review their chosen top 5 semantic search.

An interesting concept that turns traditional search on its head is that of document comparison - computational forensic linguistics. If document comparison was used to search a quality data set, the results are far more accurate and relevant than traditional search technologies.

CFL Software Ltd is one company exploiting this in many different contexts. One great application has been in a music site, Slicethepie. The latest innovation is “SoundOut Search” which enables users to search a music catalogue using what ever snippet of information they have.

Top KM books and guidance

Reading around a topic is something that I always find helpful when getting to grips with that subject, and KM has no shortage of good books and articles to stimulate those thoughts and plans.
A recent discussion on LinkedIn asked for peoples thoughts on “must have” KM books, with some interesting results.

There are many blogs and websites with good recommendations, such as David Skyrme’s site and the Knoco site with many books, articles and white papers. David Gurteen also lists his top ten KM books and I am sure that there are many others.

The comments on that LinkedIn discussion brought some recommendations that I have not found so far, such as Nick Milton’s suggestion:

Nancy Dixon's "Common Knowledge"
Melissie Rumizen, "The Complete Idiot's guide to KM"

Together with a lot of the well thumbed texts that I have enjoyed so far, such as:

Learning to Fly by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell 2004, and Working Knowledge by Thomas H Davenport and Larry Prusak, 2000.

The only problem is making the time to read them all!

Complinet to be bought

Another online publisher is going to become part of Thomson Reuters; Complinet mainly provides compliance data for financial institutions and the acquisition will add to the Thomson Reuters compliance offering.

Complinet was one of the few choices other than Thomson’s or Reed Elsevier as a possible resource to help with the inceasing need of compliance checks.


The Thomson Reuter press release describes the move as something that will “further Thomson Reuters vision to provide end-to-end financial service compliance solutions”.


Less choice in the market?

Digital copyright rumbles on

At a time when News International are trying to extract as much commercial value as possible from their newspapers by removing them from aggregators, James Murdoch has criticised the British Library over the BL’s plans to digitise the national newspaper collection.

Murdoch’s argument is that public bodies should not decide how copyrighted material is exploited for commercial gain – his concern is presumably loss of revenue for News International, rather than access to information for the general public.

The British Library has announced that it is digitising a large chunk of the national newspaper collection archive. The partnership between the British Library and a company called “Brightsolid” will enable the digitisation of 4 million pages of newspapers over the first two years in a ten year agreement.

It is hoped that “in-copyright” content can be scanned in the future after negotiation with rightsholders. This archive would only be available online as a fee paying service, but it will be available online for the first time, increasing access to the material and helping to safeguard the content of this collection for the future.

Times and Sunday Times still available to Law Firms via LexisNexis

Bob De Laney, Director, News & Business at LexisNexis has confirmed that LexisNexis have successfully negotiated continued access for law firms to News International content via their services:

“Further to our previous communication, I’m writing to let you know that we have finalised a contract with News International to maintain content from The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World on our services. Not only will this new agreement ensure your continued access to these key UK newspapers, but it will also deliver two improvements to your service:

• Content will start to be delivered earlier in the day, enabling you to pick up coverage at 9:00am rather than noon

• As News International begins to add more “website-only” content to its online offer, this content will also become available to Nexis customers, later in 2010."

KM reference material

Some great guidance and introduction to KM techniques and tools have now been brought together within a KM reference section on the Knoco website, free of charge.

With helpful introductions to KM processes, KM roles and structures, KM technologies and KM governance, these are excellent guides created by Nick Milton and Knoco.

The Knoco website already provides some great Knoco white papers, guidance documents, newsletters and details of workshops. http://www.knoco.com/