Alan Moore knows the score on Thing 4

An excellent outing last night to the British Library for the latest talk accompanying the Out of this world exhibition.  A nice illustration of the benefits of CPD – I was looking around the BL site for upcoming events for the CILIP in London Google Calendar of interesting stuff in London (fancy contributing? get in touch) just when they were adding the events listing.  The result was myself and a mate were in a packed crowd for Alan Moore in conversation with Stewart Lee.  I suspect tickets would not have come my way if I had heard about it through slower channels.

It was a fascinating discussion ranging across scifi, science, religion, technology, genre, labels and who can remember what else.

There were demonstrations of IP red in tooth and claw – for example why some comic books are movies and others are not.  And how clashes over IP have impacted on the quality of writing in comics.  Alan Moore apparently gets no money from the sale of V for Vendetta Merchandise – but does get an enormous sense of personal well being from seeing them at demonstrations around the world (DC less so – apparently we won’t be getting any more V movies as a result).

Moore takes an interesting position on technology being extremely interested and reading widely about it but largely refusing to adopt it.  He no longer has a television since they dropped the analog signal in Northampton, refuses to have a mobile and has no email address.

There was a fab quote from Stewart Lee “what is twitter if not voluntary surveillance” that gave me a wry chuckle thinking of all the people who might be signing up for CPD23 over this week.  I originally joined Twitter as part of my involvement in the CILIP Defining our Professional Future exercise so I must be slightly past my one year of involvement.  I do find it useful (as well as entertaining) but access at work is limited which prevents me integrating it into the flow of my day in the way I might like.  I recently signed up for TweetyMail that has helped with some of the link sharing issues caused by using Twitter predominantly via Snaptu.

RSS is not a new thing for me.  I had a long love affair with Bloglines that I used for a good six years and I have commented already about my current RSS consumption.

I was surprised to find that I was able to get Pushnote installed on my work computer.  I say installed as I am struggling to decide if it is working or not.  I follow a fair few people on Twitter but there is little sign of them being involved in this and I cannot really see the point.  I do not seem to be alone in this based on peoples tweets.  Maybe a use will become apparent.

You can find some other Alan Moore & Stewart Lee footage on the web.  At the time of writing there a still tickets available for R.U.R. on the 6th of July – it has been a brilliant series of events.

Rumours of my death – CPD23 thing 3

I am lucky enough to have a fairly unusual first name second name combination.  There are no movie stars cluttering up mentions of my name online (Brenda Fricker used to be good for telephone spelling requests but her departure from Casualty has resulted in a notable reduction in the population wide knowledge of how to spell Fricker).  The first ten hits on Google are mostly related to me with my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Biog from HLG conference included.  The notable false drop is the other main Alan Fricker on the web.  An environmentalist in New Zealand his death was the first thing a Google Alert I set up ever told me about my name (the perils of vanity test searches).  The other major false drop is from Facebook.  This Blog shows up on the second page of results (as does Movember from last year).  Not much of a surprise to me are a few Jiscmail mentions as I have long been active on these.  I would suggest this is actually part of my personal brand – active.

Generally I have been happy to put my own name to my activity online (also shortened versions as my name is distinct enough for people in my sector to recognise me).  My main blogging outlet being a group blog is an issue for personal brand. Indeed the lack of a clear personal brand was one of the issues picked up when myself and Hanna Lewin spoke at HLG Conference in Salford about the group blog experience.  It is notable also that people really struggle with the blog name (and that the “what’s an informaticist” page gets lots of hits!).  I did have an experimental blog for some KM learning which could be revived.  A long with my own name I have been happy enough to use my own picture (mucked about with of late as result of trying out an online tool). I can understand why some might shy away from using their picture though.

I think the professional is personal and my communication online reflects this.  I think about what I do / professional issues a fair bit and this comes out.  Twitter encourages the blurring of the line but I share considerably less there than I might with colleagues in the office.  I also like to show off pictures of pies.

I think my online brand is fairly consistent with offline which is a good thing to my way of thinking.  I probably should have a personal blog rather than the confusion of this group blog but I like it here.

Personal brand. I hate to say it, but it’s important

I’ve always disliked the term “personal branding”; it sounds, well, very impersonal, really. Makes me think of the Prisoner: “I am not a number, I am a free man” and all that kind of nonsense.  Heavens, people have charisma, personality, charm…, not branding! No, I’d decided, nothing to do with me, thanks.

But then I read somewhere, and I really can’t remember where (isn’t that terribly rude, not to link to your sources? Oh well) that it’s useful to think of your brand not in terms of what cut of suit you like to wear, or scent you care to sport, but rather as what comes up when someone puts your name into Google (I should point out here that “other search engines are available”). Now I’m sorry to say that if you put my name into Google I don’t even make it onto the front page of results. Oh dear. I do though have a couple of entries in results 11 to 20. My Linked in profile comes up, which I’m quite chuffed about as I only put it in recently, as does my Bazian (my company) bio. If you put in me + health or me + bazian then you get more hits about me (as opposed to Alan Lovell the actor, or the CEO of Jarvis etc), and I have to admit that I’m relieved that my Twitter page rarely pops up, as that’s pretty pathetic really (I should either start tweeting properly, lock it, or delete it).

But it has made me think. If at work or indeed in my personal life I come across a new person that I might have some interest in, the first thing I do is Google them. And I think nowadays we all do this – it’s second nature. While it may be argued by some that we don’t really have much control over what comes up about us in Google (or Ask, Bing, Yahoo etc) I think that on the contrary we do – we can do search engine optimization of our own pages, e.g. on Linked In or perhaps on our institution’s site, or we can start our own blog or a static webpage with a personal/professional statement as necessary. We might not like it, but for many people in our professional life their first contact with us will be through a computer screen, and not in real life; and as we all know, first impressions count.

So I still might not like the term “personal brand”, but I do think we have to acknowledge that our “online” self is important, both personally and, particularly, professionally. My online self is not the same as me, therefore terms such as “charisma” or “personality” won’t cut the mustard. For example, next time I go for a job, the interviewers are bound to Google me. I need to take control of the information they’ll find about me. You’ll need to do the same.

(the) health informaticist now on Twitter

Yes, we’re really motoring now and part of the social revolution. (the) health informaticist has joined Twitter and hopefully, with a little bit of luck, this story will automatically get posted to our new page – I’m just so looking forward to clicking “publish” to find out if it works or not. Do please follow us. No really, please…

*update 30 secs later*

It worked!

Scientific publishing will be here long after Facebook & Twitter

Hey, I found something on Twitter and thought I’d share it here. How’s that for a criteria of success? @WoodsieGirl, who herself found it through @bengoldacre, linked to a very interesting article by Michael Clarke on the Scholarly Kitchen entitled “Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?” It asks the very valid question that, given the world of web 1.0, let alone web 2.0, you’d surely have expcted expensive scholarly journals to have long since disappeared, and that instead scientists would be blogging or tweeting their results, or something. Many still predict it in fact, about how Facebook and Twitter will revolutionize scientific communication. But the web hasn’t changed anything yet, at least nothing substantial, so why do we expect any social networks to change the world of science now? Michael raises some very important points that, I think, go a long way towards explaining the longevity of the scientific publishing model, and no, peer-review isn’t one key among them. Take a look. It’s a good reminder of how technology will change nothing if the culture of a community ain’t interested…

Twitter, Tweetdeck and the attraction of cute apps

So I’ve decided to try twitting, in tweeter. I’ve not got anything to say and will have to decide at some point what I want to get out of tweeting. I mean, is it a way of allowing far off friends to keep a handle on what I’m doing (do they care), should it have a professional slant and try and get followers in the library world, or should I just try and entertain by offering wry, sidelong glances at the little follies of being a commuter in London. Not that I’ve necessarily the talent to do any of these things, but one needs a strategy however talented or talentless one is, doesn’t one? Still, my twitter user name is, rather originally I think, “alanlovell”: http://twitter.com/alanlovell.

Anyway, the point is that I’ve downloaded this smashing little app called TweetDeck. I suspect everyone knows about it, but in case you don’t it’s a nice little downloadable free program with a cute user interface that allows you to login, read, post etc tweets, in a much more manageable way than if you were doing it online via the Twitter website. It also allows you to do the same thing with Facebook. I’ve not liked logging into Facebook now for a long time, just because the whole thing seems messy and unsettling to the finer me. But now I can keep up with the singularly useless but occasionally amusing things a select group of my friends are getting up to; it’s the genuine social networking possibilities of Facebook without having to log and navigate through the flippin’ thing.

So that’s TweetDeck for you, and from looking around I see there are other cute apps out there for you if you’re a tweeter, such as Seesmic, Twittelator etc – for Windows, Macs, iPhones etc etc – and I do wonder, is it the cute apps that are the real attraction of Twitter? Maybe I’m just following the wrong people? Who should I be following, by the way? Any must reads in the information world? At the moment I’m following a few friends, some cricketers and cricket commentators, and the obvious ones such as David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, Jimmy Carr etc. I tried the Guardian for a while but just got bored with being sent links after links after links. I want to filter the information that gets to me, not just find another route through which I can get drowned by it.

Well, anyway, happy new 2010 all. I’ll try and blog a bit more this year (been a very poor few months – work has, honestly, been very busy…).

p.s. is there a way we can set up an ‘auto-updated’ (the) health informaticist twitter account one wonders? Hmm?

Real time searching

Google now includes real time searching and I recently came across a Phil Bradley presentation that include this as well. Could this be useful for health information? I find Twitter search useful to keep up to date in my field and as I’m working for an organisation who are affected by political fluctuations then Tweetminster may be useful too.  Searchengineland looked at where the results are coming from and there is ambiguity as to whether there are fees involved in appearing in a search but this is in fact aggregated search and not real time search and Google has developed  social search for Twitter Google Experimental Labs  whereby when you search for things you can see who in your social circle has written about it, sort of like a search within your followers or facebook friends. I can definitely see real time search being useful when tracking drugs in development or seeing what patients think of a treatment. It’s just the next stage of the semantic web…

Usefulness of social networking for scientists: greatly exaggerated?

A study of research patterns in life scientists found that (duh) they all have different patterns of accessing information. Of course we knew this, or at least suspected it, but I can’t help but be pleased that the British Library found space for this news on its Press Room page.  It shores up the notion that libraries and ‘resource centres’ need to be flexible with different users.

“Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources.” Yes they do-another reason why perhaps an information professional must inject themselves into the teams with which they work, rather than sideline themselves. Depending on how an organisation is set up, this can be quite natural and easy (if one’s desk is ‘integrated’ into the team area, for example, as proximity tends to predict positive regard) or difficult, if the information team is isolated or in a ‘bricks and mortar’ library away from the clients.

I thought it interesting that the report highlighted that social networking tools (blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking, etc) had not proven terribly appealing to life scientists.  The full report elaborates that, firstly, “there is not the critical mass of individuals using such services to make it worthwhile” to use them to “enhance research”. Secondly, and I almost choked while reading this, “the time required in order to become a proficient user is prohibitive.” Don’t give me that. These are highly trained people who, as it says in the next sentence, may use “grid technologies” and “an intricate array of analytical tools” in their day to day work.

What do you think about the ‘not enough time’ to learn simple, user friendly web-based software argument?

I really think that the report should have written: “the scientists can’t be bothered with this social networking stuff because of general complacency and then notion that Twitter and the like will only be around for a few years before we get something new, so, again, why bother?”

Nor is this attitude unique to the life sciences. I know someone very influential, at a Canadian charity, who is crying out to use Twitter for fundraising and marketing. But she is sadly also ‘too busy’.

In other news, the “Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has acknowledged that social media has contributed significantly to the income it has raised for its current appeal. In the first week of the DEC’s appeal for Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, over £3 million was donated,” mainly via the BBC website, Twitter and Facebook.

A spokesperson from the DEC said “the biggest risk we faced was not that we might make a mistake [with using Twitter], it was that we would miss a chance to help save more lives.”

Check out #casestudieslife on Twitter to contribute to the discussion about how researchers use and access information (or not!).

Woofer: Twitter for the verbose

Did you know that there is a Twitter clone out there called Woofer that forces you to write 1400 character plus updates? It doesn’t surprise me that Twitter alternatives are popping up, given the notoriety of Twitter (I would say ‘success’ but some of you will undoubtedly disagree with me). But what is surprising is that anybody could possibly need this bloated number of characters to impart their wisdom to the woofersphere. And be forced to a large, and arbitrary, minimum.

I have no desire to read reams of text in a update format, especially when there is no pressure to at least try to be grammatical and eloquent, as there might be in a blog.

I do like the idea of ‘woofing’ instead of tweeting. Perhaps there should be a halfway house (of ‘meowing’? ‘neighing’?) that gives you 200-250 characters as a maximum?

I agree with Mashable on this one-Woofer appears to be a joke.

Clinical Reader: Malicious or just stupid?

I’d never heard of Hanlon’s razor before. Apparently it is an adage that reads “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. I rather like that; I’ll have to remember it. It is a nice way to look at the world, as we can all be stupid sometimes. Take for example the new company Clinical Reader. The company has an online product that basically seems to be an RSS reader but that they decide which RSS feeds they’re going to track, not you. I came across it a few days ago as some clinicians were discussing what a good service it was on some mailing list. Well, I thought, that’s clinicians for you. The product didn’t seem bad enough to comment on, but likewise certainly didn’t seem interesting enough to comment on either – at least not from my point of view. So I thought to myself “well, our handsome and fragrant readership will probably come across it soon enough, and they can make their own perfectly balanced minds up about it…”, and left it there.

But today I see another twist on the Clinical Reader story, and what happens when you get involved in social networking tools without really knowing what you’re doing. The thing was that Nicole Dettmar (evidently a fan of The Prisoner) had pointed out in her blog that Clinical Reader were implying that they had been awarded ‘five stars’ by institutions such as the British Library, the NLM, Imperial College, The Lancet etc. She pointed out to them on Twitter than the NLM does not endorse anything, and that they ought to do something about it, and promptly received a reply threatening legal action (I love the use of ‘kindly’):

I mean to say, what a stupid (or malicious) thing to do. Of course everyone picked up on it and they received a barrage of tweets and blog commentary. As of writing they have since backed down, which they should do because they are plainly in the wrong, saying “We are keen to engage the twitter community the tweet made by a junior member of the team was poor judgment”. However the “five stars according to…” graphic remains throughout their site once you get past the first page.

Malicious or stupid? You decide. Either way it doesn’t reflect well on Clinical Reader.