Archive for the ‘Web 3.0’ Category

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I can’t resist commenting on BOOKS as we continue to skip down the yellow brick road to Web 2.0, Web 3.0 or whatever!

Here is an excellent visual list of the Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century. Needless to say, each tells a story - and the cultural shifts around some of them have been profound. Books still have a significant place in our world - and perhaps this is why they still figure in Web 2.0 developments to make books easily accessible to buy and read.

5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon provides an array of alternative visual search tools for….. well yes, for finding and buying good books. Very good read.

Developments in visual search tools seem to be gaining pace. You will be amazed at what is happening at Space Time, currently in Beta and only available on a PC. But what a WOW! way of searching “at the speed of thought”. “Watch as your information converges in one space at one time”.

But even more interesting for a library professional is the presentation about the Semantic MEDLINE Visualization Prototype which incorporates the semantic web and natural language processing - manipulating information as well as documents to respond to a searchers needs. It connects knowledge from various resources from PubMed and Medline - and natural language processing will summarize and produce a visual network or relationships between the material you are interested in.

A fascinating article by Michael Jensen from Chronicle Review, the Chronicle of Higher education, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority ( June 15, 2007), discusses scholarly communication now in the abundance of Web 2.0 information, and in a Web 3.0 era. Engaged participation online challenges the authority frameworks of print publishing processes, and opens the doors to authority mechanisms in Web 3.0 based on heavily computed reputation-and-authority metrics, using many of the kinds of elements now used, as well as on elements that can be computed only in an information-rich, user-engaged environment.

For universities, the challenge will be ensuring that scholars who are making more and more of their material available online will be fairly judged in hiring and promotion decisions. It will mean being open to the widening context in which scholarship is published, and it will mean that faculty members will have to take the time to learn about — and give credit for — the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

[From: Michael Habib]