This is a very insightful entry by Michael Nielsen. Due to my bias, I had to immediately skip to Part II before i came back and read Part I. Some of the things i might question – Automatic spelling correct/relevancy ranking/alerting service, etc are indeed offered on Scopus. But whether they are good (I believe they are competitive) is certainly something the users will judge and Michael would qualify as one. I haven’t heard from any of the users i talked to that any of these feature are poor but again it could be my bias.
A great search engine for science: ISI’s Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s Scopus and Google Scholar are remarkable tools, but there’s still huge scope to extend and improve scientific search engines [6]. With a few exceptions, they don’t do even basic things like automatic spelling correction, good relevancy ranking of papers (preferably personalized), automated translation, or decent alerting services. They certainly don’t do more advanced things, like providing social features, or strong automated tools for data mining. Why not have a public API [7] so people can build their own applications to extract value out of the scientific literature? Imagine using techniques from machine learning to automatically identify underappreciated papers, or to identify emerging areas of study.
Sometimes the simplest of solutions can be most useful. For example, if you are out looking for a house and want to calculate how much mortgage you can afford, one simple solution would be look up a mortgage calculator online. I’ve used this tool from Bankrate in the past and found it useful.
Anyway – my point is – sometimes simple tools that focus on a niche area can be very helpful. We are always looking for the next killer app, the next ‘cool’ idea that will solve problems for a lot of people. While we’re trying to build that one solution fits all, we can often get lost in complexity.
Twitter, in my opinion, is a really simple app. I remember years ago, i built a silly little VB client app to post updates on tasks I was working on for this dot com startup. My team mates could also get on the same app running on their machines and post their updates. None of the updates were lost since we stored them in a central dB. Didn’t think too much of it and it got lost in time as we all moved on with our careers. Goodness me… if only I knew.
Here’s another example of a simple app that will have its uses. Kevin Marks is a former Google employee (Read news about his departure). Brilliant guy who worked on all kinds of stuff – Orkut, OpenSocial, Microformats, what have you. You can check out his blog (Epeus’ epigone) for more gory details.
A couple of days ago he put together this application in 12 hours. Amatwit. Using Amazon’s API and the Twitter’s API users can search Amazon for items (currently defaulting to books) and from the search results you can tweet links to those books. Nice.. simple.. useful.
Do you have any simple and useful solutions? Maybe you already have something and just don’t realize it.
Sometimes you spend time and resources building features into your product only to find that customers don’t notice it. It can be frustrating.
For the past 7 years i had been shopping at the local Walmart. I knew where everything was and in which aisle. I didn’t have to think too much about it. Quick zip in and zip out process… a guys dream.
So last week, they closed the local Walmart and opened a Super Walmart nearby. Oh the frustration trying to find things. I must have spent at least an extra 15 minutes trying to find what i wanted (time i could have spent lying around on my couch). I did notice one thing though… I found and bought products that i didn’t know existed or were even sold at Walmart. They’ve probably always been there but i never went to those sections or aisles. How about that?
So let me draw a parallel and deduce that every once a while, you need to shake things up with your product. Move things around so people spend just a tad bit more time on your website/product and they may notice features that were always there but hitherto did not notice.
Love this presentation from Judy Sims… Very nicely summarized at the end of her post and i’ve quoted below. There are specific themes I’ve take the liberty of highlighting below that traditional publishers need to pay attention to -
The economics of media have shifted. Scarcity and abundance have flipped. This has caused hyperdeflation in media value and the end of the blockbuster era. Hyperdeflation can be countered by creating snowballs. The old media blockbuster economy was built on exclusion. The new snowball economy will be built by being open to aggregators, micro-platforms and re-constructors and capitalizing on economies of distribution, coordination and production.
This part i really like
In media 2.0 there are 3 sources of value creation.
Revelation – what’s good. (My comment: includes anything that helps our users get what they want – links from competitors, blogs; anything relevant to users – we should provide it.)
Aggregation – bring elegant organization to the huge amount of data I’m exposed to and
Plasticity – let me get my hands on your content to see how I can add my own value to it. (My comment: i.e. via API, etc)
This new economy requires radically different product strategies: letting the outside in, curation rather than ownership, becoming a part of an ecosystem, moving from mass to vertical content and viewing the site as a service instead of a product.
So true. Its human nature… remember when we had to pay to have access to email?
Too much free
If you want to know who’s a newbie on a film set, just watch what happens at lunch. Major films have huge buffets laid out for cast and crew, and the newcomers can’t resist. It’s FREE! Over time, of course, the old-timers come to the conclusion that it’s just lunch, and the crew gets a bit more jaded and learns some self-restraint as well.
The first time a previously expensive good or service is made free, we’re drawn to it precisely because of the freeness. The fifth time or tenth time, not so much.
Free online has two distinct elements, then. Breakthrough free, like the first free ebook or the first free email service, and sample-this free, which decreases the cost of trial and lowers boundaries of the spread of an idea.
But they shouldn’t be confused. As the market for free gets more crowded, we’ll see more and more people promoting their free products, stuff that people used to have pay for. A complete shift from ‘you will pay’ to ‘it is free’ to ‘I will pay for ads to alert you it’s free’ to ultimately, ‘I will pay you to try it’.
Free by itself is no longer enough to guarantee much of anything.
Read the blog entry linked below… Some interesting points to note. Most of these are probably known but its good to hear it from somebody who has been in the field
Point 1:
“I can barely keep up with the literature in my field and with what my labmates are doing. Who has time to spend reading some grad student’s blog?”
The goal should be to create tools that save time and effort, not new ways of investing huge amounts of time and effort.
Point 2: Regarding use of online collaboration tool
1) Go to the computer, go to the Connotea site, sign up for a Connotea account, log-in, add the link to the paper that’s going to be discussed, add tags to the paper, e-mail those links out to members of the journal club. Members receive the e-mail, go to Connotea, create an account, log-in, go to the link they were sent, follow that link to the actual journal’s website, download the pdf, read, discuss.
2) Go to the computer, download the pdf for the paper, e-mail it to the members of the group, read, discuss.
You tell me which is a more efficient use of precious time.
Point 3: On leaving comments for articles published via collaboration site
there’s no incentive for leaving comments. Again, you’re dealing with a limited amount of time, so why spend it on something for which you receive no credit? Where’s the upside in leaving a comment on someone’s paper?
Point 4:
If you can make it easy for your readers to get the information they’re seeking (relevant to them), then you’re doing a high quality job for them, something they’re willing to pay for, even when there are free sources of less-well-organized information available.
Point 5:
most Web 2.0 sites aren’t useful until they’ve got a high level of participation. If the users are creating content, no users = no content. If there’s no content, no users are going to bother participating, rinse, lather, repeat, the circle goes around and around.
Point 6:
This becomes even further burdened by the proliferation of “me too” sites. Here you see nine different sites that all serve similar purposes. If I have limited time and each site requires a substantial time investment, how am I going to choose which one I’ll use when they all offer essentially the same thing? What happens instead is that most people choose not to choose and sit things out until a clear winner emerges. For those who do pick a site, the site they’ve chosen is only one of many, so it sees less traffic than if there were fewer available, which means less content, which means it’s less useful.
Point 7:
if I’ve already got a way to do something, it’s going to take a lot to make me change to a new way.
If you want me to switch, you have to not just be better, you have to be way better for me to make that effort.
Point 8:
Usability is often a huge barrier preventing new users from jumping in. Your tool has to be obvious, not only why you would use it, but how you would use it.
There are several other points… but here’s the final summary
So i was in New York this week attending requirements training from EBG Consulting. It was quite different from the ones i’ve been to before. The focus was more on how to elicit (instead of gather) requirements using various models, tools and techniques. Pretty good stuff.
I think we inherently use some of the models without giving it too much thought but its good to put some formal process/methodology around it. All good…
The question i have in my mind is… what happens when i get back to work and start “eliciting” requirements? Will i use these models? Or will I simply continue doing what i was doing before? I would like to think that I will use some of them. For example, I can see myself doing the stakeholder categorization like i usually do. To add to that i will probably list features. The features combined with stakeholder analysis, i can see myself doing some form of event response analysis to quickly capture requirement one liners.
Now lets see… what i would i do to build on that? I can see myself picking some pieces of events and building a data model around some of the information but that seems like a stretch right now. If all i was expected to do is capture the user level interaction requirements – I don’t see the need to do this.
We already have schemas that describe the data. We have databases that have models. So that leaves us with only new content types that need some modeling. I don’t see me doing much of that. I totally agree that data is key to everything but I think I just talked myself into keeping this at lower priority for now.
So… will having event responses based on interviewing stakeholders be sufficient? I can see me doing some process maps and state diagrams to understand some specifics by doodling on the wall or something… but i don’t see me documenting any of this. More on this later.
About the trip – New York was great. Was sick for the first couple of days so i stayed in the hotel but last night i walked all the way to Time Square, tonight was out walking around. Its always great to be here for a visit. I can’t see myself living here but who knows what the future brings.
Alright that’s it for now. I’m excited to be heading home back to wife and kids tomorrow.
