rel SD Cool Stuff

SD Cool Stuff

Where ScienceDirect staff shares cool stuff that they bump into...

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Bye and not bye

OK, so we had to put this blog behind bars, and that's what we did: it's now on

www.sciencedirectly.com

You can only get there from within the Elsevier IP ranges. If you are SURE you are within the IP range but can't get in, it might be that I haven't added your IP address to the safe list. Drop me a line and I will take care of it.

Update your feedreader to use http://www.sciencedirectly.com/atom.xml

See ya there!

posted by Ale @ 3/15/2006 11:44:00 PM 3 comments

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Potpourri

Quick wrapup of today's noticables:

- Nature adds bookmarking and tagging to institutional repository software.
- Some guys did DIY book publishing and sold 1,750 copies of a $19 PDF book in ONE day. And it's not even saucy, fictional stuff. It's a professional title.
- Still need to read this one in full, but it adds a nice ring to my first marketing classes at university.
- Not exactly our turf, but I like some of the ideas Dave Winer's voicing here.
- The head of MIT's media lab gets interviewed. Not a lot of meat there, but maybe a thing or two to look into.

posted by Ale @ 3/14/2006 11:42:00 PM 0 comments

Monday, March 13, 2006

Green folks

Google is targeting a new geographical market ;-).

posted by Ale @ 3/13/2006 02:08:00 PM 1 comments

Just ship it, too

I like this item on Rafael's blog (I like others as well, but this one was sooo striking... you SD people MUST know what I mean).

posted by Ale @ 3/13/2006 01:02:00 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Technology wins

Seth Godin to Google:

"Technology doesn't win. Technology gives you a shot at marketing."

...and:

"What happened is you made an audacious promise to people. You changed the way they interacted -- all day long when they're supposed to be working -- all day long when they're surfing, you changed their interaction. And that interaction made them care about your brand. And that means you have a platform to do some spectacular things. But if you blow it just a few times in a row, they won't care about Google anymore."

Probably worth a further read...

posted by Ale @ 3/07/2006 03:44:00 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 03, 2006

Reuter apparently gets it

Some big guy's thoughts on the attitude that incumbent media companies should take towards the apparent trends in online media.

posted by Ale @ 3/03/2006 07:23:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 02, 2006

BloggedBy

This is (conceptually) a big one: Blogs have their own version of CitedBy.

posted by Ale @ 3/02/2006 04:40:00 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 27, 2006

Brave New World

OK. My browser crashed while I was writing this entry, and I lost everything I had done. Autosave would have been nice... I hope G and M are thinking about that when they bring out their online Office things...

Anyway - I did some reading and browsing over the weekend, and besides Microsoft's upcoming announcement about their Windows Vista range, two things struck me.

Firstly, there was this nice article in Wired that basically re-iterates that we already know, or at least suspect: today's digitized workspace hasn't necessarily led to (perceived) increased productivity.

Secondly, there was a piece in NRC Handelsblad (Dutch newspaper) about EC's Barosso planning to establish a European Institute of Technology. The debate recorded in the piece seems illustrative of the EU's apparent struggle to keep up with the pace of technological development in the world surrounding it, and indeed provides ample food for thought and further discussion. However, one quote from the academic communicty stood out - I found it rather compelling, and even vaguely familiar:
"This is yet another top-down approach. [...] Brussels doesn't have the slightest idea about research, and about the areas where competitive research takes place."

I like that quote.

posted by Ale @ 2/27/2006 01:59:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Pages

Google just announced their PageCreator service. It's based on one's Gmail account; I tried to get access to the beta, but it was too busy - maybe later... but what this service is supposed to do, is allow people to build their web pages without any HTML knowledge. This means that it is expanding on their blogging service - for which Google has the blogger.com service we are using - but it is apparently not meant for full-fledged site design (yet). It seems to be taking on the earlier mentioned MSN Spaces.

These developments mean that...
a. traditional front-end programs like DreamWeaver and Frontpage get head-on competition from a web-based service,
b. even more Internet-dummies can create even more and better pages (... on Google- and MSN-controlled platforms!), and
c. traditional hosting services are increasingly pushed out of the market.

So, yet another step in Google's strategy to cut out the middleman, and get more content under their control...

posted by Ale @ 2/23/2006 06:18:00 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Nucleus

OK. So this is our first post - we're starting off a blog.

Or rather: starting a collection - a collection of ideas: things we stumble upon during our everyday job of keeping ScienceDirect up-and-running, thoughts and opinions we hear when talking to people out there, easter eggs we find when just browsing along on what is increasingly called Web 2.0 (whatever that may be).

We're not sure what this will grow into. There's about nine bad ideas for each not-so-bad one, and about nine not-so-bad-ones for each really good one, so let's see what group this falls into.

(I actually had to create a post first-thing, otherwise the blogger software wouldn't allow me to do live previews of template changes. But hey, blogger.com at least allows collaborative posting, which MSN Spaces doesn't... one-nill to Google).

posted by Anonymous @ 2/22/2006 11:29:00 PM 0 comments