Radio's rough edges remain a key issue, something of a barrier to uptake. Radio has been percolating for more than a year, flushing out hundreds of exciting capabilities, most delivered simply and explosively.
If it was my product (and it's not), my knee-jerk reaction: bring in a usability SWAT team to do their thing. Persona casting and profiling, task analysis, trials, measurement, design feedback, user experience patterns and an experience style guide.
Double user success on the top 100 tasks:
open up new markets,
cut supports costs, and
makes the overall product more attractive to developers.
Stuart L. Weibel, "Scholarly Publishing on the World Wide Web," Journal of Library Administration, 34, 1/2 (2001) pp. 73-80. Only this abstract is free online: "The explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is due in part to the ease with which information can be made available to Web users. The simplicity of HTML and HTTP servers lowers the barriers to network publishing." [FOS News] What do you think? [] links to this post 11:23:19 PM
Just thought I'd post this, for the record... the response makes very relevant observations.
"I just completed by doctorate in physics, and thought I'd share some thoughts, as to why blogs dont necessarily work as well in mathematics oriented fields such as physics, math, chemistry, but ought to do much better in 'text' oriented fields such as biology and social sciences."
An interesting take on the question "What do people want?" I particularly like the observations that
'We see young people who are flowing between TV and the Web almost seamlessly, finding new ways of getting what they want, going to what they want when they want it,' said Betsy Frank, executive vice president for research and planning at MTV Networks. 'That's what the Web has taught them — you don't have to sit around for something you're not interested in.'
'You'd go on AOL and there'd be a pitch to subscribe to a magazine, but that's almost like the broadcast TV model where you'd turn on the set and there'd be whatever the programmers wanted to send you,' Ms. Frank said. 'This is an audience that wants to make their own schedules....'
"The media that Time Warner does," he said, "is very good at satisfying generic interests but isn't good at satisfying each individual's very unique, specific interest.' " [The New York Times]
SPARC released this white paper today. It's an informed, well-thought out strategy document. From the Executive Summary:
Institutional repositories-used in this paper to mean digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community-provide a compelling response to two strategic issues facing academic institutions. Such repositories:
Provide a critical component in reforming the system of scholarly communication-a component that expands access to research, reasserts control over scholarship by the academy, increases competition and reduces the monopoly power of journals, and brings economic relief and heightened relevance to the institutions and libraries that support them; and
Have the potential to serve as tangible indicators of a university's quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution's visibility, status, and public value.
Here are a few nuggets I extracted from this document:
The National Academy of Sciences has agreed to hold the meeting proposed recently by Ronald Atlas, president of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The meeting will address the question whether information that might be useful to terrorists should be deleted from research articles before publication (either by authors or editors). Atlas posed the question to the NAS when he noticed that many authors submitting papers to ASM journals were asking to withhold information that might create security risks. While Atlas believes the question should be discussed, he opposes this kind of self-censorship, fearing that it will lead to incomplete research results that cannot be replicated. [FOS News] What do you think? [] links to this post 5:23:18 PM
If you're a researcher or a student, think how great it would be to be able to read and search all of the scientific literature online. No more trips to the library! If you're an author of research papers, think how many more readers (and thus impact) you could have if anyone could have unrestricted access to your papers online. In some disciplines (e.g. physics) this is already the case, thanks to sites like arXiv.org, but in other disciplines researchers are still giving up their right to make their papers available online. As a result, knowledge flows less and less easily because publishers impose access restrictions. As the number of journals (and their price) increases, libraries are going through what is called the scholarly communication crisis - they have to cancel subscriptions. Definitely not a good thing.
Freeing the literature is an achievable goal - it only requires that researchers be made aware of the possibility. So if you support free online access to the scientific and scholarly journal literature, please read and sign on to the Budapest initiative and, most of all, spread the word.
Here's a quote from the text of the initiative:
For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.
To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies.
K-Logs are a close fit to the academic culture. Here are ten reasons why.
Scholars value knowledge. They have a lot of it to manage and track.
A scholar's professional survival depends on name recognition. A K-log can help provide visibility and recognition.
Scholars are used to writing; most of them can write well.
Scholars are geographically disparate. They need to nurture relationships with people that they seldom meet in person.
Scholars need to interlink in a person-to-person fashion (see Interlinktual)
Scholars already rely heavily on interpersonal trust and direct communication to determine what new stuff is worth looking at. Such filtering is one of the central functions weblog communities excel at.
For many scholars, the best collaborations come about when they find someone who shares their values and goals (this is argued e.g. in section 3 of Phil Agre's excellent Networking on the Network). The personal output that is reflected in one's weblog makes it much easier to check for such a match than work that is published through other channels.
Scholars recognize the value of serendipity. Serendipity can come pretty quickly through weblogging; see Manufactured Serendipity.
Every scholar must strive to be a knowledge hub in his niche, and an expert in related areas. A K-log is a good medium for this, as it is a way of letting knowledge flow through you while adding your personal spin.
Scholars pride themselves on being independent thinkers. K-logs epitomize independent thought.
The above points hold whatever the field of inquiry. Actually they are some of the reasons why researchers created the Internet and the Web in the first place. Weblogs, as an evolved, living form of web home pages, simply increase the incentive to get involved.
However a number of issues might cause resistance to the adoption of weblogs by academics:
It takes time.
"The technology is not well-established and tested at this point."
Many people don't like being among the first ones doing something.
Not all scholars are used to the Web and hypertext.
Shyness and fear of public mistakes. Many scholars won't write unless they have to. They may especially be reluctant to publicly expose ideas that they haven't tested.
Fear that someone else will pick up their ideas and work them out before they do.
This being said, a few researchers have dared to start weblogging. The best list I have found is compiled by Jill Walker: Research Blogs. See also the interesting article Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as a Research Tool by Mortensen and Walker.
(I intend to continue building the case in this wiki page as more ideas and links come by)
