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NEWS FEATURES
Scholarly research has come a long way since the days of poring over stacks at the library, and search engine companies are beginning to explore the particular opportunities within academic research. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most venerated American institutes of higher learning, made its own foray into the search market with DSpace, a joint project with Hewlett-Packard that was first launched in 2002. DSpace is open-source software designed to assist colleges and universities in creating, managing, and maintaining digital repositories. There are currently about 125 schools using this software, but no tool existed that enabled searching across repositories instead of just within them. Enter Google into DSpace.
When Doyal Bryant recently took over as CEO of Market Central, Inc., a CRM portal company, he realized that he’d inherited a diamond in the rough. This particular gem was an “intent-based” deductive search engine that was “just sitting there” within the company languishing, according to Bryant. Just released to the general market, this gem has been dubbed SourceWare Search, and with the release, he’s anxious to see if it shines. The company has begun selling licenses and believes the product will appeal to both the commercial and enterprise markets.
Trials of a national identity card system in the United Kingdom are producing some mixed results as well as some protests from privacy advocates, but will likely get more testing as well as continued support from government officials, according to industry analysts.
The BBC recently launched a trial program called BBC Backstage that allows developers to use some BBC content free of charge for non-commercial purposes. The BBC hopes the program encourages creativity and produces interesting ways to use its content in the same spirit in which Google and Amazon (and others) have opened up their application program interfaces (APIs) to developers.
Ofcom, the regulatory agency for the U.K. communications industries, has proposed a universal content tagging system, according to a consultation document on their Web site. Although this is still very much at the preliminary stage, one of the goals of the proposal is to provide a way to label content that might be offensive or inappropriate, ostensibly to protect young people using electronic media.
It’s enterprise everything these days. With the exception of gadgets, start big and get bigger seems to be the American way. But Macromedia took a different approach with its products from the start. It focused first on the single user with a need to create an attractive site. Then, with its Contribute product, Macromedia stepped up its offerings to teams and small businesses that wanted to more easily create and update site content. A few weeks ago, the company officially tossed its hat into the enterprise ring with the introduction of its Macromedia Web Publishing System. As much a strategy as a solution, the System combines new versions of Contribute and FlashPaper with Studio MX 2004, and adds Macromedia Contribute Publishing Services to unify and empower the suite to scale up to meet the needs of organization-wide deployments.
Ever wish that you could know the temperature outside without having to read any numbers? Are you the type of person who can’t resist going online every five minutes to check the price of your Ebay auction or your stock portfolio? Well a company called Ambient Devices is designing with you in mind.
FEATURED STORIES
It would seem that traditional publishers have much to teach other types of organizations about the digital content mantra: Create once, use many. And what better way to use a CMS than to channel content into multiple outlets, allowing an initial expense to yield multiple revenue streams. But in reality, are traditional media companies deploying content management systems?
The Adobe PDF has become the de facto standard for distributing documents on the Web. Yet the story can’t simply end there, can it? Surely technology must find a way for digital publishing to evolve, and, in fact, there are a number of competing and complementary technologies on the market that push the digital delivery methodology well beyond the elementary PDF.
Disagreement in understanding can make a big difference in the end result of an IT project. In a discussion involving data, the terms content management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, and even enterprise resources management may be bandied about almost interchangeably. In business, things can get tricky surprisingly fast if the meaning of certain terms isn’t clear to everyone.
COLUMNS
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FACES OF ECONTENT
"I'm upping thr skill quotient of our end users."
PRODUCT REVIEWS
We take a look at two desktop search tools: Onfolio provides a quick way to organize material from a variety of sources, take notes and gather data, then generate reports to share with others. The Lycos toolbar allows you to search for a variety of materials all from one convenient location.
PROFILES
Stanford founded HighWire Press to address a growing concern within academia that scientific societies and not-for-profit publishers would, individually, lack the resources and expertise to remain competitive in the Internet era.
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