Good business advice from non-business books – why not?

The Economist has an interesting article in their Schumpeter column, 23rd January 2010 issue.

It began “Margaret Thatcher regarded Beatrix Potter’s “Ginger and Pickles” as the only business book worth reading”.  It then went on to cite other tales from Beatrix Potter which could also contain important business lessons.

Having read nearly all Beatrix Potter’s tales, without any danger of nodding off, I’ll venture that most business management books are far more soporific than these books (or lettuce: see Flopsy Bunnies).

In that case, let’s disrupt the world of business publishing.  If it’s possible to learn useful business lessons without wading into the plethora of business management tomes, what alternative books would we nominate and why?

After all, Lucy Kellaway, in her column for the Financial Times, has also written about “management tomes to make you groan” (Dec 21st 2009) in which she runs through nominations for the “bad business book award”.  This is not to say that all business books are useless of course, I think that would be a little unfair (although Mrs Thatcher may disagree)!

However, I’m going to continue the Beatrix Potter theme, and would like to start the running by nominating The Tailor of Gloucester (a personal favourite).  Business lessons:
- You won’t be able to do everything on your own all the time
- Having a loyal colleague – or colleagues -  is invaluable.
- Help can come from unexpected quarters and may even be of better quality than you could have managed in-house.
- Look after your health

What book would you suggest?

Life sciences online just got bigger

The well-known site UK PubMed Central has just gone beta with an expansion, becoming the UK’s largest free life sciences resource.

This is great news for supporters of the Open Access movement.  The new interface was developed by the British Library.  The press release explains that the new platform will enable researchers to:

• Conduct a full-text search of 1.7 million articles
• Access abstracts for over 19 million articles
• Exploit the scientific literature with innovative features which enrich abstracts and full-text articles by linking scientific terms to other sources of quality assured and useful information
• Search content not included in traditional journal literature – including clinical guidelines as well as other hard to find material such as PhD theses

The platform offers two search templates – Simple which is just one text box and Advanced which has search boxes for Title(s), Author(s), MESH terms, Journal as well as a General Query (= free text) box.   You can also select from a couple of Preferences.  One is for how your results are displayed – by date or relevance and the other is for selecting what collections to search across, the options are quite helpful, such as  “All Clinical Trials” or “UK Theses” and  I reckon the “Reviews” option will be very handy for me.  Unfortunately you can’t choose more that one document type, but being beta, they are keen for our feedback.

Other nice features (there are more):

• a journal index – it’s always useful to be able to see exactly what content there is, and this index also tells you how “open access” each journal is, plus there is a button beside each journal that you can click on if you’d like to search it.
• a grant lookup tool.  You can search by a list of funding bodies and also by keyword, project title, institution and grant ID.

All in all, I think this site is a real asset for life science research and will be very well used.

(Finally, I’m really sorry, but I accidentally deleted a couple of kind comments left by visitors to this blog, which is why they don’t appear anywhere!   I did read them and very much appreciated your feedback.  Thank you and many apologies.)

Want to know where to find digital books? This is the place

Here’s a resource which provides access to thousands of books in digital format.

Discover ebrary has been much talked about on the information professionals’  sites and email newsletters, and for some time, but as you may not receive those, you may not have heard of it.  Part of ebrary is aimed solely at the information profession, but there is also much of interest for the more general user – such as over 20,000 books, plus sheet music and maps.

To give you a flavour of the content, some categories with sample titles are presented on the right hand side of the screen, but rather than re-write what’s already been written on ebrary, I’ll refer you to Resource Shelf’s excellent and concise review: Resource of the Week.

Happy reading in 2010!

Very GeoScenic

Of course I’ll always recommend visiting the snowflake site at this time of year.  If you’re stuck for what to give someone, I can’t recommend enough a book of snowflakes from this site.  I was lucky enough to receive The Art of the Snowflake last Christmas.  It’s simply exquisite and very informative.

Anyway, this year I thought that the British Geological Survey’s OpenGeoscience site should also have a mention.  It’s getting a fair bit of publicity at the moment as they’ve just opened up a lot of images which can be used non-commercially.  You need to register, but it’s worth it.  Forget Bing’s daily picture for  a while, there’s a huge collection available for viewing here.

Ah, amazing world.  The world will be ok though, it’s humanity (along with a lot of wildlife) that’s at risk.  Hmmm, there we go, busy shooting ourselves in the feet.

Please visit these sites, pause, and reflect on your lifestyle, I’ll reflect on mine.  In so many ways, we’ve grown remote from the natural world, and I’d rather that the winters don’t get so mild in England that those wonderful snowflakes cease to visit the garden.

Season’s greetings.

Divide and conquer?

Currently search engines are centralised in a fairly small number of very large data centres.  This means that the a search engine’s indexing – which records the location and provides a relative importance to information on the web (and thus also to your search string) – is replicated within these data centres across several locations.  This also means that the results you get from a search in the UK won’t differ so very much from the results received by someone carrying out the same search in another country.

Replication is inefficient

Researchers at Yahoo have proposed that web searching could become much faster and more efficient if the search index and additional data were distributed around the world across a larger number of smaller data centres.  The authors suggest that overall search engine operating costs could be reduced by up to 15% without compromising the quality of the search results and should also speed up the search.

However, it would also mean that searches would become more localised so that the same search carried out in  different countries would yield a less duplicated set of results.  This is because most of your results would be coming from your friendly neighbourhood data centre.  To resolve this, the authors say that the data centres must be able to communicate with each other.  It is more complicated than that…of course.  If your search needs to go to more than one data centre, query processing will suffer from “latency”, i.e. a slight delay.

“Distributed architecture” for search engines has met with resistance in the past because people, on the whole, don’t like inconsistency and do like having just one place from which to search all the info. on the web.  Not that that happens in reality course, it’s just an illusion (ref. deep web/invisible web).

So that’s all very well, but the researchers are concerned about the future health of the mammoth data centres.  It looks as if data centres are moving towards a bursting-at-the-seams scenario.

The researchers presented their paper at the The 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management where, I gather, they were also awarded “best paper”.  Well done to them, after all, this approach won’t be implemented tomorrow, it’s far from simple, they’ve done a lot of mathematics and acknowledge that further work is needed, but as we’ll all notice if a data centre suddenly goes “pop!”, it’s good to know that the experts are working on some alternative options.

Fierce news is free news

It’s all down to Churchill evidently – the origin of the “fierce” name, that is.

Fierce markets has been providing sector-specific news for several years now, and they’re well worth signing up to if your interests lie in the medical/healthcare, telecom, IT or finance sectors.

They also offer events and webinars, but I know them best from their free email newsletters which have proved popular with my users.

A quick and cost-effective way to keep yourself up-to-speed across the above sectors in these straitened times.

And so it came to pass…into print

Having talked about the apparent efforts of digital information to look as much like print as possible in the last post, a satirical French website has decided to stop just pretending to look like print and actually launch a really-made-of-paper edition.  The Financial Times article described this move as “making a mockery of the newspaper industry’s dash for digital”.

I don’t really agree with that, I would like to think it will demonstrate that neither format has made the other obsolete and that as readers, we would still like to have the choice.

That’s my take on the customers’ view, but what’s the business case for doing this?

Unsurprisingly, the main reason seems to be financial.  It’s a familiar story with many online news sites: Bakchich has not been able to find a successful online business model.  Add to that the huge drop-off in advertising (which is often relied upon as the main revenue-earner) and you end up struggling.

By contrast, the business model for print is well-established: sell copies and make money.  However, the point that interested me most was the expectation that the quality of content will be higher due to lack of (digital) space – the print version will be only 20 pages long.  The editor, Nicolas Beau is quoted as suggesting that there will be a “qualitative leap” in the standard of writing and editing as they will need to be more selective.

Quality, or the lack of it, has been a constant criticism of web-based information.

Is it accurate?  All information literacy training urges students to check the source, the date, the author, apply common sense – are the facts corroborated anywhere else?

The other criticism I’ve seen, albeit less often, is slightly different.  The suggestion is that “more is less” – the sheer quantity means lower quality.  Anyone can publish now and “play at journalism”, and the web is becoming full of endless drivel as people spout on about this and that, just as they feel and no one’s bothering to edit themselves or be selective…and that it’s boring.  Twitter has been a prime candidate for this type of criticism.

Of course this is sometimes the case, but print isn’t immune from producing drivel either and I don’t think digital publishing, by default, should (or does) mean no editing or selectivity, often rather the reverse!  Surely editing is exactly what you have to do to compose those brief sentences on Twitter?  And the respected blogs tend to be subject-specific, which means being selective with the content.

I’d rather see the ability for everyone to have a go as a positive disruption within the world of publishing.  And it’s a great opportunity for all non-journalists to learn at least two new writing-skills: editing and selecting.

Flippin’ fast news

There’s a new service from Google called Fast Flip.  The aim is to more closely replicate how people flip through the news, so that we can “consume” news more quickly.   I feel a bout of indigestion coming on.

However, as we all know, delivering information effectively isn’t just about speed, it’s just as much about content and searchability.  It has Google’s search technology behind it and Fast Flip has some interesting content coverage – 30 providers so far ranging from the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Popular Mechanics and Technology Review to Elle, Fast Company and Goodhousekeeping.  Yes, well there should be something for everyone there!

Oh my, I’ve started laughing, why is this so funny?  Perhaps it’s the somewhat over-the-top,  over-keen description.  Hey folks, this is  “a new reading experience”! Is it?  Really?  The reading bit actually felt just the same to me, what’s new(-ish) is the presentation format.  I say “ish” because it’s not as if the screenshot format is a first-ever, check out Newseum.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting idea and progresses the move towards a more browsable interface – the screenshots of front pages give the user that “as originally printed” feel.  It will no doubt develop over the coming months and I expect it will be popular.  If it improves users’ ability to browse around or search and find specific news items that they want then it should be successful.   It may even help “boost the flagging fortunes of the news industry” as the BBC’s article notes.

The thing that strikes me most though,  is why this is not really a new reading experience.   It is the paradox of what is defined as innovative and progressive in electronic information provision.   I quote from the BBC article: “Fast Flip imitates a conventional print publication by offering screenshots of the web pages containing relevant articles.”

So, electronic information is shamelessly striving to become more and more like its print predecessor?  Interesting.  It’s been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, will it also turn out to be disruptive?

The 3rd-party purchaser as 2nd-class citizen?

Strange, but true: if you buy market data from a third party aggregator, almost all publishers will refuse to answer any queries you may have on their data you have bought.  However, if you buy data direct from the publisher, the publishers will then be happy to answer any questions you have about the data and will often let you speak to the report author too.

Why?  I spoke to Frost & Sullivan, a major player in the market research sector.

The short answer is: total loss of customer-interaction.  They don’t get to know who is buying their material.

The aggregator pays the publisher an upfront fee for permission to sell their data (and takes a percentage of this).  The publisher doesn’t like this lack of visibility.   Contrarily, you might think that the publishers are missing a trick here – why not then encourage these “remote purchasing” customers to ask questions as a neat way of finding out who has bought their data?

Well, no, it seems that the dislike of third-party purchase goes deeper.  In fact, ideally the publisher would rather you couldn’t buy any of their data through a third party.  It is seen as “detrimental to our whole interaction”.

So they turn their backs on you and sulk.  Or maybe they do have a case.  Let’s be balanced here.  Frost & Sullivan pointed out that you may well miss out on special offers and discounts that they could offer, suggestions of alternative reports, as well as advice and further explanation of the content.  As is so often said in the world of search skills (and it’s all too easily forgotten): there’s nothing like actually speaking to someone who knows.

Maybe the role of the third party aggregator will gradually change into being more of a search portal, from which the user then jumps direct to the publisher for purchases.   I’d certainly recommend that if you want to purchase a complete report, go direct to the publisher and get that after-sales advice…oh, and a discount of course!

Here are some market research publishers that allow you to buy their reports by-the-slice direct from them.  This isn’t an exhaustive list, and many other publishers are open to selling sections if you ask nicely.

Business Communications Company: Coverage: multi-sector

Freedonia: Coverage: multi-sector

Global Industry Analysts: Coverage: multi-sector

Kalorama: Coverage: multi-sector, but especially healthcare. Only older reports are available to buy by section.

Packaged Facts: Coverage: consumer markets

SBI Reports: Coverage: food service equipment industry

Aggregators:

Marketresearch.com, Mindbranch.com, ResearchandMarkets.com, MarketsandMarkets.com and Profound
MarketResearch’s database contains summaries and tables of contents and a “search inside the report” option with some of the reports. They bought Profound back in June 2007.
Mindbranch and ResearchandMarkets are two other major aggregators. The content on all three will overlap, but cross-searching can still usefully reveal different reports.
MarketsandMarkets.com seems to be the newest kid on the block and (I absolutely love these urls!) just sneaks my Market Reports Website Naming Competition prize, can’t you just hear them? “Oh for heavens sake, I give up let’s just call it…”

It’s trivial, but it’s making an important point

I’ve gained a new habit.  It’s ok, this one’s fine to share – I’ve taken to visiting Microsoft’s Bing just to have a look at the daily picture.

In addition to the scenic photo, you can click underneath and within the picture to get pop-up snippets of information about it, which also give you the option to click onwards for further information.

Perhaps it’s trivial, little more than window-dressing, but to me this pleasant offering is more than that.  It is an illustration of the ongoing struggle to create something new for the search engine to do.

To me it really does seem to be a bit of a struggle, because despite the myriad ways we have available to us by which to search for the information we want, in truth, the effectiveness and success of any search is still almost completely dependent on the skills of searcher.

Call it what you will: “information literacy” or being search-savvy, but it amounts to the same thing.  If you don’t use the right keywords, or don’t know where best to start your search, or  how to evaluate the results you are given, it is unlikely that you’ll be very happy with your findings.  Unless perhaps, you have hours and hours to spend trawling or unless – of course – you’re lucky.

And yes, there is an element of luck behind many a successful search.  Any search professional worth their salt should be humble enough to admit that.  I think Google understands this too, why else would they have their  “I’m feeling lucky” button?

Semantic searching, fuzzy logic, Bayesian analysis, natural language, voice, images and – my goodness – “ambient findability” have all entered the fray, but for the time being it still boils down to the same requirement:

Searcher know thy searching
It takes time to learn to search well, and you then need to continue teaching yourself.