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Not specifically publishing-related, but here is a fun rant interview with Alan Kay titled The PC Must Be Revamped—Now. My favorite bit… “…in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It’s unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn’t anything to learn from the past, so most people haven’t gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought.

Update: All apologies to Google. Apparently this was a problem at our end which our IT folks are currently investigating. (And I thought it was just me. 🙂 Just managed to get this page: _“Google Error We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon.

The info registry has now added in the InChI namespace (see registry entry here) which now means that chemical compounds identified by InChIs (IUPAC‘s International Chemical Identifiers) are expressible in URI form and thus amenable to many Web-based description technologies that use URI as the means to identify objects, e.g. XLink, RDF, etc. As an example, the InChI identifier for naphthalene is InChI=1/C10H8/c1-2-6-10-8-4-3-7-9(10)5-1/h1-8H and can now be legitimately expressed in URI form as

Rob Cornelius has a practical little demo of using Yahoo! pipes against some Ingenta feeds. Like Tony, I keep experiencing speed/stability problems while accessing pipes so I haven’t yet become a crack-pipes-head.

Jon Udell interviews Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, see his blog entry: “A conversation with Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving”. The podcast of the interview is available here. Interesting to see these kind of subjects beginning to be covered by a respected technology writer like Jon. As he says in his post: “I have ventured into this confusing landscape because I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with — persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis — are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals.

From the OASIS Press Release: “Boston, MA, USA; 13 February 2007 — OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved version 1.1 of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.”

February 5, 2007, Washington DC Crossref invited a number of people to attend an information gathering session on the topic of Author IDs. The purpose of the meeting was to determine: About whether there is an industry need for a central or federated contributor id registry; whether Crossref should have a role in creating such a registry; how to proceed in a way that builds upon existing systems and standards.

Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Identity Czar and member of the Identity Gang, comments on Microsoft’s announcement that they will support OpenID. Another sign that federated identity schemes are gaining traction and OpenID is likely to emerge as a standard the publishers are going to want to grapple with soon. This follows Doc Searl’s comments on the notion of “Creator Relationship Management” where he speculates that the techniques being used in federated identity schemes and the Creative Commons can be combined to create a new “silo-free” value chain amongst creators, producers and distributors.

Niall Kennedy has a post about the newly released Yahoo! Pipes. As he says: “Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr.” He also warns about possible implications for web publishers: “Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content.

Sam Ruby responds to Brian Kelly’s post about the RSS Validator and its treatment of RSS 1.0, or rather, RSS 1.0 modules. As Ruby notes: “There is no question that RSS 1.0 is widely deployed. RSS 1.0 has a minimal core. The validation for that core is pretty solid.” Not sure if I’d seen that RSS comparison table before, but it is reassuring. (Oh, and see the really simple case off to the right.