The eResearch Australasia conference will be held in Sydney this year, from the 9 - 13 November 2009. This year's theme is No boundaries. The conference planners are seeking to engage conference participants by asking them, "What challenges are raised by a world with no boundaries? What potential can we unlock?" I am excited to be attending the conference to co-present with a number of seasoned

I was reviewing a collaborative site for scientists called My Experiment, when I stumbled upon Open ID, a distributed identity system that gives you single sign-on anywhere where Open ID is supported. Now I can use my single Open ID sign on to access web sites that support Open ID. Sign up is free and it is quite simple to do.

Have you ever worked your arse off on a document and then lose it due to some Microsoft file corruption nonsense? Did you try your best to recover it using the regular steps of searching your hard drive and temp files and as a last ditch effort, trying the recovery console options on your computer, with still no luck at recovering the file??? This scenario happened to me last Thursday. I lost

The recently published Congressional Research Services Report titled the Google Library Project: Is Digitisation for Purposes of Online Indexing Fair Use Under Copyright Law includes the following legal questions by legislative attorney Kate Manuel:Does an entity conducting an unauthorized digitization and indexing projectavoid committing copyright infringement by offering rights holders the

KM World's annual top 100 companies that matter in knowledge management was released yesterday. I find it gratifying that InMagic's Presto is included, considering those of us in the library and information management fields have recognised the potential in InMagic's indexing and knowledge sharing capabilities. Information solutions companies that specialise in InMagic implementation including

The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain, recently released the Ranking of World Repositories. The group provides detailed information on their ranking methodology, including the following criteria: Only repositories with an autonomous web domain or subdomain were included (

The Washington Post's Sunday edition (Oct 12, '08) includes a fascinating article on the last ten years of Google titled the Way we Webbed: A decade of Google. It highlights the challenges of archiving the web and mentions several organisations that have made capturing historical information on the web their primary purpose. All of us in the "information know" already use the Internet Archive for

A recent issue of the Weekend Australian includes an intriguing article on Google. Here's a link to a snippet from the article.

A recent article from Inside Higher Education discusses a joint study of the common misuse of scholarly citations. The authors of the scholarly paper, J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Malcolm Wright of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, expose the magnitude of "botched references" that are frequently cited in

CCau's national conference will be held in Brisbane next month on 24 June 2008. The theme, Building an Australasian Commons, "brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. It aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide. " The program

I attended the Janders Dean Law Firm Management Leaders Conference earlier this May. There were a lot of great speakers that day. The following people had the most impact on me:David Fitch, Director of Knowledge Management Simmons & Simmons , who commented on Global Trends & Challenges for the Modern KM Directors--Uses several outsourcing companies for a number of KM/IS/BD related functions.David

I was recently asked to investigate wiki software offerings, specifically focusing on the following features:Free vs. CommercialHosted vs. Locally SupportedWork flow IntegrationSecurity Used by Corporate and Legal Sectors.After no success at locating a relevant article on Lexis Nexis, I stumbled upon the WikiMatrix web site through a blog posting search. WikiMatrix is a super resource that offers

Okay, I admit it, I'm a QWeekend hornbag. This weekend's edition (April 19-20th- '08) features a nice round up of the top 40 blogs on the web. Gee, would you believe the folks at QWeekend decided to not post this article online yet? Hum, an article about online blogs not available online, how helpful! :O I'm not sure where their ratings came from, nevertheless, there are several that prove worthy

I normally don't comment about political issues on my blog unless it deals with the 1st amendment, privacy issues and freedom of information. I do want to spread a message of advocacy for Tibet. Tibet's struggle for freedom and China's blatant physical and psychological oppression to restrain the Tibetan people continues to be an outrage. Aussie PM Rudd will be visiting China soon, so don't delay

QWeekend, the Courier Mail's Saturday rag, reprinted an article that reports on the potential harm in the active participation of social networking sites. The original piece was published last month in the Independent, a U.K. paper. The authors highlight recent litigation involving harassment charges, defamation, privacy issues and even insurance claim legitimacy. The most disturbing for me is

Booktagger is another book sharing site on the web that was developed in Australia by a nice bloke named Jeremy LeBard. Jeremy designed Booktagger with the help of a biblio aficionado who was searching for an interactive place to share books with family and friends, without having to rely on the regular book o sphere sites (Amazon, Boarders, half.com, LibraryThing). It offers the familiar web 2.0

Looking for a free killer application on the web that enables you to download streaming videos directly from YouTube, Google Video and many media based sites and save them to your own PC? Check out KEEPVID. This nifty service also helps users convert Flash files to adaptable WMV and AVI. KEEPVID was masterly crafted by two media IT geniuses in Australia. For a review of the site, see this news

I attended the VALA Conference last week in Melbourne, Australia and was really impressed with the program offerings and the calibre of professional speakers that were represented. The conference planners did an exceptional job on selecting the most timely issues and trends facing both the Australian library & information management profession, and the solutions companies that continue to develop

The masters of vocabulary from the Macquarie Dictionary are conducting a survey to determine the top word for 2007. Interested in participating? Check out their site here and vote! Voting will close on January 31st and the winning word will be announced early February.My personal favourite found under the Fashion category is below...butt branoun Colloquial a garment worn as a support for the

I'm a music buff, and love listening to all kinds of stuff. Blues, Jazz, Soul, Alternative Country, Bluegrass and of course, Indie groups and singers. I used to subscribe to Pandora when it first arrived on the scene. However, due to licensing issues with the some of the big music recording industries, Pandora stopped offering their service to subscribers overseas. :( Big bummer, because I really