A press release from ISYS Search Software tells me that its ISYS:web product for advanced intranet search is being implemented by Blue Cross Blue Shield Arizona, where it joins the ISYS:desktop product for desktop and network search. ISYS Search products were also recently added at the Branford (Conn) Police Department, the Colorado Bar Association, and Novelis. Just another indication of the growing importance of desktop search, which is the cover story for the March/April 2005 issue of ONLINE.

Like a good non-virtual conference, you don’t have to stay in one room and listen to the sessions. There’s the Cafe where sidebar discussions are taking place. There’s also a place where participant profiles are posted so you can sort of figure out who’s who. I suppose it’s equivalent to nametags in the physical world.

Next week the presentations begin. Two presenters that I know have already posted some comments about OSN05 to their respective blogs: Michael Stephens at Tame the Web and Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper.

Next week should be fun.

Lisa Kimball asked the OSN05 group to identify the key challenges for social networks. The ensuing discussion (which is still going on) honed in first on time and energy, then on trust. The trust issue manifested itself as identity (are you who you say you are?) and source validity and value (it wasn’t even a librarian who said that, but there were librarians who commented later).

There seems to be a certain glamour attached to communicating globally — it’s cool to network with people in other countries, on other continents, even if you’ve never been there. However, localization and actual f2f meetings have practical value.

The time issue has two components. One is “getting sucked into a rathole,” as Howard Rheingold put it — basically just spending way too much time online unproductively. The other revolves around how long it takes to learn new social networking tools. They need to be easier to use with a shorter learning curve. I loved Charles Cameron’s idea of doing “by mind” (rather than by hand) to discover what software should be doing. The discussion then went into some music analogies that essentially went over my head.

Imagine a conference that runs for 3 weeks! Can’t spend that much time away from home/work? No problem. This one’s on your desktop. The Online Social Networks 2005 (OSN2005) conference opened its virtual doors on Wednesday. The first week started with a keynote panel discussion from Howard Rheingold, Lisa Kimball, and Joi Ito, which was followed by an ongoing discussion by conference participants (I hate to say attendees as I would for a physical conference, because we’re not exactly attending anything) who are a truly international group. The first dozen responses to the keynote came from the U.S., Brazil, and Denmark. Although the conference organizer told me that over 300 people have signed up, the most I’ve seen online at one time has been somewhat over 50.

The themes I’ve picked up so far have to do with how large the online world has grown. There was a sense of nostalgia from both keynoters and participants, a longing for the “early days” (meaning the 1980s) when only a few people were online in a collaborative, social networking sense and everybody knew each other. Now there are more people and more diversity. It’s not the clubby, small band of like-minded technophiles it was.

I’ve heard the same from the pioneers of online search and information retrieval and they predate the 1980s. Note to self: Time to get over it.

As I wrote in yesterday’s NewsBreaks Dialog has split its business units between Thomson Legal & Regulatory and Thomson Scientific & HealthCare. Think of it as the “de-MAIDification” of the company formerly known as The Dialog Corporation when it was a freestanding company that traded on two stock exchanges. It’s my fervent hope that the Dialog Divide benefits the serious researchers who are the bread and butter of the Dialog/DataStar customer base, but shoving it further down the Thomson hierarchy isn’t as good a sign as I’d like to see.

A press release I received this morning from American Institute of Physics highlights a new trend that I’ve been peripherally aware of for some months now — publishers digitizing their entire archives. Yep, back to volume 1 number 1. The AIP announced it has put its 8 journal, over 50,000 article, backfile online. The oldest is Review of Scientific Instruments (1930). Two others, Journal of Applied Physics and The Journal of Chemical Physics also date back to the early 1930s. The “baby” of the bunch is Chaos, which started in 1991.

I said “online,” but I didn’t say free. Subscribers to AIP journals automatically receive a five year backfile, but must pay an additional fee for the full backfile.