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.

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

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

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

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

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 bra noun 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

ZDNet's Education IT has an interesting posting concerning Copyright and Fair Use , as it pertains to the educational sector. Apparently many educators are unclear of what is acceptable to copy under fair use, especially when borrowing from digital materials. Confusing? Yes, indeed. Copyright has never been a straightforward law in the United States, and I find it just as perplexing in Australia.

The One Laptop Per Child Project launched the Give One Get One Campaign which you can buy a XO laptop for both yourself (or some child in your life) and a child in a developing country. Here are the details: Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a

This Saturday's QWeekend from the Courier Mail (Nov 10-11, 2007) includes an article about Google titled Bigger Brother, by writer John Arlidge. Sadly to say, the Courier Mail's Q Weekend did not provide the full version of the article online via their web site (don't you hate that), but I was able to find a similar version of the article via the web at the U.K. Times Online. A shout out to

Drop.io is a nifty site that lets anyone store and share photos, video, audio, notes, docs, etc. According to Drop.io, "each upload is accessible only to those whom you tell exactly where to look." Users can set their materials to expire after one day, one week, one month, six months or one year. Drop.io also provides settings for others to access your uploaded materials which includes view only,

The Washington Post reported today (Wednesday, October 24), that one-sixth (17%) of the books, monographs and bound periodicals are missing in action, due to flaws within the system. The Post's findings come from a March 2007 Report by the Library of Congress' Inspector General, which was highlighted during a U.S. Congressional hearing this week. The report mentions that areas in improvement are

This recently released memo from the Pew Internet Project based in the U.S. might be of interest to many of you. While it doesn't concentrate on Australian statistical analysis, it should provide everyone with a good idea on teens involvement with social networking sites and their contact with strangers in these online environments.

Can I tell you how useful Joel Oleson's blog on Sharepoint, SharePoint Land, has been to me these past several months? It's been instrumental in my personal knowledge of SharePoint services during the planned deployment of MOSS at my current place of work. Joel recently authored an incredible posting called SharePoint Deployment Essentials and Resources. It offers information on just about every

I was one of the lucky attendees who participated in yesterday's first Australian Blogging Conference, spearheaded by QUT's Faculty of Law and Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovations and Industries. Firstly, let me say that is was apparent that a lot of hard work and planning went into the event. Major kudos to Peter Black, the conference's coordinator, and all those involved in making the

I will be attending the Australian Blog Conference this Friday, at Queensland University of Technology's Kelvin Grove Campus. Peter Black, the Conference Coordinator, has published an official blog for the conference. The schedule and list of speakers have been finalised, and I'm looking forward to learning and sharing with other blog minded companions. :)

Okay, I have to admit that I'm not the most avid cricket fan yet. It's weird. Kind of like baseball, but only two bases, and talk about L O N G innings. The average cricket game can take all day! That gives the Aussies plenty of time to swig a few VBs. In honor of the Twenty20 world championship, the Google developer gurus put together a nifty search feature to pull up recent cricket scores.

Joel Oleson's most excellent SharePoint blog recently posted on Miami Dade Public School District's successful implementation of SharePoint school portals, which includes access for students, teachers, parents and school administrators. Microsoft provides a complete case study here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200967Three main implementations that are truly

I’ve been doing research on copyright as it pertains to the current licences that are used by Australian schools or educational-based organizations. Some of the major copyright related organisations that cover limited copying covered under the Australia Copyright Act include C.A.L. [Copyright Agency Limited], A.M.C.O.S. (Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society), ARIA (Australian Record

It's been quite awhile since I've last posted due to my excursion back home to the states for a 3+ week visit. But alas, I found an article discussing Google's searching capabilities in the Washington Post's Fast Forward Section, and thought it was worth a post on the old blog. Author Rob Pegararo offers a more than decent analysis on Google's search results performance. The two most relevant