saraewood.com

Playing around with it. But only sorta.

“Le serveur à l’adresse www.swivel.com met trop de temps à répondre.”

Thanks to Robert Kosara for his post on eagereyes about Swivel – and it’s untimely demise. “The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com”

I left the following comment (my typos remain intact here):

“With any startup, there are ups and downs, small mistakes and big mistakes. I joined Swivel as VP & Chief Data Officer early on and was completely blown away by the talent and intelligence of the team and the vision of the founders – Brian Mulloy in particular. I think everyone involved truly had (and some still have, as I do) the strong belief that data and tools for understanding them are the next place for the web to have true impact.

I chalk a lot of the shortcomings of Swivel to timing, not lack of vision, interest by early-adopters, mass-market appeal or talent of the team. Web-based technologies needed to assemble complex interactions (but in a simple UI) for real-time data analysis are still maturing and people’s comfort level in sharing data on the web is still evolving as well (Particularly business or research data – this was before “in the cloud” was a phrase middle managers had ever heard of, and frankly are still afraid of. And last I checked, even tax-payer funded research data sets are pretty closely guarded).

I left Swivel to run Product at Flickr and am now overseeing Product strategy at PLoS, a non-profit dedicated to making more scientific and medical research open access with open data supporting it. Through Swivel I met an amazing community of like-minded folks (like the Robert, who runs this site) that, on a personal level, make Swivel a huge success for me. People with whom I hope to have healthy discussions into the distant future about the intersection of data, the web and the impact on society.”

I was a little late to the Old Spice party… but, I hope the Old Spice marketing people all got huge raises.

Goes something like this:

1. Make Old Spice commercial
2. Spawning Old Spice twitter stream.
3. Twitter users directing tweets to @OldSpice.
4. Old Spice commercial man responds on YouTube (in this case, to Ashton Kutcher).
5. Twitters about his new YouTube response.
6. Ensuing more discussion on Twitter where Twitter users send more tweets to @OldSpice.
7. And sometimes even on Reddit.
8. Or Facebook.
9. And also on media outlets.

Utterly brilliant.

Thank god for the Twitter Trending: Worldwide feature or I would have no idea what the modern male finds attractive. Or more interesting, unattractive. So much so, they are wiling to share it with the world. This is soul searching at its finest. Humanity, digging deep.

[nerd alert. super old content i found unpublished in the bowels of my word press install. given my new job, it is fun to think about this stuff again.]

Last week I had the pleasure to be invited by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers to speak about the future of publishing and what role data might play. The panel I was on was comprised of folks from Nature, Wiley-Blackwell (think, Dummies books and CliffNotes), the Royal Society of Chemistry and was chaired by Geoff Bilder of CrossRef.

Data plays an important role in the process of getting an article into a journal. It is the raw material from which researchers extract meaning and analyze their findings. But once the article has been written and the sources cited, that is normally the end of the road for the data so far as consumers of the information can see.

What normally happens then is that the people reading the article who want to explore the issue further embark on a laborious text mining exercise. They find the numbers among the prose so they can put them back together to have a look for themselves.

There are many obvious problems with this, not the least of which is that in an attempt to keep control of the data, the authors are essentially losing track of who might be doing what with it anyway. The integrity of the data is compromised due to invariable human-error in the extraction. And the sapling of exploration, innovation and derivative works is pruned before it has a chance to thrive.

While it will be a long time before both technology and attitudes change to the point that all raw data will be open and available, it is high time the derived data referenced in articles be made available to the people reading them.

There are around 20-25 thousand scholarly journals active today, and this is growing at a rate of 3 or 4% annually. Global journal readership is in the 10-15 million range, and about 6 million of those readers are also researchers and potential authors.

The number of scholars is trending similarly upward, fueled in large part by growing Chinese, Indian and other developing countries making massive investments in education, research and development.

In such an environment, how can we add to the experience for all key stakeholders: authors, readers, publishers?

Authors are motivated by a myriad of reasons. Top among them are recognition among peers and the need to publish (the old maxim “publish or perish” is as true today as it was 100 years ago). Including the data cited in their work will help engaged people quickly with their research and enable them to reach a wider audience – including people in other fields. Data becomes another work with ownership/stewardship for which authors and researchers would receive credit.

Readers of journals are motivated by the need to be kept informed. Clearly, trust in article findings is key. And if interests are piqued by the findings, they want to explore their own hypotheses. What better way to achieve trust, enable exploration and garner interest and good-will than to allow the reader to get in on the fun of analysis with real data?

Meanwhile, publishing companies are actively looking for new and innovative ways to engage both readers and authors, build brand loyalty and community, and generate income. Including data and interfaces by which to analyze it will open up many possible revenue opportunities while at the same time help build trust, further the open data agenda and, importantly, build a strong community of passionate users of their products.

New tools in distributing and sharing data will only make journals more accessible, which in turn will make knowledge more accessible while still continuing to enrich the experience of authors, publishers, and readers. I am happy that publishers are thinking about these kinds of problems and exploring solutions.