Blue Insights unveils prototype platform for 'Social Discovery'

At the SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) conference in Boston the other week, I had the opportunity to catch up with Sharon Mombrú and Ammy Vogtlander of Blue Insights. They showed me a prototype of a new platform they’re developing that promises to bring together the functions of social networking sites with information sharing and organising services, for their newly-coined term 'social discovery'.

Societies will be able to use Blue Insights’ (as yet unnamed) platform to create a space for readers to store and selectively share documents with any number of self-created contact groups (networks). The Society also gets to promote their published content by making it as accessible as possible.

There will be some concern from publishers about the copyright implications of making articles so 'sharable' but sharing is simply a form of peer recommendation (like verbal, email) and content owners shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to leverage these endorsements as another form of promotion and distribution. Yes, a new way of thinking about business models will be required but it’s about time!

Just-In-Time Information

The Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) 30th Annual Conference on 28-30 May in Boston was a bit of an eye-opener. It was my first time in attendance and I definitely plan to go again next year.

The anniversary theme was "Empires of the Mind: Inventing the Future of Scholarly Publishing" and I thought it would be the usual discussion about and run-down of who's doing what with social media and blogging etc (and indeed these topics were prevalent) but it was MIT's presentation that really grabbed me.

Their plenary talk entitled "Just-In-Time Information" was delivered by Pattie Maes, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, who presented some of the experiments going on at the MIT Media Lab for integrating relevant information into our physical and personal context so that we do not need to interrupt our lives by using a mobile or laptop keyboard and browser.

One of the experiments, Reachmedia, involved wearing a bracelet or ring that would gather information from the objects we pick up in a shop via electronic ID tags in the product. This is what everybody was talking about at the Gala event to celebrate the Society's thirtieth anniversary.

I like that this conference brings real research developments together with the library and publishing communities, reminding us all what we're actually sharing/promoting/publishing information for and what technologies we should all be planning for in the future.