I am Adriana Cronin-Lukas, and apart from being a self-style blog guru, I am also an Online Information Conference committee member, assisting with putting together the session on wikis, blogs and RSS. 

Whether you work in a corporate or academic institution, ignoring blogs is missing out on the most dynamic development online these days. As with most new phenomena, blogging can be both confusing and exciting. I believe that there are tremendous benefits and opportunities in applying these new tools to businesses. And this is what we try to convey in the sessions in the Wikis, Blogs and RSS track and why we dedicated the whole day to it. The aim is to get you up to speed with these rapidly evolving tools and technologies as well as understand what all this fuss is about.

The speakers have been selected to cover a wide range of implications of blogging on business and other institutions. They are all practising what they preach and find it very easy to talk about their expertise, which in many cases started as a hobby. They all got swept up in the versatility and empowerment of blogging, wiki and RSS technologies and cannot imagine their professional lives without it.

I’m especially looking forward to the opening session ‘Evolution of Wikis’ where I’m moderating and get to put Jimmy Wales – founder of Wikipedia - under the spotlight!  This is a rare opportunity to hear Jimmy speak in Europe and apart from hearing about Wikipedia, we will hear more about what lies ahead in Social Web and the implications for information professionals. 

Loic Le Meur a French blogger and a representative of Six Apart - the leading blog software platform vendor - moderates the session ‘Wikis and blogs in corporate and academic institutions’. It focuses on interesting case studies such as the student blogs at Warwick University that have been leading the way in academic blogging and Neil McIntosh from The Guardian who has been using blogs to create new relationships with Publishers.

Later on in the day, do not miss the presentation from IBM ‘Using RSS feeds to provide dynamic content’ and Fergus Burns from Nooked will answer your questions about RSS feeds.  The day closes with a panel with experts from Nooked, Six Apart, Yahoo! and PubSub who will debate and discuss the pros and cons of tools available for monitoring and mining the blogosphere.   

Finally, if you have any questions about blogging and the sessions, please do not hesitate to contact me [adriana@bigblog.net] and/or look me up at the conference. I look forward to seeing you there.

Many thanks to those of you who commented on my earlier posting about desktop search and to those of you who emailed me privately. Your feedback is very helpful. A couple of people have asked me to explain what desktop search does. Put very simply, it searches for information and files on your desktop PC. You download a program to your machine, tell it what to index and set it going. The first time it runs, it does take a while to index your files. These may include cached web pages, word documents, emails, audio, video, IM, PDF etc. depending on the desktop search you choose and the settings you stipulate. Some programs combine desktop with web search.

The types of files indexed by these programs varies and, for those of us using non-Microsoft programs, support for applications such as Open Office/Star Office, Thunderbird and Firefox is an important factor.  But there are other criteria and features and I shall be covering some of these in my presentation.

So why not use the built in Windows Search for files and folders? First of all, you must make sure that is set up correctly. In some versions of  Windows, the Search option appears "broken" because of the default settings. For details and instructions on how to fix it see "Making Windows XP Search do what it says on the tin - almost" in the December 2004 issue of my newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. (Note: this is nearly a year old so some of the comments at the end of the article are no longer valid.) The second problem is that if you have disabled the "Indexing Service" it takes an age to find file names containing your terms and an eternity to search the text within files. And it does not search inside files that have extensions that Windows does not recognise as being associated with text applications. It will be interesting to see what Search can do in Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system.

Do I use desktop search on a regular basis? Erm, I have to confess I do not. Yes, I do have desktop search on my PCs but my documents and emails are organized into folders and sub-folders so it is rare that I "lose" a file. I do, though, sometimes forget where I have saved a file, and there are times when I want  to track down the different versions of a document or I have forgotten whether I really did get around to downloading that really interesting PDF newsletter. For me, desktop search is not  essential but it is a useful utility which does save me time on certain occasions.

The Blogs, Wiki & RSS track opens with a session with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia - the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Here is an introduction to the concept of Wikipedia, which makes an interesting point:

Lots of people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour, all of which are recorded on the page history and the Recent Changes page. Nonsense and vandalism are usually removed quickly, and their creators banned.

This is somewhat counter-intuitive for most people I tell about wikipedia - after they grasp the enormity of 'anyone can edit', they move onto 'but that must be total chaos' or 'how do you know what they write is right'. Not unreasonable points, however, Wikipedia has proved that collaboration driven by the right motivation, in the right context works better than a top down project. Obviously, the $64,000 question is what is that motivation and the context - working that out is what I find most interesting about my work.

They say that picture speaks a thousand words, imagine what moving pictures, i.e. a screencast can tell! John Udell of InfoWorld, who came up with a genius idea of playing a series of screenshots accompanied by an audio commentary, did one about a Wikipedia entry. He traced the 'history' and evolution of Heavy Metal umlaut page in 8.5-minute screencast, which scrolls forward and backward along the timeline of the document, and follows the development of several motifs, including attempted vandalism. Enjoy.

A growing area of the exhibition is the Enterprise Search Solutions feature which this year will showcase key exhibitors including BA Insight, Endeca, FAST Search & Transfer, Google, Networked Planet, Nexidia, Mondosoft, Scientigo Inc, Semantec, Solcara and Vivisimo.

Also, day 3 of the Managing Enterprise Content (MEC) conference track focuses on Enterprise Search with a keynote from world renowned search expert Stephen Arnold, Arnold Information Technologies and insights into successful search strategies from SAP & Google.

This year we have a record number of panel debates taking place in the conference so get your thinking caps on now for questions!

We've selected some high profile names and organisations to take part in the panel sessions, some of who you dont get to see that often in Europe.  For those of you who would rather remain anonymous why dont you email me(lorna.candy@vnuexhibitions.co.uk ) in advance with your questions?   Alternatively we'll have a question box on the conference registration desk you can use to add your question to.

To remind you we have: a desktop search panel session on Tuesday 29 November; a monitoring and mining the blogosphere panel on Wednesday 30 November and an enterprise search question time on Thursday 1 December.

Hi all.
My name is Marc Estève, and I will be speaking about the progress of international communities inside EDF, the french electricity company. I have been in charge for the past 3 years of developping the collaborative platform which serves as a virtual support for the exchanges inside these communities.

We are currently introducing real time options (webconference, chat, ...) in our plateform which used to have only asynchronus capabilities (forums, content management, directories ...). I'm wondering how this will impact the way our people work, and am eager to hear from anybody who has an experience in that field applied to large organizations. See you all in London very soon !! Marc.

Peter Scott here. I will be moderating the session entitled Content syndication - supply & demand on Wednesday 30 November, 14.00-15.30. I will be explaining how to keep up with the latest developments in content syndication with RSS, making reference to my RSS Compendium. My fellow panelists are Philippe Borremans from IBM, and Fergus Burns from Nooked.

ALPSP, AAAS and HighWire Press have today published their major report on the financial and non-financial effects of the Open Access publishing model.  The report, The Facts About Open Access, is freely available from the ALPSP website at http://www.alpsp.org

Sally

Hi everyone, I am Philippe Borremans, PR Manager at IBM and I will be speaking about IBM's internal and external use of blogging, RSS and wikis. I would like to point you to an online presentation about why IBM thinks "blogging means business". But I can safely say that we wouldn't have come this far without our blogging guidelines so here (opens a PDF) they are. See you at the conference.

Hi - I'm Karen Blakeman and I am giving a presentation on Tuesday 29th comparing the various desktop search tools.

My list at present includes Blinkx, AskJeeves, Yahoo, Copernic, Google, MSN and Exalead. I'd be interested in hearing about people's experiences of using these tools, and if there are any others that you find useful. (My current favourite is Yahoo Desktop because of the wide range of file formats that it supports.)

You can either comment to this post or email me at karen dot blakeman at rba dot co dot uk .

Hi - I'm Mike Davis, Senior Research Analyst with Butler Group based in the UK. I firmly believe that in both the public and private sectors, despite all the standards and advice, we are failing to manage records in a manner that enables us to run our organisations better or deliver better services.

Most people do not know what constitutes a record, and the majority of processing is still undertaken manually. Where organisations have deployed EDRM systems the workflow is normally within the respective systems.

The issue is that we do not take a holistic view, and fail to recognise that whilst records management is itself a series of processes, they are driven by the operational processes of the business/organisation, which may span multiple repositories, systems, even organisations - and I have a very clear example.

I am looking forward to an interesting session on the 29th November at 15:45.

The Awards Nominations Deadline has been extended to 17 OCTOBER. 

The roster of awards are wide ranging - from individual and team awards to project, product and technology categories, as well as customer service and other specialist categories.  In all, there will be 19 awards presented at the awards ceremony which takes place on 30 November at the Royal Lancaster Hotel complete with celebrity host and gala dinner followed by celebration and dancing into the small hours.   

A nomination gives the whole team a boost and is a great way to raise a company profile or reward an individual.  2004 winners included Open University Knowledge Networks, Boots plc intranet, Northamptonshire Observatory Portal, Hoovers Online, ALPSP, Swets Information Services, and the London Business School Library.

View the judging criteria, make a nomination and book your table online at www.online-information.co.uk/awards