Science Intelligence and InfoPros

If you’re not paying the for it, YOU are the product…

(http://lifehacker.com/5697167/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product)

Source: http://www.demainlaveille.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/july12.graphitix900.jpg

A ‘more or less” funny experience from a geek.

“I am a big fan of cloud services. I’ve been migrating more and more of my local services to the cloud. (…)

I also like moving to the cloud because I tend to access my information from a lot of different locations and computers. I work in my main office, my den, my living room, on my tablet, on my laptop, in the studio, in the garage, and so forth. Keeping all my data synchronized on all those machines gets old after a while. (…)

But cloud services have their failings, as well. And I’m not talking about the usual crashes and cyberattacks. 

No, sometimes the service just goes away.

Google users are familiar with the phenomenon. Loyal users of Google Health were disappointed last November when the service was shut down. Del.icio.us users almost lost their minds when it appeared the service was being shuttered by Yahoo, only to have it bought up at the last minute. (…)

And then the author tells how his wife has been disappointed recently loosing a  favorite list management software…

as a conclusion,

“

Does that mean I’m going to stop using cloud services? Heck no. But I do intend to at least check into the business model of the services I’m using. If it looks like there’s no way it’ll make any money and be a cost drain, I probably will do my best to, at the very least, keep backups, reports, or dumps of any of the data I entrust to the cloud provider.

The silver lining in this tale? Forewarned is forearmed. Now you know you need to be sure you can get your data out before the cloud services dissipate.“

Gewirtz, David. The curse of free cloud services: a cautionary tale. ZD Net, May 24, 2012. Available from: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/the-curse-of-free-cloud-services-a-cautionary-tale/590?tag=nl.e539 [Accessed 24th of May 2012]

UPDATED ON 6th of March 2012:

As part of Google’s prioritization of product efforts, we will be retiring Knol.  From now through April 30th, 2012, Knol will work as usual, but we’ve made it easy for you to download your knols to file and/or export them to WordPress.com.  From May 1, 2012 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported.  After that time, knol content will no longer be accessible

https://knol-redirects.appspot.com/faq.html

KNOL, the Google attempt, a long forgotten Wikipedia competitor, will be shutting down soon…

According:
http://mashable.com/2011/11/22/google-wave-knol-and-gears-headed-for-retirement-video/

Google blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

For previous posts on KNOL, see:

http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/tag/knol/

http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/a-piece-of-knowledge-by-google/

Update February 2012:
Users ‘don’t like’ Google’s new search tool.
http://www.infotoday.eu/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Users-dont-like-Googles-new-search-tool-80761.aspx

According Martin Belam, Google has promised to add some pieces of social information into its algorithms.

Anyway, it looks like that the new “Search Plus Your World” function tends to “forget” Twitter, Facebook, Flickr… and is likely to favour its own social network Google+…

Belam, Martin. Would you like some social with your search? Google launches “Search, plus Your World”. FUMSI, online the 16 th of January, 2012.
http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/find/65955

According Dominic Tyer.

Pharmaceutical companies have started joining Google’s new social network with Roche and Pfizer the first to set up official Google+ presences.

Fake pages are already an issue on Google+ and Roche’s head of corporate internet and social media Sabine Kostevc explained that one of the reasons she set up Roche’s corporate page was to “reserve the space”.

For now both Roche and Pfizer are only tentatively using Google+, as befits a still emerging social network, but already official pharma pages are outnumbered by fake ones.

Tyer, Dominic. Roche and Pfizer launches pharma’s first official Google+ pages. Digital Intelligence blog, Posted on 6^th of December 2011. http://www.pmlive.com/digital_intelligence_blog/archive/2011/dec_2011/roche_pfizer_pharma_official_google_plus_pages

Intellogist, the best source to benchmark patent sources that I know so far, reviews  Exalead, the French Google, …

“Exalead is a free search platform that has existed for nearly a decade, and it has developed a range of search features that rival, and sometimes exceed, the features of Google search.  The format of advanced search options on Exalead offers a simpler interface than Google’s multiple advanced search forms.  (…)

 Exalead isn’t a replacement for Google (or any subscription non-patent literature database), but the search platform does possess search features that complement Google’s“.

Mornini, Joelle. How is Exalead better than Google, Intellogist, Posted on September 28, 2011.
http://intellogist.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/an-alternative-to-google-search-exalead/

Is Google investing silently in Science collaborative platforms?

It is reported by several websites that Google Ventures has quietly invested in Wingu.

Wingu is a cloud-based service designed to accelerate collaboration and to improve communication of scientific novelties.

https://www.wingu.com/ 

Reported by (among many others):

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2092652/Google-Ventures-Quietly-Invests-in-Collaborative-Toolset-for-Scientists

By Publicis Modem, a very clear explanation of Google+ marketing goals:

• integration with other Google services (GMail, addWords, etc.)
• the competition with FaceBook
• the financial impact on Google’s employees!
• people are the targets, not the brands

The official Google blog announces that they’re going to retire Google Health.

The goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information.

“Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service. We’ll continue to operate the Google Health site as usual through January 1, 2012, and we’ll provide an ongoing way for people to download their health data for an additional year beyond that, through January 1, 2013. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point will be permanently deleted”

Announcement:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-google.html

This study says that some Google tools (like Google alerts, etc.) are too unknown by CI specialists: may be, but I’m just wondering if it is not only because these tools are not enough efficient and not enough professional!

Google alerts is only about noise and waste of time (does not manage homonyms, redundancy, duplication of alerts, etc.)…

 
http://www.slideshare.net/miniera/google-tools-for-competitive-intelligence