Wired Magazine reports on New York City's 311 line, which provides a 24 hour live operator (with access to 170 languages) who answers questions and forwards calls regarding city services. This “citizen services phone line … may well be the most radical enhancement of urban information management since the invention of the census, and it promises to make urban centers into more livable spaces….

“First, it's a kinder, gentler 911: You dial 311 when there's a strange guy hovering around the playground, not breaking into your apartment.

“Second, 311 functions as an information concierge [giving directions to everything from parking tickets to the nearest daycare centre to the concert schedule at Central Park]…

“Third, the government learns as much as the callers do. That's the radical idea at the heart of the service: Every question or problem carries its own kind of data. … 311 automatically records the location of each incoming service request in a huge database that feeds info throughout New York City's government. Think of 311 as a kind of massively distributed extension of the city's perceptual systems, harnessing millions of ordinary eyes on the street to detect emerging problems or report unmet needs…

“Already, 311 data is changing the government's priorities. In the first year of operation, noise was the number one complaint; the Bloomberg administration subsequently launched a major quality-of-life initiative combating city noise. Today, geomapping software displays streets with chronic pothole troubles and blocks battling graffiti – all integrated into custom dashboards on city officials' laptops.”

Update from Mark Evans on November 25:   The CRTC has approved a joint application from the cities of Calgary, Toronto, Halifax and Halton to use 3-1-1 for non-emergency municipal government services.

Google has launched Google Scholar, a specialized search engine restricted to scholarly literature like peer reviewed articles, technical reports, theses and abstracts. The search algorithms have been customized to provide the kind of information that researchers look for, and includes results from subscription-based online journals that are hidden from the public web.

In many cases, Google Scholar finds relevant citations that are only in hard copy but are referenced in an online article. From TechWeb: “In such cases, a Library Search and/or a Web Search link shows next to the book's or paper's title. The former uses the Open WorldCat program to locate a nearby library with the work, while Web Search searches the larger index for other, non-scholarly references.”

For more information, see Google Scholar's  FAQ.

Google is offering to include posted reports from eligible professional associations. This is an opportunity for the voluntary sector to disseminate research and reports without big investments in OAI compliant archives as I recommended in an earlier article. If a website such as www.nonprofitscan.ca was included in Google Scholar, it could instantly provide a free search function on its own site at the same time as joining the international scholarly literature.

The free FireFox browser is finally officially released. Besides being more resistant to viruses and other security threats than
Internet Explorer, as well as lots of other features that technology
magazines seem to appreciate, it has two very cool abilities. First, it
will enlarge text on most sites, even those that are not programmed to
offer larger text. This is a big deal for people with visual
impairments, like anyone my age or older.  [Update: Firefox
also offers an extension that "displays a text representation of a web page similar to how a screen reader would read it. This helps web developers finding accessibility issues at an early stage in the UI development process."]

I  like many of Firefox's extensions, which are little optional
plug-ins that expand the functionality of the browser. My current
favourite is called WayBack, and it lets you instantly see the history and various versions of the web page you are browsing in the waybackmachine archive.

For example, using FireFox I went to the web site of the Liberal Party of Canada (www.liberal.ca),
which incidentally has one of the worst home pages I've ever seen – a
questionnaire in two languages asking for personal information. I
right-clicked on the page and selected 'WayBack this page'. I got
the following response, listing all of the major versions of the
information-free Liberal home page since 1996.

 * denotes when site was updated.

You don't need FireFox to do this – just enter an URL into the waybackmachine for any web page – but it sure is fun to do.

Jessica Litman, in Ethics and Information Technology (2003), an expert in Digital Copyright (in fact, she wrote the book) writes about ethical disobedience in music and movie downloading:

Lori Criss Powers pointed out this What Works Clearinghouse published by US Department of Education to “provide educators, policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education”. The site lists research on relevant topics in education, and divides them into studies that meet evidence standards, and those that do not. For example, they have collected 300 studies in the topic of Peer-Assisted Learning, of which 15 meet evidence standards and 109 are still being reviewed. Evaluators and agencies are encouraged to submit studies for review; only two topics have been studied so far.

The evidence standards themselves are worth reading, in that they define the characteristics of relevant research in particular topic areas. It's an interesting model for other areas of best practice in the human services.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse, also sponsored by the US government, lists evidence-based clinical guidelines that are selected through a multi-level peer review process. The site attempts to serve consumers and patients as well as researchers and policy-makers; it's a rich, complex site with masses of health information. Health sciences have led the push towards evidence-based practice, and it's past time for social services to follow suit. This type of clearinghouse could be very helpful to service providers and funders in key topics such as employment, immigration, family violence and so on.

Jakob Neilsen's current Alertbox analyses the Internet strategy of George Bush and John Kerry, and concludes that their email newsletters may have contributed to Bush's win.  The article also describes guidelines for effective newsletters. Here's an excerpt from Neilsen's own email newsletter:

“As [my] analysis shows, Kerry supporters were bombarded by repeated fundraising requests, to the extent that many of them probably tuned out the newsletter in the final critical days. Although the Internet is great for collecting money from the masses, there is a limit. Kerry exceeded it.

Open Access Now is an online journal devoted to articles on various aspects of open access research, published by BioMed Central. A recent article addresses '(Mis)Leading Open Access Myths':

“In the evidence presented to the [UK] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications, many dubious arguments have been used by traditional publishers to attack the new Open Access publishing model. Below, BioMed Central responds to some of the most prevalent and most misleading anti-Open Access arguments.

Nature journal has completed its series on Open Access publishing with a few wrap-up articles summarizing the pros and cons of open access models. One of the articles addresses the needs of researchers themselves, based on an international web survey of 91,500 senior authors who had recently published in an ISI-indexed journal.

“The survey yielded 3,787 fully completed questionnaires, with responses from 97 countries and from each major discipline in the sciences and social sciences.

“What authors tell us they want from the journals systems reflects a view that has probably not changed much over the past four centuries. They want the imprimatur of quality and integrity that a peer-reviewed, high-impact title can offer, together with reasonable levels of publisher service. Above all, they want to narrowcast their ideas to a close community of like-minded researchers.”

97% of the respondents said their target audience was other researchers in the same  field. Only 56% said their target audience included education professionals, 45% wanted their own funders to read their articles, and 40% wanted policy-makers and opinion formers to read them.

“The significance of this finding is that it places one of the journal crisis’ traditional scapegoats, the cry that there are ‘too many journals’, into its proper context. It might even be argued that there are too few titles to satisfy fully scientists’ needs.”

It also points to the importance of journals or other communication vehicles that reach out to policy makers and opinion formers, because scientific literature is not aimed at them.

From the Register – “NBC News has set up an 'I can't vote!' helpline…. The Voter Alert Line application will allow US voters to 'notify local polling officials about voting problems or irregularities at their local polling location' and forms part of NBC News' political coverage of today's presidential election. People unable to vote successfully for whatever reason will be able to get the weight off their chests by calling a free automated system… and leave up to a message (in either English or Spanish) about their experience. These rants (no longer than 60 seconds) will be captured as a voice file and delivered to news network NBC News along with statistics about the origin and volume of the calls via a web portal….”

The information will be used in several ways. Voters can be transferred to their local election offices after their rant, and NBC will analyse the calling patterns and report voting problems in real-time. The results may feature in civil rights lawsuits after the election. It's a fascinating extension of the role of public media in citizen engagement, and it's being funded by several non-partisan organizations and universities. Watch the site throughout election day to see which locations are reporting high numbers of voting problems.