Recent Posts
UK Web Focus
Return To Blog Listing
The UK Web Focus blog gives Brian Kelly's reflections on the Web, focusing on Web standards and innovations, Web 2.0 and Web accessibility.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'General'
Forecasting Trends Backwards
“Forecasting for the Future” was the title of an article published in the recent issues of the JANET Newsletter (No. 9, September 2009 – PDF format). It won’t surprise people that the byline for the article was positive about...
RSS Feeds For Welsh University Web Sites
RSS Usage On Welsh University Home Pages Last year I published a blog post which provided a summary of usage of RSS feeds on Scottish University home pages. The survey was carried out in July 2008, shortly before the IWMW 2008 event was held in Aberd...
Top Technology Trends – For The Twentieth Century!
Top Technology Trends for Libraries and Information Professionals Later this week I’m taking part in the Internet Librarian International (ILI) Conference in London. In addition to running a workshop and giving a talk on standards I’ll also be ta...
If It’s Not “All About The Technology” Then What Else Is It Not About?
The announcement of the availability of a video summary of the event reminded me of the opening F-ALT session, held on 8 September in the Lass O’Gowrie pub (a pub I always try to get to when I’m at a conference at Manchester Universit...
Skype, Two Years After Its Nightmare Weekend
The headline in the Technology Guardian supplement read “Skype’s nightmare weekend highlights peer-to-peer fears” two year’s ago back on 23 August 2007. The article described how “Skype’s popular internet telephone...
25 years of PowerPoint. But What Next?
Happy Birthday PowerPoint was born 25 years ago, on 14 August 1984. An article on the BBC News Magazine, entitled “The problem with PowerPoint” points out that “They’re often boring” and goes on to point out the problems...
If Not Too Large, Are University Web Teams Poor Communicators?
I recently posed the question “Are University Web Teams Too Large?“. The context to this question was a suspicion that the UK HE sector is lagging behind smaller US colleges in exploiting the potential of various Web 2.0 services. And may...
The Recession Has Still To Hit the Public Sector!
Last week began with the gloomy headline in the Sunday Times Whitehall sharpens the knife for university cuts. The article began: WHITEHALL is drawing up plans for deep cuts in the higher education budget that in the worst case would slash a fifth f...
The JISC SIS Landscape Study
The JISC is funding a landscape study on the UK HE sector use of content, communication and social networking services developed by commercial companies (or, perhaps more accurately, outside of the JISC sector). As we know although JISC has develop...
Who’ll Last Longer – Gordon or Google?
On Friday I gave a talk on Benefits of the Social Web at the Association of Independent Museum’s (AIM) annual conference. In the subsequent workshop sessions the issue of the sustainability of the services provided by companies such as Facebook...
Reflections on eLib and Other National Digital Library Programmes
I have been invited to give a talk at the CILIPS Annual Conference 2009 on “Inspiring Excellence: Yourself, Your Service, Our Future” which will take place in Peebles on 1-3rd June 2009. I have been invited to give a talk in a session o...
Critical Friends, Friendly Critics and Hostile Opponents
I recently wrote a blog post on We Need More Critical Friends! and have made this point in several of my recent talks on A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0 and Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2...
I Won’t Be Censored!
Stephen Downes recently published a blog post entitled “Lessons From Slidesharegate” which began “Brian Kelly wrote, in a post he later deleted“. In his blog post Stephen described some of his concerns regarding Slideshare and...
How Many Publishers Does It Take To Change a Light Bulb?
“Submit Comments By Easter Monday” I’m feeling a bit grumpy. On Wednesday night while listening to some excellent live music at The Bell, Bath I checked my email in the interval. There was an email from a publisher with the final co...
Must Institutional Repository and Open Science Software be Open Source?
“Institutional Repositories Should Be Built on Open Source Software” is one topic in “Institutional Repositories: The Great Debate“ which is being held in the current issue (April/May 2009 -PDF format) of “The Bulletin...
Lessons From ‘Slidesharegate’
Blog posts from Phil Bradley and myself published at lunch time on 1 April 2009 where amongst the first to take Slideshare to task for the April fool’s prank. Now although a number of people felt that people should have expected such gags’...
We Need More Critical Friends!
My First Encounter With The Term ‘Critical Friend’ I first came across the term ‘critical friend’ when it was used to describe my colleague Paul Walk when he was interviewed at the JISC-funded Dev8D event. Shortly after the ev...
UKOLN and the FE Sector
A number of years ago, following the announcement that the LSC (Learning and Skills Council) was to be a co-funder of JISC along with the various funding councils the various JISC-funded organisations set about extending their remit to provide supp...
Attention - Services Unavailable!
Background Bath University Computing Services (BUCS) is planning engineering work from 4:30 pm on Friday 27 March until 9:00 am on Monday 30th March 2009. This means that no UKOLN Web sites or services will be available for that period. Further infor...
The Long Tail of the Topless Swedish Model
What is the usage profile like for a typical blog post on this blog? I suspect the statistics for the post on “Are You Able?” is fairly typical (although, as I confessed recently I did pimp up this post on Twitter. What we can see is the ...
What Are the #jiscbid Evaluators Thinking?
A few weeks ago Gráinne Conole, a professor of e-learning at the Open University, used Twitter to ask for suggestions on how to go about writing a bid for one of the forthcoming JISC calls. And, as I recently described, many useful suggestions we...
Impact Of This Blog On My Publication Record
Does The “Blogging Bug” Affect Academic Publishing? Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, recently wrote a blog post on Blogging impacts on formal academic output in which he describes how the numbers ...
“Slowly, One By One, The Stars Were Going Out”
I recently asked on Twitter “Who remembers the SciFi short story ‘Slowly, one by one, the stars were going out’?” I went on to add “It’s happening with Twitter profile pictures“. It turned out that this came ...
Google Breaks!
There was much lively discussion from my Twitter community yesterday - and not on from the football fans whose teams were involved in a flurry of goals in the second half. Josie Fraser was one of the first to report the incident: Google’s gone ...
“Britain Faces Worst Year Since 1930s”
“Britain Faces Worst Year Since 1930s, warns IMF” screams an article on the front page of today’s Guardian. It seems that that the International Monetary Fund has warned Britain that it will be at the bottom of the league table of...
Risk Management - the JISC infoNET Perspective
I’ve previously written about the need to adopt a risk management approach to the use of Web 2.0 services. This was something I started doing back in 2006, when I wrote a risk assessment page which covered use of a variety of Web 2.0 services w...
JISC to Increase UKOLN Funding Significantly from 2009
UKOLN received a pleasing Christmas present recently, in the form of the JISC announcement of a significant increase in our funding. As described in the press release “This increase is both a mark of confidence in the work of UKOLN but also a r...
A Year In The Life of IWR’s Information Professional Of The Year
It was last year on 5th December 2007 when I reported that I had been awarded the Information World Review’s Information Professional of the Year. With this year’s winner due to be announced at the Online Information 2008 conference in th...
Edupunk begets Eduprog at CETIS 2008 Conference
I commented on the “Edupunk” meme a while ago. For some people this provides a useful metaphor for describes a ‘anyone can do it’ approach to e-learning developments; although others are very critical of the term (and thus pro...
