explodedlibrary.info

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

[6 October 2007 update: This post has been followed up here]

The Australian Financial Review, nicknamed the Fin and sometimes AFR, is perhaps the newspaper of record for the Australian business sector. It used to have arrangements with aggregators such as Factiva, Media Monitors and NewsBank. At some point, it decided that it wasn't making enough money from licensing its content online in this way. In addition, the head of Fair Business Media, Michael Gill, was convinced that AFR content needed to be locked down, "because because one bank used an AFR article to support a prospectus." So AFR decided to develop its own platform for online access to its content and abruptly ended licenses with Factiva and the others.

There's was more information about the afr.com debacle in the second article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey called "Remember the glory days of AFR.com", but sadly that's in the pay section of Crikey and I can't link to that. So I thought I'd add my impressions of afr.com and thoughts about the whole process. I am the first to admit that what follows is not a thoughtful objective review, but a rant. The afr.com fiasco has been a major inconvenience to me and many of my co-workers and faculty and students at MPOW.

I tried out the new afr.com both in beta and since its release on a trial subscription. My first impressions of the beta product was that it was an absolute dog. The current release is better than what I saw in beta, but I still think the product is a dog.

The product has a flash-driven interface. This has a number of effects. It makes afr.com a real memory hog. For example, when I'm running Firefox for Windows I don't use it lightly. I have multiple tabs open, I have various web apps running and maybe the Firefox application is using 90 MB of RAM. When I'm running afr.com in Firefox, that number jumps to 250 MB. The other thing is that the application is very slow. Don't bother trying to do anything quickly in afr.com, especially typing or scrolling or clicking on buttons. The other "feature" of the flash-driven interface is that it's impossible to copy and paste text from afr.com. This is a part of their strategy to eliminate copyright infringement by treating paying customers as if they were thieves.

Even if one pays for a monthly subscription (the cheapest being $A 25/month), it is not an all you can eat package. Usage is metered with credits. It costs one credit to open an article. What struck me as tremendously stingy - or clueless - is that if you do a regular search on afr.com, you do not see any page numbers in the list of results. That exclusive information only appears once you choose to spend a credit to open the article. Don't they realize that page numbers are needed in most citation systems?

I was expecting that afr.com would, if nothing else, be a good way of reading the Fin online, similar to wsj.com, the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. But there seems no good way of browsing the current issue of the Fin in afr.com. The home page on afr.com seems to contain some articles from today’s paper, but it also contains links to other non-premium publications like Reuters or the Sydney Morning Herald – both of which can be viewed for free elsewhere. I've since learned that afr.com is different from the Digital Edition of the Australian Financial Review. The digital edition is only included with afr.com when people subscribe to the spendy ($A 150.00/month) advanced markets package. Compare that with wsj.com, that's available for $US 9.95/month [yesterday, that amounted to approximately $A 11.92].

I have one positive thing to say about afr.com. At least they bothered making it compatible with Macs. The product does work with Firefox and Safari, except that mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in either Mac browser.  For some reason, they use the most unreadable font for full-text articles in the Safari browser.

And what's with the advertising? I don't mind ads on products I use for free, e.g. Google or smh.com.au. But afr.com is priced as a premium product. I think that somebody paying for a clunky product should be spared from ads.

I doubt that this going to be a huge problem for me, seeing that I don't intend to use the product again, but the online help in afr.com is very poor. They are large glossy-looking slow-loading pdf files which look and read more like marketing pieces than online help. It's a microcosm of the problems with all of afr.com, they go for bling and end up with something slow and unusable.

Afr.com’s major flaw as a product is that it provides all sorts of miscellaneous research tools, as if it’s aspiring to become its customers new research portal, but it doesn’t provide cost effective (or effective in any shape or form) access to the frickin' newspaper, which is only thing that I think 95% of likely subscribers would care about. But that’s not the only flaw in play here. An esteemed colleague of mine is convinced that in a few years from now, there will be books and business case studies about this afr.com fiasco. How could a supposedly smart company get it so wrong in so many different ways?

I wonder if they thought they could get away with it because they thought, “we’re the Fin, the paper of record in the Australian business community, people will put up with this crap, because they need us.” The answer is no, if you make life too difficult and expensive for your customers, we’ll adapt to life without you. Some day you may realize that actually, it was you who needed the goodwill of your customers and suppliers – and try to win us back. That may work, but maybe by then we’ll have got used to not using the AFR at all.

[14 June 2007 edit: I wrote something else about afr.com here]

when you need to forget the answer to remember the question

If you pride yourself on being competent at finding information, please skip this post. This post is for people who know they screw up sometimes. Oh and by the way, competency can be overrated!

interesting presentations - how to survive having the wrong powerpoint slides

Today I gave two presentations for our starting Executive MBA students. Both of the groups I spoke to were a great audience, but the second presentation for the GDMs went much better than the first, simply because I had the right powerpoint slides for that one! For the first presentation, I found myself staring at the slides for something I had done back in January. Not a fun moment. I decided that the only thing I could do was to do an ad lib mashup between the slides on the screen and the notes I had in front of me. Needless to say, it was not the most polished presentation which I have ever done in my life.

I'm posting the slides of the correct presentation here for a little while, because somebody in the second group requested this and I wanted to make my intended presentation available to the first group.

[4 September 2006 update: To conserve bandwidth, I have removed the link to the powerpoint slides, but if you're interested, drop me an email (my address is in the questions and answers post)]

This may seem like a cautionary tale against relying on things like powerpoint slides. All I can say is that sometimes people do things a certain way because that's what they chose to do. Other times it's not like that and certain formats are just expected.

what do libraries, landscaping, lighting and liqour have in common?

How interesting. While helping a student do some research on the Australian landscaping suppliers market, I discovered that there's another ALIA in Australia which has nothing to do with libraries. Unfortunately for them, the Australian Landscape Industry Association did not get any ALIA domain names.

My curiousity piqued, I then discovered that the Australasian Lighting Industry Association has the alia.com.au domain.

I mustn't forget the Australian Liquor Industry Awards, which are sometimes known as the ALIA awards, but mustn't be confused with these ones.

There's a school in Victoria called Alia Secondary College, although it's website seems to be down right now.

Finally, there's an Alia involved in an Australian scandal, although it's not actually Australian. It is the name of the company which was a front for the previous Iraqi regime. The Australian Wheat Board paid bribes to the Iraqi government through Alia. Well, that's still not as bad as enduring all the Symbionese Liberation Army jokes from a former co-worker whenever I attended an Special Libraries Association function.

research, decision-making and bullshit detection

The following is adapted from some presentations to our Executive MBA group. It's a combination of what I actually said and what I wished I had said. I spoke equally on all four points, but tonight I'm only writing about the fourth one.

Why the research skills you learn in the library are important -

• Authoritative information
• Save time with more precise searching
• Getting a competitive edge with your information
• Bullshit detection

Some people might be thinking, yeah I need to learn this stuff while I'm a student and have these research assignments, but I know that when I'm finished with business school, I can safely forget about it. The reason why I'm taking this course is to prepare me for a leadership position in the company. If I need research, I'll just pay a consultant or somebody else to do it for me. I won't need to do it myself.

For one thing, it is impossible to be in a leadership in business without making decisions. Decision-making has two essential ingredients - information and a brain which processes and analyzes the information. It is possible to make decisions without information but these are invariably poor decisions. To gather the information needed for decision-making, there is no escaping the fact that you need to do research. What I am saying is that the decision-maker has the responsibility to research. As a matter of practicality, the research work is often delegated to an information professional. I am very aware of distinction involved in researching and gathering information to make a decision. I am more than happy to research all the facets of an issue, and giving reasons for and against the various positions. But don't ask me to tell you what to do - you don't pay me enough for that. Giving advice is something I happily eschew, except in a strictly obiter capacity. There are some decisions which only the CEO is placed to make. This is why you need research skills - to identify what you need to know and have an idea of how to find them, or who to ask.

This leads to my other point here. The research skills which you learn in a library will serve you well in your career as a form of bullshit detector. Even if you delegate the research work, as the decision-maker you are still responsible for gathering the information you need. This means you need to be able to critically evaluate the research that is done on your behalf. You need to understand what was done and determine if it's acceptable. One of the best ways of learning how to evaluate the quality of research is to do your own research and learn how the process should work. In your Executive MBA you won't be able to get away with limiting your research to the top 10 hits of a Google search. One of the goals of the course is that you will develop a sense of what is and isn't solid research, so that the next time one of your departments or a consultant tries to palm off some filmsy "research", you will recognize the danger signs.  In these days when information seems so abundant, research is not just about locating information, it's also about filtering and excluding information.

information about electricity and metrology for non-engineers

Generally I have been impressed by the information in South Australian government websites. In my previous job at NEMMCO, I would often refer people to ESCOSA's (Essential Services Commission of South Australia) information about electricity and full retail contestability (FRC). It seemed to be one of the few places to find less-technical information about electricity - stuff that is understandable to people without a degree in electrical engineering or years of experience in the subject. Another helpful publication is NEMMCO's An Introduction to Australia's National Electricity Market.

It's my opinion that within the broad electricity subject, metrology (about electricity metering) would have to be one of the most arcane sub-specialties. This was another place where I found ESCOSA's site to be helpful . The South Australian metrology procedure had a helpful cheatsheet (on page 30 of the pdf document) explaining the differences between the types of meters. It's a little dated now - with references to the now defunct National Electricity Code, and this document will probably disappear entirely within a couple of years when the state-based metrology procedures are replaced with national ones. Still, while it's around, the cheatsheet is helpful and isn't just relevant to South Australia.