Informationoverlord

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Communications (apComms) has launched an inquiry into Internet traffic to assess whether the current regulation of ISPs and a range of Internet traffic issues from behavioural advertising and privacy to child abuse images and Internet neutrality is still fit for purpose, and if not whether government and/or further legislative action is needed.

Whilst all views on the topic are welcome the committee are particularly keen on views on the following 5 key questions:

1. Can we distinguish circumstances when ISPs should be forced to act to deal with some type of bad traffic? When should we insist that ISPs should not be forced into dealing with a problem, and that the solution must be found elsewhere?

2. Should the Government be intervening over behavioural advertising services, either to encourage or discourage their deployment; or is this entirely a matter for individual users, ISPs and websites?

3. Is there a need for new initiatives to deal with online privacy, and if so, what should be done?

4. Is the current global approach to dealing with child sexual abuse images working effectively? If not, then how should it be improved?

5. Who should be paying for the transmission of Internet traffic? Would it be appropriate to enshrine any of the various notions of Network Neutrality in statute?

Submissions and any other enquiries - by 22 May - should be sent to: admin@apcomms.org.uk

The Current issue of Online has an article by Seth Earley entitled ‘The New Versus Old Schools of Taxonomies, Metadata,and Information Architecture’ which takes as its starting point a prediction from CMS Watch that predicted with the rise of social computing that ‘Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata’.

Earley is having none of this and argues that far from being dead, taxonomies are more important than ever.

He identifies that this line of thinking might be because of the old view of taxonomies, where taxonomy = navigation and nothing more. In today’s world, with methods such as faceted search, the worlds of navigation and search merge behind the scenes. “[B]uilding out faceted search and filtering based on attributes requires a well constructed taxonomy. The controlled vocabularies of their taxonomy drive choices for the facets, and hierarchies allow users to refine their choices intuitively.”

He makes a convincing case for for having multiple taxonomies too - something I have had many pro and con discussions about over the years. According to Earley “Multiple taxonomies are needed to “represent various perspectives within the organisation.” On its own this might be statement you’d question but he goes on to make a very important point.

“Do not confuse this with having multiple navigational hierarchies. A navigational hierarchy is an access structure. It is dependent upon the context being indexed. However, building multiple taxonomies and surfacing them within new tools will allow for maximum flexibility in navigational constructs.”

He concludes by saying that to survive taxonomies need to evolve and change with the needs of the organisation and also with the changes in technology, but that they still have an important role to play in how we access information and mine internal knowledge effectively. Worth a read.

I discovered last week that a lawyer in CMT (then MCC) Group here at CC Towers - way back when - has a nice little Commercial/TMT blog. Andrew, who is a Partner at Charles Russell is behind, CRITique - an “unofficial blog from the Commercial Team at the law firm of Charles Russell LLP”

Good stuff Andrew. Wish we were doing that here.

Andrew also has a Twitter feed too [You need to tweet a bit more though Andrew!]

Yesterday on Techcrunch Mrinal Desai asked if twitter was turning into myspace. Interesting piece, but I was more interested in his reference to to growing trend of ‘Ghost Twitterers’. This lead me to a New York Times article I’d missed last week on the Ghost Twitterers and a great quote from basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, echoing my own thoughts on this subject, who said:

“It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”

A slam dunk, I would say.