Just in case anybody may not have seen this, here‘s the testimony of Sir Tim Berners-Lee yesterday before a House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Required reading.

There’s a great exposition of FRBR (the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records model “work -> expression -> manifestation -> item“) in this post from The FRBR Blog on De Revolutionibus as described in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich.

Not specifically publishing-related, but here is a fun rant interview with Alan Kay titled The PC Must Be Revamped—Now. My favorite bit… “…in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have.

Update: All apologies to Google. Apparently this was a problem at our end which our IT folks are currently investigating. (And I thought it was just me. 🙂 Just managed to get this page: _“Google Error We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.

The info registry has now added in the InChI namespace (see registry entry here) which now means that chemical compounds identified by InChIs (IUPAC‘s International Chemical Identifiers) are expressible in URI form and thus amenable to many Web-based description technologies that use URI as the means to identify objects, e.g.

Rob Cornelius has a practical little demo of using Yahoo! pipes against some Ingenta feeds. Like Tony, I keep experiencing speed/stability problems while accessing pipes so I haven’t yet become a crack-pipes-head.

Jon Udell interviews Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, see his blog entry: “A conversation with Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving”. The podcast of the interview is available here. Interesting to see these kind of subjects beginning to be covered by a respected technology writer like Jon.

From the OASIS Press Release:

February 5, 2007, Washington DC Crossref invited a number of people to attend an information gathering session on the topic of Author IDs. The purpose of the meeting was to determine: About whether there is an industry need for a central or federated contributor id registry;

Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Identity Czar and member of the Identity Gang, comments on Microsoft’s announcement that they will support OpenID. Another sign that federated identity schemes are gaining traction and OpenID is likely to emerge as a standard the publishers are going to want to grapple with soon.

Niall Kennedy has a post about the newly released Yahoo! Pipes. As he says: “Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results.