Harold has another great post, this time he lists some of the tangible benefits of blogging, for him…

After an intensive year online, these are the tangible benefits to my business:

• Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
• The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press. Call this competitive intelligence.
• By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
• I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal.
• Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
• The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work – two areas of interest for my business.
• Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
• Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
• When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
• It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

Like e-mail, blogs are practical tools for everyday business. There are abuses of both (spam) but I think that blogs are one more tool that give the small business operator a real competitive advantage.

To me, my blog has become the single more powerful knowledge management tool I use. The way I use it, it gives me a view of where I am, where I’ll be, where I’m thinking about being. My blog is like my intelligence department… it collects lots of data in an organized fashion and it sits there, waiting for me to go to. The fact that I’m read means I get feedback, and hence, people help me complete my information. I also find out about new, interesting people because they link to my blog, comment on my blog and so on. Like good clients, they come to me first, hence, they pass a compatibility test. My blog requires some effort, but very little in the end. The benefits far outweight the cost, so far.

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It seems like a bunch of schools in British Columbia got together to develop open source academic publishing software.

The University of British Columbia’s Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Simon Fraser University Library and SFU’s Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing (CCSP) have formed a partnership to support the maintenance and ongoing development of the internationally acclaimed open source software developed by PKP.
(…)

At the heart of the partnership are three major software programs. Open Journal Systems (OJS) provides online management for journal submissions, peer reviewing, editing, and online publishing and indexing. Open Conference Systems (OCS) manages conference registration, programming and paper submission and publication. The PKP Harvester (PKPH) is used to automatically create an online index of materials from a variety of online sites including journals and repositories such as those housed at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which are harvested and reside on an SFU Library server.

(I got this through Downes’.)

Harold has a good post on Market Diversification:

In Canada, we continue to focus almost exclusively on exporting to the US. As Godfrey puts it, Wal*Mart does more business with China than all of Canada does. The business development strategies that I see presented at every “innovation” forum in the region have the same old story presented by analysts, bureaucrats and government. That story is about exporting our products and services to the US. The talk about diversified global markets is negligible. Given the warning signals on the state of the US economy, it would make sense not to put all of our economic eggs in one basket, n’est-ce pas?

I think Canada will probably suffer in the coming years given its very intense relationship with the USA. However, we have many young bright Chinese in Canada…

Geomblog gives a rather pessimistic view of scientific conferences:

And so the implicit content of many a conference paper is not, as one might think, “Here is my research.” Rather, it is: “Here am I, qualified and capable, performing this role, which all of us here share, and none of us want to question too closely. So let’s get it over with, then go out for a drink afterwards.

The main issue here is that attending conferences is simply not so useful anymore because communication appear to be one-way: you go to the conference to give your talk, but you have come not to expect feedback because feedback is rarely given. Well, at least, the question period after most talks is pretty shallow and you rarely see interesting discussions arise.

A related issue is the quality of the peer review which is definitively very low in many cases: you get a hastily written 3 lines as a review of your work. Whether these 3 lines are positive or negative is irrelevant, the point is that these lines were hastily written and often indicate that the reviewer didn’t have time to really read your paper, let alone check it for accuracy or do some research on the topic.

However, I don’t think this should be a major concern. Yes, conferences are becoming more of a ritual and less of a scientific communication hotspot. Yes, traditional peer review is falling apart. However, scientific communication is alive and well. Maybe it is even becoming more civilized in a way: flying a thousand kilometers to present some work, and being afraid someone might make fun of it, that’s not something we should fight for.

I remember a conference I attended a few years back. Several weeks before the conference, I read the abstracts and found out that one young student was presenting work that had already been done in a number of places. I sent a polite email pointing out additional references. As it turns out, the student decided to ignore my email and was publicly blasted… but the point is that email is one form of feedback that might have replaced the public humiliation some miss. Myself, and people I know, were told of mistakes in their papers through email. This seems like a very efficient approach. If you find mistakes in my work, or want to question it, I think the I would prefer it if you email me first… most people would.

From now on, all trackbacks to this blog are moderated thanks to the moderate-trackbacks plugins. Spammers have really a lot of time to waste. Good thing the wordpress community is very strong and fighting back.

Now, the simplest thing is: do not to use trackback. It is a weak protocol (in a spam infested world) and I’ll probably not moderate these very often especially if the queue gets very long. Ping my blog instead (pingback specs make spamming difficult).

Update: Downes has a recent post on a related topic: Trackback is Dead, Use PubSub (though I published this post before he published his!).

Update 2: about 2 hours after installing the plugin, I’ve got 18 trackback deleted. This is 9 spams an hour. And I’m a low traffice web site…