Information overload

(I thought I'd uploaded this on Monday night, but it was still a draft...) On Monday morning the office is awash with the weekend papers, provided to check for higher education stories. Most of the supplements lie untouched, so there's no shortage of reading material for lunchtime, but, I go for a wander around Lincoln's Inn and adjacent fields (actually a modest park) instead. Most of the day is spent exploring the issue of 'semantic content', which means things like embedding datasets and links to the chemical database ChemSpider www.chemspider.com/  in (mostly scientific) papers. I resist the temptation to just 'read the literature', and talk to two people on the phone, which provides lots of good material. In particular, Cameron Neylon http://cameronneylon.net/ makes some interesting points about how best to communicate ideas, compared to what we need to record and archive; the PDF format is criticised (see 'Ceci n’est pas un hamburger:...' ). This job is taking me into all sorts of areas of unfamiliar media and ideas - one website claims that two biomedical papers (on average) are published every minute. On the way home, I have a look around the Apple store in Covent Garden - three floors of technology goodies in a stripped-back space of bare bricks, glass stairs and white tables, the only bright colour being the inviting screens of numerous devices - no doubt great for semantic content. There are hundreds of people there, though it's past 6 o'clock. Perhaps they are just sheltering from the rain.