Lorcan Dempsey is Vice President and Chief Strategist for OCLC and he publishes a popular blog covering many items of interest to the library community. Lorcan has a couple of interesting recent articles:

Library resources on the web

Lorcan provides a thorough review of Cambridge University’s Science@Cambridge science portal. I won’t regurgitate what Lorcan wrote. I do want to add that what struck me as innovative about the Cambridge portal was its focus on providing access to content and to services in an integrated fashion. I’ve written about the value of enhancing federated search by providing contextual information and I’m happy to see Cambridge University wholeheartedly embracing this idea.

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Lorcan Dempsey has, what I find to be, a visionary blog article, The two ways of Web 2.0. Dempsey writes about Web 2.0. He sees two major ways that Web 2.0 is being used and he doesn’t see many of us making the distinction. He has coined the terms diffusion and concentration to describe these two ways.

Diffusion, Dempsey explains, is about connectivity among people, applications and data. Think blogs, RSS, and social networking sites. Concentration is about what Dempsey refers to as “major gravitational hubs” which include sites that contain or aggregate large volumes of content. Diffusion, Dempsey believes, is the more dominant of the two ways of Web 2.0.

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