Knode sounds like some fab tech. Imagine a Facebook with precognition. Knode’s bot crawls scientific publications, and generates “expertise profiles” for each scientist it encounters. Then it suggests who a scientist should know, rather than who they already do know. Still in beta, and currently confined to the Life Sciences.

Might be useful if it works but, as with all bot-based curation, the vital curatorial element of personal trust would be missing.

An article in today’s China Daily, written by a westerner, on academic corruption in China….

“because the government remains the principal source of funding for institutions of higher education, they are forced to compete with each other on the basis of rubrics, including the number of publications of their faculty. International rankings similarly depend on publications. All this leads to a temptation to inflate the number of publications, sometimes by repeat publications …, copying the work of others, fabricating research findings, including scientific data, and more.”

Recollect. Everything you do online: recorded, archived, and securely backed up. A little scary for most people, but it might be useful for some. Artists and writers wishing to leave a proper digital archive. Or researchers wanting to map their project’s online research paths in microscopic detail. Although I’m not sure how much success Recollect would have in auto-archiving content from behind paywalls.

New Pew Internet report on teen search skills. Pew surveyed teachers of intelligent Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands teenagers. Teachers filled in a multi-choice question survey, asking them about online research skills among their advanced students. There’s nothing unexpected in the summary, and several hints at some rosy-eyed visions of the past…

“What was once a slow process that ideally included intellectual curiosity and discovery is becoming a faster-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete an assignment.”

Predictably… Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube head the pack as the first port of call in a homework research task.

One figure that did seem of note is that 78% of such teachers say that in-school website censorship filters have either a major or minor effect on their teaching.

The new socialist government in France is making ridiculous noises over taxing Web links. It threatens to pass a new law: if a Web link leads to an online press article, then an unspecified ‘fee’ will need to be paid. Paid even if that article is freely and openly published online, it seems. Paid even if the link comes from overseas, potentially.

The proposed law is targeted first at Google News, but a fundamental threat to the existing Web links ecosystem seems obvious. The new law reportedly has the highest backing — the French Culture minister appears to love the notion. Which would seem to suggest that their new government just doesn’t understand the Web.

Leaving aside issues of ‘fair use’, and the seeming inability of French publishers to monetize around four billion Google visits a month, one wonders if France has really considered the consequences of its planned law. Is France prepared to risk a worldwide online protest over its threat to the fundamental ‘freedom to link’ and to the open Web? The highly successful ‘SOPA blackout’ protest of January 2012 showed what could be done. Will the French Culture minister be so breezy if a big chunk of inbound French links are simply wiped off the Web for a period, perhaps coinciding with France’s peak online holiday-bookings week for overseas tourists? All it would take is one techie to whip up a simple script for webmasters that diverts outbound traffic headed for France. To a picture of a French poodle, perhaps.

A fledgling but interesting new project aims to open up British universities. Fruni is short for “Free Range University”. If I’ve got it right, it sounds rather like a cheap bottom-up version of The Great Courses (aka the Teaching Company). It’ll be interesting to see if Fruni puts lectures online as free-for-all, funded by advertising.