Yesterday's blog (the bit about Macmillan Science) elicited a comment from Peter Collingridge who runs a design consultancy for publishing clients called APT. It's well worth reading as a constructive critique of the way Macmillan and others are approaching web marketing and the use of the Internet.

I have discovered one way of increasing traffic to this blog is to write the words 'Jeffrey Archer'. However, on this occasion I am not interested in increasing the number of visitors here but to encourage you to look at Jeffrey's blog which is part of his official website.

And while on the use of the Internet as a marketing vehicle, President Chirac has inaugurated a French version of Google Earth (although they deny that this is what it is). It launched last week and the interest has been so great that the following page comes up

http://www.geoportail.fr/excuses.htm.

I've left the url as it stands because there's something about the word 'excuses' which is perfectly fine in French but in English says it all. And some governments still think they can do a better job of web publishing than private enterprise....

And finally an excellent article in Nature which analyses the financial standing of the most important open access organisation The Public Library of Science. What the article shows is that the 'author pays' model for scientific publishing is likely to be unsustainable without charitable support. I don't think that scientific publishing should be a charitable enterprise. Its innovation and growth has been driven by commercial market pressures to improve which have always been the best guarantee of high-quality service. The alternatives nearly always end in bureaucracy and protection of the status quo.