Science Library Pad

tagcloud on your cellphone

All About Symbian showing the new tag cloud in the Photos app on the Nokia N96.

Facebook Mini-Feed wants to be your Life-Feed

Facebook launched some "lifestream" integration features on April 15, 2008

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us [and now Digg]—are available for importing at the moment

Facebook Blog - A new way to share with friends

Sidebar: Facebook also seems to have silently taken away the feature where you could X stuff out of your News Feed, which was supposed to teach it to only show friends items that interested you, over time.

Yahoo - the SearchMonkey cometh

Well, as long as it isn't a flying monkey, ok.

Enter the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS). ...

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

...

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results.  ... launch party May 15 [2008]

http://ycorpblog.com/2008/04/24/developer-welcome-mat/
(Exclamations removed because I refuse to put exclamations all over the place, including inside of acronyms.)

SearchMonkey is what I previously described as "semantically-enriched search results".

General story of Yahoo Open Strategy very widely reported, e.g. Globe - Associated Press - Yahoo plans social makeover.  SearchMonkey bit via Search Engine Watch blog.

Globe on Lifestreaming

Today's Globe and Mail has a good article on lifestreaming, the article is a reasonable combination of skepticism and information.

For every bon mot you leave [online], a breathless news release documents the leaving of the bon mot. Assemble all those press releases together, and you've got a lifestream.

...

A lifestream is just a [Facebook] mini-feed writ large, covering not just the cloistered confines of one site, but stretching across the entire Web, pulling in data from every site that is willing to share it.

Globe and Mail - Billy blogged! Sarah e-mailed! Tell everyone! - April 24, 2008

There is also accompanying audio (presented in a video window, I guess so they can show you an ad first).  I like when he describes his worry that full lifestreams will be mostly full of "random detritus" of your web wanderings.

FriendFeed is kind of the canonical application in this space, but to some extent, anything that can aggregate RSS feeds can do a basic job of serving as a lifestream.

the social shotgun: blasting your updates everywhere

In the library world we would probably call this something like "federated updating".
With the proliferation of different targets, particularly different social presence sites, people are trying to do one-to-many updates.

We see an example of some infrastructure for this in Yahoo's FireEagle, for collecting and redistributing location updates.

There was also a nice example at the CRIG Repository Challenge, called FileBlast, which allows you to upload a paper (an article) and then send automatic notices with the link to the paper to multiple sources, such as Twitter and your blog.  It is build on the FeedForward infrastructure, and you can read more about it (as well as find a link to the code) in the FeedForward blog.

Today, via the Outsell Headlines feed, I find news that TypePad has a new Facebook app called Blog It, which  can send a single update to many sources of your choosing, including various blogging platforms (TypePad, Blogger, LJ, Vox, WordPress) and various "statusy" services, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook status itself.

UPDATE: The article Outsell pointed me to, Six Apart Gives Facebook Bloggers Blastability, uses the term "lifestreaming".  I wonder if this is where we're headed, from the blog to the lifeblast.  ENDUPDATE

I think there's always this tension between decentralisation and centralisation, and these kind of notification federations may be one way that we manage this.

In particular, "article blast" to multiple repositories using SWORD may be a very compelling solution to a lot of ingest and content recruitment issues.  (And feel free to contact me if you're interested in SWORD ingest across platforms.)  Julie Allinson did a great job of introducing SWORD in her Open Repositories 2008 presentation.

context and location awareness

A lot of buzz about the next generation of technology providing better information and services by being aware of the context in which the device is being used and the location.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia, came to the Mobile World Congress... to declare that Nokia will "reshape the Internet."

Nokia believes it, not Google, can deliver operator-independent, cross-platform phones through new software and services. How does Nokia presume that it can reshape an Internet so firmly established already? Nokia's answer lies in Maps 2.0, which the company claimed enables a "context-aware Internet" that combines multimedia features, Internet and Assisted- GPS, "We can bring more relevant and powerful context" to users browsing on the Internet, claimed Kallasvuo.

Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president of services and software, added: "By adding context--such as time, place and people--to the Internet, the Web will become something very different from the one you have today."

EETimes - Nokia, not Google, sees itself reshaping the Internet - February 11, 2008

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there weren’t competitors, there wouldn’t be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of GyPSii, a mobile social network based in Amsterdam that is a contender. “Maybe there are 30 or more now — in three years, there will be 5 that matter.”

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

...

Most mobile social networks seek to capitalize on location information. The SpaceMe service from GyPSii, for instance, will show users where friends and other members are in real time.

New York Times - Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone - March 6, 2008

Well established as the business mobile device of choice, the BlackBerry may soon become a much more social smartphone, says the co-CEO of creator Research In Motion Ltd.

Jim Balsillie says RIM wants the BlackBerry positioned to tap into the growing trend of Internet social networking sites such as FaceBook.com that allow consumers to share information about their lives, and access multimedia content, particularly music, on their mobile devices.

"Architecturally, music and the social networking are going to merge," Balsillie said ahead of a Thursday speech to the Canadian Music Week festival in Toronto.

CP - RIM looks to make social networking part of BlackBerry's strategy - March 6, 2008

Although the above is about mobile, Google is already "location aware", to the extent that each country version of Google ranks results in a different order, presumably based on language and click tracking, amongst other things.  So e.g. Google Canada will list hits in a different order (for the same search) than Google France.

It gets pretty complex to try to make meaningful context decisions though.  If it knows you're in a coffeeshop, should it return higher ranking results for "java" as it relates to coffee?  What if you do all your computer programming in coffeeshops?

This applies beyond mobile devices, to context awareness for any app being used on any platform anywhere, whether at work, at home, or on the go.

Of course, there is an extent to which the computer either implicitly or explicitly knowing more about the context and location of your activities is very privacy intrusive (e.g. hypothetical location-aware shopping application "I see you're passing a drug store on the way to your girlfriend's apartment, perhaps you should purchase some prophylactics?")

To rephrase something I wrote in my Twitter, I find my online and mobile walled gardens either have too many walls, or no walls whatsoever.  I would like to have a lot more control over the barriers and translucency of those barriers.  If my friends want to know my exact location down to the metre, that's fine, but as my circle of acquaintances expands outward, I want the the precision of my location to decrease, so that maybe people I know less well are shown what city I'm in, and people I don't know at all only get to see that I am currently somewhere in the vicinity of planet earth.

In a way, this is old news anyway.  The next thing that was supposed to follow on from the e-commerce bubble in 2000 was "m-commerce".  The cellphone companies conceived this as the m-commerce "value chain", by which they meant, extracting value FROM you, FOR them, all the way along the chain.  So they wanted not only to charge Amazon for placement on their wireless portal, they thought they should get a cut of everything you bought from Amazon.

I thought this was ridiculous when they were talking about it in 2000...

"E-Commerce value chain has many more steps and players than standard"

Notes on Wireless Internet for E-Commerce seminar - April 28, 2000

and when Tod Maffin talked about "CRM M-Commerce" in 2001, my general feeling was that the day a coupon pops up on my phone screen when I pass a store is the day I throw my cellphone into the river.

Accordingly, given people's widely varying expectations of privacy and "value", we are going to need much more granular and much more interoperable tools in order to achieve workable context awareness (including location).

Yahoo`s Fire Eagle is an infrastructure piece, an architecture for sharing location information between applications.

Plus which, this is all very nice in theory, but given that in Canada our mobile providers near-total control over their nextworks, and have data plans that are expensive and/or limited, mostly incomprehensible, and don't cover roaming outside Canada anyway, I think it will be a while before most Canadians are willing to use any sort of advanced mobile applications.

I actually think the carriers are setting themselves up for a fall, because Canada is concentrated in a few cities with lots of WiFi, so as soon as more phones have WiFi, people will use that to the exclusion of wireless data, and may even try to do a lot more VoIP over WiFi as well.

Related:
February 15, 2008  CNet reviews Nokia 6210 Navigator GPS phone [including Maps 2.0]
February 05, 2008   Nokia Location Tagger: in-phone photo geocoding

The Agenda on Microhoo and the Compute Cloud

The Agenda had their somewhat-usual technology suspects on talking about the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, with a majority of the show devoted to the idea of the "compute cloud" future for computing.  It's quite impressive that they took this fairly technical topic on, and they did a good job of covering it from various angles.

The Debate: The Coming Cloud (switch to the Mark Evans tab for the other discussion) - video is linked from these pages, just click on "Watch video" there

also available as iTunes audio and video - I'm npt seeing it in iTunes yet though

Overall I liked the show, but I would have liked to have seen a cloud computing user, rather than just a panel of pundits.  Show me someone who has moved their enterprise over to Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud services.  (For example, Internet Archive has been experimenting with this... and I see I'm the top hit for this information: "Science Library Pad: Internet Archive 20th Century Search".  Also SmugMug photos uses Amazon S3 storage.)

I think the future splits into multiple models of computer use.  Gamers, for near-term, need local graphics engines and local storage (holding the multi-gigabyte virtual environments they use).  The intensive computer users like me probably still have their whole elaborate local network and local storage and local computing... well, basically entire personal data centre.  We're probably the only ones left with a lot of non-cloud data and computing.

The digital dividers (old people, poor people, the technically unsavvy) will have very simple devices, something very akin to thin clients - probably in many different form factors - built in to televisions, set-top boxes, things like OLPCs and Eee PCs, "intelligent LCD displays".  The highly mobile will have quite sophisticated but completely mobile devices.  All of the data for both groups lives in the cloud.

This being said, there is a very, very long history predicting the demise of the PC and its replacement with set-tops and thin clients, and it has yet to materialize.  People use a bunch of devices (cell, camera, PDA, laptop) AND their home computers, not instead of their computers.

SIDEBAR: Jesse Hirsh had quite the slag on for the Preventers of Information Services in IT Departments.
First he says home users can't be trusted with personal computers, and then he says work users must be trusted with unlimited use of Internet applications.

It is true that some of the Dr. No aspect of IT is arbitrary, but some of it is either out of their control (layers of regulations imposed from on high), and some of it is related to user support.  IT is about user productivity.  Computer secure, applications running smoothly = happy IT.  If this could be guaranteed through the magic of trusted cloud computing, that would be fine.  But the reality is, users download a bunch of cr*p and access a bunch of cr*p websites, and then IT has to come in and try to clean it up.  That's why IT tries to lockdown.  Lockdown is about being able to guarantee a stable computer, network, and sustainable support experience.

If you want to see what happens in an uncontrolled environment, just let a bunch of consultants into your organisation and let them "manage themselves" and see how well that works...

LimeWire led to data breach: N.L. justice minister

an outside consultant had installed LimeWire, a popular program used to swap music for free, on a laptop computer that was being used to work with data for the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

As a result, information — including names, addresses, dates of birth and medical and work histories — related to 153 individuals was exposed

END SIDEBAR

SIDEBAR 2: A minor quibble with terminology used during the show, Amazon's S3 is cloud storage only, their compute cloud service is EC2.  END SIDEBAR

Deloitte & NMC Tech Horizons

Deloitte has released their Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Trends: Predictions 2008 (also available via URL www.deloitte.co.uk/predictions )

The full PDFs for each of the three sections are free online (with copying of text disabled), along with about 10 minutes of audio for each section.

In the Media report, they assert something that I have been saying for a long time, which is that e-Books have limited use, but e-Reference (e-Textbooks, medical reference, etc.) makes a lot more sense.

Also they discuss the carbon footprint... of your living room.

Deloitte via Google News.  If you want to see all the bullet points in one place, see an article in the Exchange Morning Post.

The 2008 NMC/EDUCAUSE Horizon report is also out, you can get it from the wiki

http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page

It seems to be mostly about the mobile and the social, with "Collaboration Webs", "Mobile Broadband", "Collective Intelligence" and "Social Operating Systems" as major topics.  They also discuss "Data Mashups", mostly in the context of map mashups.

The power of mashups for education lies in the way
they help us reach new conclusions or discern new
relationships by uniting large amounts of data in a
manageable way. Web-based tools for manipulating
data are easy to use, usually free, and widely available.
Research can be displayed on interactive graphs,
charts, or maps that make the concepts clear.

Previously:
February 15, 2007  Tech to Watch in 2007 Horizon Report

inexpensive laptop may be appropriate for many uses

In an interesting article, Road-testing the $100 laptop's 'appropriate technology', Ryan Bigge talks about the implications of inexpensive laptops

In creating a cheap laptop, the XO has also started a fresh debate about affordable technology. Affordable and appropriate interrelate quite closely, and the XO hints at the added costs of proprietary operating systems offered by Mac and Apple, along with the price to be paid for the Intel brand. In this way, appropriate technologies such as the XO serve as an implicit critique of the marketplace.

Plus which, any article that includes the TRS-80 Model 100 deserves a mention.
(I saw, but never used the Model 100.  I used to go to RadioShack and play Hammurabi on their regular TRS-80s.)

You can see video of him demoing the XO.

The inexpensive laptop trend was noted as part of ALA LITA Top Trends 2008

• Hearing a lot lately about lightweight road computers
• Could be appropriate for loaners, not as big of a deal if beat up, most of work on network anyway.
• A discussion of solid state hard drives & sealed keyboards… more durable
• Relying more on the Internet for applications and data means we can have a much smaller laptop

conference notes from Lauren Pressley
via Michael Ireland

I hadn't realised but there is already a small laptop (the Asus Eee) with solid-state storage out in Canada for C$300, it sells through The Source (formerly Radio Shack)

see e.g.

ASUS EEE 2GB SURF MOBILE INTERNET DEVICE, GREEN

You can see others in the Mobile Internet category

http://www.thesourcecc.com/estore/category.aspx?language=en-CA&catalog=Online&category=Mobile_Internet

In the US, you can get them through Amazon (below is an affiliate link), for US$300

with that kind of price and availability, the barrier to mobile computing is very low.

If I understand correctly, you can buy an SDHC card to add more storage.

They have some new models planned as well

The Register - Hardware - Second-gen Eee PC

I wouldn't put the MacBook Air in this same space, as it is much more expensive.

The Air is more like the ultimate Road Warrior laptop, you pay a heavy price in terms of limited expandability.  Since I use my laptop mostly as a home desktop replacement, I'm continuing to look at the regular MacBook as my next computer (I have a PowerBook G4 right now).

SIDEBAR: Dear Radio Shack, do you really need an "MSCSProfile" of

287001FD2674671CC1C6E1B8FD422E0877FC152AF8DD5EA4F64CC488CD9F9EBB8663805103CFB74
01041BEB7B395895C25D0D2FA5E2CFCD5D4F58390B0377D79966CED87AC19D769C2D0DC51FEBF8
7913B4E23159DD17CBAC78B9FDB32CF03ECF2F50753794A30EF0E5A558850D5AD85500469650F624
FBD9F19AA4A6BE0B24BC8ADCEC1815BED94

in your URL?  What are you trying to do, describe every atom in my body?

END SIDEBAR

ACRL 2007 Environmental Scan is out

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released their 2007 Environmental Scan (PDF), dated January 2008.

Issues around intellectual property, data management, and skillsets (and associated new information technologies) are some main themes.

via User Education Resources for Librarians

provide your input to OECD participative web conference

There will be an event "OECD-Canada Technology Foresight Forum on the Participative Web: Strategies and Policies for the Future" on October 3, 2007 in Ottawa, Canada, so in slightly under three weeks from now.  You still have time to submit your comments as well as to suggest blog links and feeds

---> Participate online <---

There will be 2 official event bloggers who will blog about the event during the meeting. One will be a representative from civil society (ICANN) and one will be from Canada.

Err, the latter would be me.  I think the blogging will be on an official OECD site rather than here.

UPDATE 2007-09-30: The blog has gone live. ENDUPDATE

The event will be webcast live as well as archived with transcripts.

There are already some videos submitted by participants, rather confusingly listed under "podcasts", which they are not.

There is an E-Science session in the programme (PDF)

Session 2 STREAM B
Research 2.0: e-Science and new ways of interaction in the science community
Chair: Walter Stewart, Walter Stewart & Associates Inc.
- Andrew Herbert, Managing Director, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
- Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks, CANARIE Inc.
- Daniel Atkins, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation
- Ulf Dahlsten, Director for "Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures", Information Society and Media Directorate-General, European Commission

Check out

http://www.oecd.org/futureinternet/participativeweb

for more information.

I also created an Upcoming event and Google calendar entry and am suggesting the tag oecdwebforum2007

Bill St. Arnaud also provided a pointer a while back to the OECD report on this topic

OECD, 12-April-2007, Working Party on the Information Economy - PARTICIPATIVE WEB: USER-CREATED CONTENT (PDF, 888KB)

UPDATE 2007-09-14: I have made a Google Earth KMZ for the conference venue and hotels where the organisers have arranged room availability.  You can also view it in Google Maps.  I have indicated the location of Canada's Parliament as well.  It may be the only Parliament in the world where you can sometimes see people playing frisbee on the front lawn.  Note: Don't confuse the Government Conference Centre venue (the old Ottawa Union Station) with the Ottawa Congress Centre, located a block away.  Also note in some cases Google is not showing proper street names for downtown Ottawa at the moment.

Download OECD-ParticipativeWebForum.kmz

View Larger Map

Alvin Toffler interviewed by Allen Gregg

ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock. The Third Wave. Two classics that revolutionized the way we think about our rapidly changing world. They established Alvin Toffler as one of the world's most influential futurists. In his new book, Toffler once again takes us back to the future. It's called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change our Lives.

Web Exclusive Preview: Allan Gregg in Conversation with Alvin Toffler

Allen Gregg in Conversation (on TVO) - August 31, 2007

Note: a lot of the links on the TVO site won't work if you have cookies turned off.

Previously:
October 1, 2006  Alvin Toffler on Big Ideas

in the age of geoinformation

You may wonder what interests me about automated geotagging of photos using a GPS.
There are a couple things.
One is that I can see the tracks of where I've walked (or ridden on the train, or flown).
The other is that I can learn more about what I photographed.

I'm walking around Paris, I see a church with a motto GLORIA DEO * PAX TERRAE

That's cool.  Snap a photo.

I have no idea what church it is.

Get home, georeference it automatically, and now I'm in Google Earth

So that's cool, now I know where I was, and I can see the beautiful cross-shape of the church.
But what church?
Turn on Geographic Web... no help.
Turn on Google Earth Community... aha!

It's the E‰glise Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet (website, Wikipedia).

In a sense, physical objects can now tell you about themselves, as in Vinge's Rainbows End.

But it's quite a delayed process.
What I should be able to do is load my phone or camera's multi-gig memory up with map info (or download live info, if I didn't have outrageous data charges) and do this in real time.  But unfortunately Google Maps Mobile seems to have no concept of running as a nice generic Java mobile app that can talk to my GPS (e.g. on my K790 phone using Bluetooth GPS), Google Maps Mobile instead is all locked up with specific carriers and phones, and I don't think it will let you download maps in advance.  j2memap for some reason only pulls in satellite views, not street name views or enhanced geographic info.  Hmm, if only I had a chance to talk to someone at Google...

(This posting for Colin, geothinking author.)

More info and thoughts along these lines in my Mapping category and on my geocoding photos page.

georeferenced crowdsourcing network - Ogle Earth speculates

Daily Wireless excerpts a Newsweek article that struck me: Both Tele Atlas and competitor NAVTEQ already employ hundreds of "road warriors" in the field to gather data that satellites can't catch: traffic signs, one-way streets, points of interest...

"At the end of the day, there's no substitute for going out there and capturing the real world ourselves," says Navteq CEO Judson Green.

How to scale that? Build a crowdsourcing network, so that others can capture the real world for you — using devices that companies like TomTom (and Garmin, and Nokia) can build.

Geospatial crowdsourcing already has a impressive working example: OpenStreetMap.org, where you can (manually) upload your own GPS tracks to create a collective world road map or edit existing data. And now it turns out that Google has been piloting something similar in India

...

This is where this week's under-reported acquisition plays a part: Nokia bought Twango. Twango is a media sharing web application for mobile devices. Unlike its main competitor Shozu, which offers to forward your media to your web sharing app of choice (such as YouTube, Flickr and others), Twango wants you to store all your media in one place, on its servers, and share it using its URLs as a destination. With Twango soon installed by default on new Nokias mobiles, Nokia will be making a play to capture the generated media of its hundreds of millions of mobile phone users, so that network effects are its to dispense — with uploaded videos and photos providing eyeballs to advertisers.

from Ogle Earth - The human sensor web

UPDATE: Via Map Room I see there was also a recent New York Times article With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking

On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.

With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos.

data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

Lee Dirks - Director, Scholarly Communication - Microsoft
"Open access, data-driven science & the impact on research communication"

* basic research ACTIVITY unchanged
  but output options dramatically changed
  - blogs
  - wikis
  - scholarly journals
  - IRs
  - discipkine repositories
  - podcasts

Current Issues vs. Anticipated Trends

* OA to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm

* international cross-discipline research facilitated by interoperable standards

* "evolved" methods of peer review will be adopted

* preservation of data will become a requirement

* services develop around scientific content and prevail over pure publishing
  - data analytics, publishing workflow tools, long term storage/access

EDUCAUSE "Horizon Report" 2007 - for higher education IT in USA

* key trends
  - academic review and rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship
  - the notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship
* critical challenges
  - assessment of new forms of work
  - isses of IP and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done

OA momentum

... S.2695

Blogging
- example: useful chem
- recording experiments that fail

Wikis for Sharing Lab Protocols
- example: OpenWetWare

Bookmarks
- example: Connotea

IR
- 1400+ repositories worldwide

Influence of IRs

http://www.webometrics.info/top3000.asp

The Promise of Data Sharing

PLoS article - Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

"this is going to radically change science"

ISSUES
- data integration and interop
- annotation
- provenance & quality
- exporting/publishing in agreed formats
- security

"an aspect of competitive differentiation"

Publications as Live Documents

MS will have some results on this later this year

* helps with reproducibility if you can get to the raw data, simulations etc.

Trend: The Rise of Mass Collaboration

* Novartis released all its raw data on genetics of type 2 diabetes

[missed the end of the presentation]

blogs, wikis and libraries, oh my

LITA BIGWIG (Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software IG) is pleased to present the first ever online, unconference at ALA Annual 2007. The Social Software Showcase will be occuring around and during Annual. We have gathered eleven librarians and leaders in the field to present on cutting edge technology and social software. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to view and discuss the presentations on the official Social Software Showcase Wiki.

...

We will have a Twitter feed

http://www.twitter.com/bigwig

More great work by libraries adopting and promoting new web technologies - I have to say I'm impressed by the speed at which things are moving.

from LITA Blog - Social Software Showcase, sponsored by BIGWIG

The presentations aren't up yet, but they will be by the time ALA gets underway at the end of June.

Trendwatching: Still Made Here

The always colourful and engaging Trendwatching has their latest report: (Still) Made Here.

If everyone starts to report the full lifecycle (transportation included) carbon amounts in their products with carbon footprint labels, it may help to promote the Buy Local movement.

via OCLC It's all good

future of tech and libraries

The Shifted Librarian has lots of blogging from the "Future of Technology and Libraries" meeting.  You can start at

"The Future of Technology and Libraries" Meeting - Thursday May 17, 2007

and read forward.

soft peer review

Via Library 2.0 - Social Software and New Opportunities for Peer Review, I find a fantastic posting about the many different ways in which formal "hard" peer review can be enhanced by open web technologies:

Academic Productivity blog - Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation

Although I don’t think social software will ever replace hard evaluation processes such as traditional peer review, I suspect that soft evaluation systems(as those made possible by social software) will soon take over in terms of efficiency and scalability.

This is very much the position I took in my submission to the Nature peer review web focus, and which I will be re-emphasizing with a community-interaction angle in my upcoming Allen Press Seminar presentation.  I really like the comprehensive view that Academic Productivity has taken in looking at the many types of peer evaluation that can be provided on the open web, and the call for more APIs exposing more data for all of us to use.

I do think the debate about "open" peer review vs. traditional peer review is a bit of a red herring, and it very much concerns me when people suggest that open review can replace traditional (or in the language of this posting "hard") peer review.  We have already had open peer review for years, it's called preprint feedback, mailing lists, ArXiV, letters to the editor... it's a tremendous addition to, but not replacement for, the rigourous anonymous peer review system needed to provide a publication filter.

Tech to Watch in 2007 Horizon Report

They identified six technologies with time-to-adoption of between one and five years.
In addition to their analysis, they provide a useful list of web links for more information on each topic.

UPDATE: Probably I should link to the report (PDF). ENDUPDATE

Of most interest to me was "The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication".

New forms of scholarship, including fresh models of publication and nontraditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common—blogs and video clips, for instance—but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Some scholars worry that blogging may cut into time that would otherwise be used for scholarly research or writing, for example, or that material in a podcast is not as well researched as material prepared for print publication. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research—a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work.

I also found it interesting that they separated "Virtual Worlds" (e.g. Second Life) from "Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming".  I think these categories are too often combined, whereas I find they are quite separate experiences, as I described in Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA.

As with last year, they had a Horizon Project Wiki

http://www.nmc.org/horizon/wiki/Main_Page

They also have tagged bookmarks in del.icio.us under hz07, and invite others to add to their tagged collection

http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07

via Stephen's Lighthouse

Previously:
February 26, 2006  New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE 2006 Horizon report

the future: plan for uncertainty

Via Steve I find a good Library Journal article by Roy Tennant

Facing the Not Knowing - January 15, 2007

We need to become comfortable with the not knowing. We need to foster personal and professional strategies when things don't go as planned.

He makes a number of very good points, of which I think "If it doesn't have an API, it's not worth having" is a particularly important one in the library world.

JFK on the pace of technological change

I happened to be watching the JFK Moon Speech last night, and I was struck not by his famous lines ("We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard") but by the fact that a politician was using his bully pulpit to actually try to explain history and science, and to be thoughtful and inspiring about the implications.

Is it just me, or does no one, least of all politicians, do this any more?

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them.

Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.  Newton explored the meaning of gravity.

Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

I have tried to put forward a similar position on Web 2.0, which basically, we developed two days ago.
As JFK says

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers.

I for one welcome our Robotic Microsoft overlords

Microsoft Robotics Studio

Robot + Microsoft software = chills of fear up and down my spine

I'm sure they'll get that "kill all humans" bug worked out of the robotics laws subroutine any time now

Bill Gates wrote an 8 page article for the January 2007 Scientific American called (I am not making this up) "A Robot in Every Home".  Yes, you read that right, January 2007, not January 1957.

Tapscott on collaboration and Wikinomics in the Globe

Don Tapscott has the great fortune to get not one, not two, but seven articles in a series in the Globe based around his ideas in his new book Wikinomics.

The third article is out today.  I will update this post as the rest come out.

UPDATE 2006-12-30:

Part 4: The New Alexandrians

I wasn't able to extract a lot of meaning out of this, other than

A shared research infrastructure, in turn, allows project participants to harness insights and resources from thousands of university researchers, and hundreds of company researchers, too.

These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology -- breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders.

So keep that thought of shared infrastructure, shared platform in mind.

See next posting for part 5.

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2007-01-02: The final two articles. ENDUPDATE

Part 3: The Prosumer Revolution - Life game a signpost for future

in Rosedale's business, customers do 99 per cent of the work. His "product" is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, for short) called Second Life, a fascinating world where more than 400,000 participants socialize, entertain and transact in a virtual environment fabricated almost entirely by its users.

In fact, Second Life residents are far more than just "users." They assume virtual identities, act out fictitious roles and activities and even create virtual businesses that earn some 3,100 residents an average net profit of $20,000 a year.

The end sentence is a bit misleading.  "earn some 3,100 residents (out of a total user base of over 2,000,000)" might have set the context better.  Yes, I'm still bitter that I only have a dollar.

Second Life is no typical "product," and it's not even a typical video game. It's created almost entirely by its customers -- you could say the consumers are also the producers, or the "prosumers." After all, they participate in the design, creation, and production of the product, while Linden Labs is content to manage the community and make sure the infrastructure is running.

It's interesting to see that the "prosumer" terminology continues to gain ground, after being introduced so long ago by Toffler.

Part 2: Ideagoras - A new marketplace for ideas

In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine.

I'm all for collaboration and external sourcing of innovation, but make no mistake, collaboration is hard.  Think about how difficult it is for you to communicate ideas within your own organization, to people who already have some common context.  I spend person-weeks every year doing this, with only limited success.  Now imagine trying to extend that conceptual integrity outside of your walls.

Part 1: Peer Pioneers - Get your mass collaboration road map set

Though it is unlikely that hierarchies will disappear in the foreseeable future, it's clear that the traditional business enterprise is no longer the sole engine of wealth creation in the economy.

The quintessential example of mass collaboration is Wikipedia -- a collaboratively created encyclopedia, owned by no one and authored by tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

See, this makes me dubious right away.  Wikipedia is a very finely tuned collaboration engine with an actual number of active contributors that is very small.  Businesses need to be very wary of the idea that they can just wave some collaboration wand and get useful results.

Not part of the series, but effectively Part 0: The Net Generation is entering the workforce

According to New Paradigm's research, N-Geners are used to more choices in their everyday lives than previous generations, whether it's which of the thousand songs they want to listen to on their iPod, or which blog read. They thrive on the freedom to chose, yet are not naive when it comes to the boundless determination of marketers to sell them stuff. They are especially discriminating when it comes to evaluating companies and what they sell, and will not buy from — or work for — one with a poor reputation.

The traditional approaches to planning, decision-making and information transfer are painstakingly slow to this group reared on instant everything. They are incredibly well-connected and can tap into a huge network of their peers, either through their instant messaging contact lists or through social networks. Nothing stays secret for long. N-Geners don't take well to the hierarchical and authoritarian management style; they like to work in teams, collaborate, so that problem solving becomes a communal task. They expect to be involved in decision making.

There is a Wikinomics Blog.

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation

Web Services for Learning Object Repositories

Via SlideShare I discovered Web Services and Semantic Web for the Next Generation of Learning Repositories by Stephen Downes.  I was attracted to it because it uses one of the NRC presentation templates.  (UPDATE 2006-12-21: The presentation is from 2002, it discusses the creation of eduSource Canada.  I don't know if there has been any work on it recently, after the project finished in 2004. http://www.edusource.ca/ )

Considering that Stephen is working on topics of interest to my group, and the fact that we're in the same organization, we really should probably meet and talk sometime.

Does everyone else have the same experience of only finding out what your organization is doing from surfing the web, not from internal communications?