Science Library Pad

the blog is quiet

The blog is quiet for a number of reasons, including

* I have moved to using Twitter (@scilib) and FriendFeed a lot more for sharing information
* I have a new iPhone and as I discussed in my Twitter modes posting, short-posting services like Twitter are a more natural match for using on mobile devices.  You can blog from an iPhone, but it would take a lot of patience to tap a long posting out on the virtual on-screen keyboard.
* Reason I can't tell you which will be announced soon

In the meantime, you can look to Twitter and FriendFeed, e.g. for the recent ICSTI conference in Ottawa look at the #icsti2009 hashtag and the FriendFeed room.

This does point out one really unfortunate thing about Twitter search - it's not like Google, it doesn't go forever back in time.  It is intentionally limited to recent tweets.  So it looks like there was only one #icsti2009 tweet, when there were actually dozens, as you can see in the archive on FriendFeed.  (In fact making a FriendFeed room is one way to get some preservation of your tweets, although I believe FF search also doesn't cover all the way back in time either.)

And I recognize that Twitter is a much noiser information channel, full of half-formed thoughts, asides and insider person-to-person conversations.  The blog is still the best platform for long-form thoughts.

Britain's Science Minister uses Twitter for two-way discussions

Quite a few politicians have a presence on Twitter -- Barack Obama among them -- but most see it as a tool for advertising their activities rather than interacting with voters. But Lord Drayson, Britain's Science Minister, is different.

Times Online - Science Minister takes to Twitter - June 10, 2009

You can follow him: @lorddrayson

a call to journalists to do serious reporting on content copying

Here is some Serious Business Reporting from the Globe

About 32 per cent of the computer software in Canada is pirated, contributing to losses of $1.2-billion (U.S.) in 2008 alone, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). If Canada were to crack down and get its piracy rate to around 23 per cent – close to the U.S. rate of 20 per cent – it could result in 5,200 new jobs and contribute $2.7-billion to the country’s economy by 2011, according to a 2008 report from market research firm IDC.

Globe and Mail - Download Decade - New media, old rules - May 19, 2009

Wow: jobs, billions, Business Alliances, all very professional.
There's only one problem.  Those numbers are sh-t.  The RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and CRIA all report dire numbers for piracy and billions lost, numbers which they obtain by... making them up.

Seriously, they just pull them out of thin air.  I might as well say eliminating software piracy would cause Canada to have more pleasant summers and would increase the bison herd.  There's just as much evidence for that.

It is in the interest of industry associations to make digital content copying - which I might add is impossible to prevent technologically - to make this out to be some giant economy crushing disaster.  In the face of counter-evidence (tens of millions in ticket sales for the latest Star Trek, for example) their argument is that some imaginary amount of MORE money would be made, if not for the dread piracy gap.  This is complete, total, unscientific, evidence-free public relations nonsense.

I call on all serious journalists to follow the trail of these numbers from the industry advocacy organisations, do some investigation, and I guarantee you will find that they come from nowhere, they're simply made up.

Stop reporting these numbers as facts.  They're not.  They're basically idle speculation dressed up with scary numbers.

There are lots of real issues to report on, for example, incredibly complex international rights agreements that mean Canada almost always gets online content access later than and to a lesser extent than the United States, and archaic Crown Copyright and cost-recovery approaches in government that mean Canadians can't access their own digital data, paid for with public funds.

Google and the web of structured data

Google has announced it will be using (some) microformats and RDFa to enrich search results.  They call this Rich Snippets.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags.

Official Google Webmaster Blog - Introducing Rich Snippets - May 12, 2009

O'Reilly Radar says

Moving toward the Semantic Web will allow our searching technologies to become more intelligent and will set the stage for the next revolution in which computing systems can become more aware of the "meaningfulness of data".

We've already seen a shift toward "semantic search": Google has already been augmenting search results with Google Maps, limited catalog searches, and more recent entries into the search market such as Amazon's A9 and the yet to be released Wolfram Alpha differentiate themselves by the structured data and content that can be extracted from a search result. We have yet to a see a compelling reason for web masters to place RDFa or microformats into a site to enable this semantic data to be mined until today, until Google provided a social incentive for site designers.

O'Reilly Radar - Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa - May 12, 2009

Google has a help file to get you started: Marking up structured data.

Incidentally, if you're thinking, "why didn't someone tell me this structured data thing was coming?" I should mention that actually I did try to tell people, whether it was in my presentation to Allen Press in 2007 (where I talked about the need for microformats and semantic enrichment) or in my keynote to NISO Discovery last year (where I talked specifically about Yahoo SearchMonkey using semantic information).

Previously:
September 8, 2008  semantic search thoughts

Wolfram Alpha and the web of structured data

The good news is, WolframAlpha can understand a query like "unemployment in Ottawa".

The bad news is, as you can see in the Result, that while it knows what data it needs to compute the answer, "(data not available)".

This is as clear an example of why we need open data as I can think of.  If you want your computers to start providing you with smarter answers, you have to give them better information to work with.

WolframAlpha provides two channels to try to address this problem: Contribute Structured Data and Suggest Data Sources.  You can also contribute individual facts, but that won't scale very well.

the Open City - the next driver for innovation?

Mayor Gregor Robertson and Coun. Andrea Reimer want the City of Vancouver to support open-source software and open standards.

They also want the city to make as much data as possible freely available to the public. Reimer will introduce a motion [PDF] next Tuesday (May 19) that would see the city endorse the principles of open source, open standards, and open data, as well as start work on publishing data on the Web using open standards.

In a press release issued today (May 14), Robertson said that an “open city” philosophy would help create new opportunities in the information-technology sector.

City of Vancouver set to back open source, open standards, open data - straight.com - May 14, 2009

via Twitter - Rob Giggey (Rob works at the City of Ottawa) - May 15, 2009

(I tried to find the Gregor Robertson press release referenced above, but I haven't been successful - can anyone point me to it?)

Toronto Mayor Miller has also announced toronto.ca/open (which still shows "under construction").

In Ottawa, supported by some City of Ottawa staff but not (yet?) endorsed as any kind of official policy, we're starting the open data discussion as part of ChangeCamp Ottawa.

What can you do as citizens and what can we do as libraries to enable the sharing of our civic data?  Is sharing civic data a next logical step for public libraries as enablers of the public space?

Previously:
May 5, 2009  Web APIs explained on CBC Spark - and Open Data Under Construction

Government of Canada internal IT Innovation Campaign

The Government of Canada has opened what I would call an ideas market, a system to submit ideas, vote on them, and comment on them.  The Campaign is internal only and for IT staff only.  You can see a screenshot (by permission of the GC and the developers, Publivate)

Rather than give a URL which most of you can't access anyway, I'll just suggest that if you're in the Government of Canada, you can find more information and the link to the site by searching for "innovation campaign" on GCPEDIA (which is also accessible within GC only).  The site opened for submissions of ideas May 4, and will close May 29, as you can see from the countdown bar in the upper right.

Like GCPEDIA itself, I consider this a great development, showing a government willing to embrace risk, try new technologies, and draw upon the expertise of the community (about 18,000 federal IT specialists, in this case).  I think this is a measured approach, and I certainly would expect that if successful, it will lead to more consultations more broadly both within the government as well as ones open to all Canadian citizens.

I think this approach is really effective for breaking silos and circulating information - in some of the ideas already, a few things being proposed turn out to already be available, people weren't just aware of them elsewhere in the government.

I'm using the hashtag #gcitic to discuss and ask questions about the campaign on Twitter.

UPDATE 2009-05-06: I should mention another innovation aspect of this site, which is that it is the first time I've seen machine translation use in an official way.  Currently all Government of Canada websites must have all text in both official languages, which is usually done through manual translation.  This makes it basically impossible to have a dynamic site with constant changes.  If we're allowed to use machine translation, it will make it much easier to bring up e.g. public blogs.  Now that being said, the translation engine they are using is Google Translate, which is ok for a free translator but is by no means perfect.  I know there's tons of work being done on machine translation at NRC and elsewhere in the government - it would be nice if there was a standard machine translation service available that we could also use... hmm... I think I'll submit an idea... ENDUPDATE

Google uses this approach internally, their site is called simply Google Ideas.

(Screenshot via blogoscoped.com - The Tools Google Uses Internally)

I have seen this approach used to some extent in the library community, the example I always point to is JISC Repository Ideas (which is still up, but no longer active).  There are probably many others that I have missed.

The Obama administration has also used this approach a number of times, see e.g. my recent posting about the National Dialogue to gather IT ideas for the Recovery.gov site.

Previously:
November 03, 2008  Government of Canada launches official wiki for federal employees

conversations: local realtime versus global asynchronous - as applied to FriendFeed

FriendFeed has launched its Twitter-like "real-time" redesign, which has some of us unhappy and thinking about why we're unhappy.

What I think is that there are two different modes of operation you can address: real-time and asynchronous.

Across Realtime

So first, what is the nature of realtime, what characteristics does it have?
It's kind of a strange question in a way - we live in realtime.  It is now, I am typing.
But that nature is its strength and its limitation.
In realtime, a big part of your thoughts are concerned with yourself.  This is Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter's question is: What are you doing? but there's an implied "now" on the end.  What are you doing now?

Not what are you thinking.  Not what ideas have you developed.
What are you doing now?

This is a legitimate mode of interaction.  But it has issues:
* realtime doesn't scale, because you only have a very narrow window of immediate attention

I can talk to one person.  I can have a conversation with two people.
Apocryphal stories of Millenials or whatever gen we're up to now having dozens of chat windows open simultaneously aside, there's only so much time in the now.  In the now you can broadcast to many people.  But converse?  It's not like you can type into chat windows simultaneously.  The "multiple conversations" people have is really: slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, one after the other.  We are not multitaskers.  We are serial taskers.  At some point, that attention gets sliced so thin that all you can say is "yes", "no" and "lol".

Realtime by the nature of the limited slice you have, has to be: I, me, doing, now.

* realtime creates a false sense of urgency.  realtime is the pace of short-term business thinking.  realtime is the tick-tock of self-centred false importance.

Look at the crackberry man, out in the world, but staring at his little screen.  Out in the world, but living in his email.  He sent a message almost 10 seconds ago!  Why has no one replied?  Don't they realise he's important?

Yes, it's a caricature, but it has some truth.  Between your twitter follower alerts and your friendfeed follower alert and your facebook sheep throwing and your spam messages and the 100 other new emails and your tweetdeck and your calendar alarms... where are the cycles to, you know, actually think about anything.

Realtime is the buzz buzz buzz of busy-ness.  Business busy-ness.  But don't confuse activity with productivity.

* realtime is time-zone discrimination.  realtime is local.

Your scope of immediate thought and action is local.  In the now, a fire across the country is interesting, a fire in your building is ALARM ALARM.  Realtime is a great tool for re-connecting with your local community, with the people who are awake when you are, where you are.  But realtime by its very nature excludes the non-local, the timezone outsiders.

* realtime is loss of control

You can't keep up, the thought is gone, the tweet is gone, the friendfeed posting has scrolled... run twice as fast as you can.  Realtime brings not only false urgency, but since no one can keep up with everything, simultaneously, it means a loss of control, over information and over your ability to act.

* realtime is cr*p to monetize, except for search

Realtime is very rapid conversation.  Conversation is inherently hard to monetize.  Conversation is between people, in order to monetize it, you as the advertiser, the stranger, have to step in between the two people talking, and shout.  Imagine how popular that is.

Realtime conversation, scrolling off the screen second by second, is even worse.  Oh, they're talking about cats, I'll put up a cat ad... oh wait, they're talking about dogs... oh wait, they're going to go see Wolverine... oh wait, they're gone.  Oh ya, that's a genius space to try to stick your ads in.  Good luck with that.

You can monetize the search of realtime conversations, but don't confuse search with conversation.

** In Summary **

Realtime has value.  I'm in Ottawa, now.  If GCPEDIA goes down, I tweet that it is down, I see tweets when it comes back up.  I can ask a question of my local community, what's happening tonight?  is Bank Street closed?  where are the buses re-routed?

This is an absolutely useful connection and capability.
But it is only one possible way to interact.

Around the World in 80 Postings

The global asynchronous conversation, web pages linking to web pages, which turned into blogs linking to blogs, is another mode of operation.

There is no question hovering above the big empty box of your Blogger posting.  There is just a word: Create.

Not what are you doing, right now.  But what are you thinking, whenever.  Like this blog posting that I write now, but you may read at the appropriate time for you, in hours, days or weeks.

Asynchronous can have a measured pace, can be reflective, can weave in many different threads from many different sources, because you have the luxury of time.

* asynchronous is about the flow of conversation, not about the immediate individual acting

You link to me, I think, then link back.  I connect to your ideas, I don't speak directly in the moment to you.

* asynchronous is global, timezone agnostic

My friendfeed has people from all over the world.  Some are ending their day as mine begins, others haven't yet awoken.  Where's Berci?  Where's Bora?  Well it doesn't exactly matter, because if they post, I see their thoughts at the time of my choosing, and vice versa.

* asynchronous is actually a lot better to monetize

Because we're taking our time to scan and interact with long form ideas, you can figure out what we're talking about, and stick an ad next to that conversation, and we may actually have time to look at it.

** In Summary **

Asynchronous is about the global circulation of ideas.  I don't need to know where you are, or when you are, because I'm interacting with your thoughts at the time and place of my own choosing.

What this means for FriendFeed

Facebook and Twitter are already in the realtime, "what am I doing now" space.
Delicious and StumbleUpon and others are already in the "look what I found" space.

FriendFeed's strength was in the global, asynchronous conversation about the things that we'd found, the ideas that we have.  This is a particular type of conversation support that lends itself very well to scientific discourse, bouncing ideas back and forth around the globe, day after day.  The scientific discourse is a global asynchronous conversation, by its very nature.

Realtime mode is a nice feature for supporting conferences, when there really is immediate "this is happening now" to report on.  But it's a mode mismatch for long-form conversation about ideas.

As I have suggested on FriendFeed, it may be that in the end, with the divergence of the founder's goals from some of the users, we may have to write user requirements for the global asynchronous conversation, and if FriendFeed can no longer support them, then move elsewhere, or have a replacement site built.

What FriendFeed will lose is people who, at the time and place of their choosing, spend a lot of time on the site.  Time is attention.  Attention is eyeball you can put ads in front of.  FriendFeed will lose the people who were paying the most attention.

I was inspired to write this by Cameron Neylon's thoughtful posting Science in the open » “Real Time”: The next big thing or a pointer to a much more interesting problem?

In a way, this posting is part of my conversation with Cameron, despite the fact I have only the vaguest sense of where (in the UK?) and when he is.

We have taken different approaches to the issue of realtime, and in particular I want to raise a very important, indeed critical point that Cameron makes: filtering takes time.  One of the other incredibly powerful aspects of FriendFeed in asynchronous mode is that it bubbles up items of interest, through the collective action, the filtering that results from my friends liking and commenting on items.  When I open async FF in the morning, what I see is not the latest ideas, what I see is the most important ideas, based on the filtering of a community I trust.  Realtime, by its nature, has no time for filtering.  No time for filtering turns a curated stream of useful information into a firehose of content, the little specks of gold that dance in the stream lost because they are mixed in with the flood of useless noise.

Previously:
April 6, 2009  why I don't like FriendFeed beta

Google visualizes open government data

Official Google Blog - Adding Search Power to Public Data

We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. So for example, when comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate

There is also a video about how it works.

via ResourceShelf

So Google, whom do I talk to about adding Canadian data?

Recovery.gov crowdsources ideas for using IT to open government

I continue to be very impressed at the commitment of the US national government to maximize what are very new technology platforms and concepts to connect with the expertise of their citizens.

Recovery.gov has launched, for a very narrow window (April 27 to May 3, 2009) a "national dialogue" with the question

What ideas, tools, and approaches can make Recovery.gov a place where the public can monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds?

It then continues on to say

Making Recovery.gov a useful portal for citizens requires finding innovative ways to integrate, track, and display data from thousands of federal, state, and local entities. With this online dialogue, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is reaching out to the public, state and local partners, potential recipients and solution providers to help fulfill the commitment to a transparent and accountable recovery.

The Obama team have been using these kinds of "ideas market" approaches to gather feedback quite a bit.

The National Dialogue also have a presence on Twitter - @natldialogue

and on Facebook

via GovLoop - White House to Host Dialogue Solutions for Recovery.gov (you may need to be logged in to read, I'm not sure)

This is very timely because I'm working on a volunteer project to do something similar for Canada called StimulusWatch.ca (albeit from a grassroots level, so we have nowhere near the scale of Recovery.gov)

We're still not yet at alpha, but you can read a bit about the background of the project in our blog and about page.

building a conference social network: Pathable

After, shall we say, considerable deliberation, ChangeCamp Ottawa went with Pathable as our provider for a conference social network.  What I found compelling is that they have EventBrite integration, which means once we were ready to go, it was able to pull current registrations across (with names, emails, and affiliations) and send out Pathable invites, and as new users register it will automatically pick up the EventBrite registration and send out an invite.

While this still means a bit of extra effort on the part of users, it does reduce a bit the usual approach which is that you have to actually notice there is a separate conference socialnet and then go register separately and re-enter all your info.

It's not a free service, but we're getting great tech support.

(I should note that Pathable is a sponsor of ChangeCamp Ottawa.)

The event registration itself is at 

http://changecampottawa2009.eventbrite.com/

Once you register there it will do the automagic described above and send you an invite for

http://changecamp-ca.pathable.com/

I think it will be a good way to get people to engage before the unconference (but I'm being realistic about the amount of conversation that may go on - getting discussions going is HARD) and also just as importantly, I think it will be useful for the "oh I should connect to that guy I met, what was his name..." activity after the unconference.

What have your experiences been with conference socialnets?  Any suggestions?

The OCLC (Dis)Integrated Library System

Andrew Pace writes

OCLC is extending the WorldCat Local platform to include circulation and delivery, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components. A quick start version of WorldCat Local--available at no additional charge to FirstSearch WorldCat subscribers--is a first step to WorldCat Local and to a truly next-generation cooperative library management service.

...

Five years after I advocated dismantling library management systems, I am confident that using web-scale architectures and a cooperative service model are the right way to put things back together again. The OCLC cooperative is not only uniquely positioned to provide this solution, it is part of our obligation to libraries.

via Lorcan on Twitter

An interesting development. One wonders how it will fit in with OLE, Evergreen, DLF ILS API and other initiatives.  Also I would be interested to know if it will extend to true, article-level integration/linking for licensed content, which has been the barrier to true usefulness for the ILS in a modern academic library setting (right now we have the catalogue for books, separate article-level systems, and then federated search on top to combine the results).

Web 2.0 from a publisher perspective, using 2Collab as an example

One of the big challenges for all of us developing Web 2.0 is finding out what the users actually want.  That's part of why libraries and publishers are taking various lab, web development group, developer network and contest approaches.  Another big challenge is trying to build a community around your tools.

Just a quick review of some of the online activities:

There are lots of library labs, and a few publisher initiatives, including Elsevier Labs, Elsevier Scopus Labs (accessible only to Scopus subscribers), Ingenta Labs, and Nature's Web Publishing group (I don't think it has a home page, but you can see some of their work on Nature Launch Pad).  In the sort of library-vendor space OCLC and Talis have developer networks.  I think some of the other library catalogue vendors may have developer spaces, but they are usually closed.

Looking at a few more Elsevier things specifically:

Elsevier has SciTopics, which is also on Twitter.

Elsevier also just announced the winner of their Grand Challenge, the Reflect project (if you follow my FriendFeed, you may see some familiar names in the winning team, like Lars Juhl Jensen and Michael Kuhn).

Which brings us to Elsevier's 2Collab.  I had a chance for an advance preview of 2Collab in late 2007.  It takes a somewhat different tack to other academic bookmarking tools, focusing a lot on group collaboration.  I had a chance to see Camelia Csora present about 2Collab as a research collaboration tool (PDF) at NISO Discovery Tools forum in 2008.

There are lots of challenges with these kinds of tools.  Can we integrate them into user workflows?  Can they understand bibliographic metadata, do lookups on DOIs, read COINS from source and embed COINS into their bookmarking pages?  Can we build standard APIs for these services?

Camelia has moved on to ebooks, and I see in my FriendFeed today that the new Product Manager for 2Collab, Michael Habib, will be presenting about 2Collab as a publisher collaboration tool

http://www.slideshare.net/habibmi/engaging-a-new-generation-of-authors-reviewers-readers-through-web-20

You can read more in his posting Engaging a New Generation of Authors, Editors, and Reviewers - Presentation for Boston Editors' Conference.

One of the big challenges in this area is getting people into the new network in order to collaborate - this is the issue that most of the "scientist social networks" have - there's no one there.  Even using Google Docs to collaborate tends not to scale very well, as you end up having to invite and reinvite groups of people to each new document.  FriendFeed as a collaboration space I think has a lot of advantages, in that it brings an immediate, individual benefit (mindcasting/lifecasting unification of web activity) as well as a critical mass of people, as well as lightweight group and discussion tools.

That's not to say you couldn't use 2Collab along with FriendFeed - and it occurs to me that one immediate step all the publishers (and other service providers) could take would be to work with FriendFeed to add their academic bookmarking services added as top level "import" sites.  Right now, despite a strong scientific user community, FF only has the non-academic sites in its list: 

• delicious
• Diigo
• Furl (which is now gone, bought by Diigo)
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon
• Twine
• はてな

The key point is it can no longer be either/or. It's not my site OR your site, it's all of our sites, interconnected. It's also/and.  I have to be able to go seamlessly from LibX to Zotero to Mendeley to Connotea to EndNote to 2Collab to Papers to FriendFeed and back again.  If Zotero has a great tool, I should be able to call it using an API from LibX.  Data can't be trapped at point of creation, it has to be able to flow around the web to be useful.

NYPL is calling all widget builders

Our first widget is going to be a List Building Widget that will include platform integration for iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, blogs and web pages, and/or desktops.    The widget will allow users to:

• Build lists of favorite book, movie, music, game, etc. lists
• Build lists of materials needed for homework projects
• Share lists with friends

We are looking for open source designs that can be made available to and repurposed by other organizations seeking to engage young people. The widgets will be developed as part of a 2008 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services titled Homework NYC Widgets: A Decentralized Approach to Homework Help By Public Libraries.

Read the RFP.

The project team will accept and answer questions about the proposal via comments on the NYPL Labs blog. 

See the blog post for more information, including contact information.  Deadline to submit proposals is May 1, 2009.

It's great to see libraries reaching out to their community, to build technology that will benefit lots of organisations.

meta: I second that blog emotion

If you'd asked me, I would have guessed that SLP tends to weaker words that are somewhat negative, as mild criticism is a common theme for me.  According to HotStuff 2.0 for Science Library Pad however, I apparently tend to medium-strength, positive words (in the plot below, lower position is stronger words, right is more positive words).

HotStuff actually has all kinds of cool information about library blogs, including word clouds and geographic references - a great example of making the blog data work hard.  There are also daily summaries in the HotStuff blog.

Discovered via DLTJ - Some Navel-Gazing: A Meta-Post about DLTJ.

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

why I don't like FriendFeed beta

The creators report a  # number of goals for FriendFeed beta.  My responses in bold.

# A consistent look for entries, no matter where they originated from, to help you focus on what your friends are sharing

I like knowing the source of entries.  I mentally prioritize based on source - Twitter is ephemeral, delicious is an indication of "something to read", a blog post indicates some serious thought.  Now I can't easily tell what is what.

# A new and improved share box that can now post entries to multiple feeds

Neglects to mention that the main feature of the new share box is that (by default) it posts to Twitter as well, and (without the option to disable) it automatically includes in the tweet an ff.im link back to FriendFeed, effectively trying to redirect traffic to FF via Twitter.

# The ability to send and receive direct messages

I don't see any use for this feature, considering I can already reach people through multiple other channels, and don't need yet another inbox to check.

# Filters so you don’t miss a post from a certain friend or an entry about a specific topic

Ok.

# Keyboard shortcuts for the most common commands

I don't use keyboard shortcuts, but ok.

# And, one of the most defining features of our redesign — and what we believe will underlie everything about FriendFeed from now on: real-time. There’s no longer a need for refreshing — every view in FriendFeed now updates in real-time.

This was always an option, it is now the default.  You can disable it (by clicking on the pause icon.)  I personally never use this except in a conference reporting room.  FriendFeed is a long-form conversation, it's not Twitter, it doesn't need to bounce new information in every second, I can refresh once I've read a page.

That's the end of their # items, here are my further thoughts...

Overall this design, like the recent Facebook redesign, seems intended to copy Twitter.

* prominent user icon next to their posts: check
* real-time updating (as in Twitter search or TweetDeck): check
* direct messaging: check
* big open "what are you doing" box at the top: check

The problem is, this fundamentally breaks the model of information interaction in FriendFeed.  I wrote (on FriendFeed, naturally), that I dislike FaceBook in general, but I liked FF because it was about "the social life of information".  It's not people-centric, it's not "whatcha doin?"-centric, it's about people interacting with interesting information.

The redesign breaks that.  From the simple standpoint of human psychology: your eye is drawn to faces.  Your eye is drawn to movement.  Your eye is drawn to the left edge of the screen.  Your eye is drawn to bigger items first.

What FF used to put on the left: white space and small information source icons.  Reaction: hmm, I will scan this information.

What it puts there now: people's face icons, constantly moving with realtime updates.  Reaction: person! person! person!

So FriendFeed has taken what FaceBook and Twitter already have, and buried its own unique functionality.  Why wouldn't I just use FB and Twitter then, what's the point?

Now I understand there is an underlying point about monetization, and the only money is going to be in realtime search.  But the way to deal with that (as Twitter does, about which more in the next posting) is with a separate search interface, not by ruining your main user interface.

Understand that FriendFeed is my main information interface - I use it basically as a replacement for reading feeds (with FF, the news comes to me) and much more than Twitter or FaceBook.  It's important to me that it work well.

There is an official channel for providing feedback (the link to which is buried at the end of the announcement in their blog) -

the area is  http://beta.friendfeed.com/friendfeed-beta

I also made a poll using twtpoll (which turns out to be really easy to do - recommended)

UPDATE 2009-04-11: The poll has closed, here are the results

Dislike beat like pretty handily, but on the other hand, Like plus don't care outweigh Dislike slightly.

Mathew Ingram at Third Tuesday Ottawa

First to get some administrivia out of the way - yes, in words I think I can attribute to Douglas Adams, as his trilogy grew to four books and more - "there was a miscounting" and Third Tuesday was indeed on the 5th Monday.  But regardless... thanks to Joseph Thornley, CNW and everyone involved for bringing Mathew Ingram of the Globe to talk in Ottawa.

I think as part of his role of engaging the community Mathew has been giving this talk a lot, but it was still good - he covered a range of topics including the Public Policy Wiki and Twitter, with unexpected praise for CoverItLive (which I didn't know was Canadian) and TweetDeck as powerful tools.  I have to admit that while I had skimmed through the TweetDeck interface options, I hadn't tried them all - the Twitscoop tag cloud integration is a way to keep an eye on the realtime news topics streaming by - Mathew said he found out about the Mumbai attacks when he noticed Mumbai getting larger and larger in the word cloud and clicked through to see what was going on.  (See my posting on Twitter modes for a bit more about TweetDeck.)

There was time for a number of questions (it's always good to see a presentation that makes time for this) - I won't go over them all - you can see the--what are we supposed to call it--liveblogging? livetweeting? of the event under hashtag

#tto

He had a posting earlier this month The Guardian ups the ante on APIs and if you've been reading this blog, you know I'm all about the APIs, so I was glad to have an opportunity to ask him a question about it.  It would be great if the Globe could offer this kind of capability.  In my opinion the winners in the online space are going to be the ones who figure out how to be open, machine readable, and (somehow) monetized.  (Maybe we all buy tshirts that say "I love the Globe API", I don't know :)

UPDATE 2009-03-31: Brief summary with links to audio of presentation and Q&A now available.  Via Twitter/FF.  ENDUPDATE

SIDEBAR on the space and on technology: It was a good meeting space, although there's no free wifi.  I'm getting increasingly tempted to get a Rogers Rocket Stick 3G USB network stick, but I don't think I could justify the cost - I wish they had a pay-as-you-go version, I'd use it all the time.

Since my tiny netbook got attention again, I'll mention it's the Asus Eee PC 4G, it's a first-generation device and handy to throw in a backpack or shoulder bag, but it has a few issues: small screen, tiny keys (I'm lucky that my fingers are small), limited battery life (maybe 1.5 hours) and limited storage 4G "hard drive" - internal flash drive.  People asked if it was slow but it's actually not compute limited for basic web surfing tasks, even using WinXP - that's one of the lessons netbooks are teaching us - you can even play full motion video on it.  You can add an SD card in a built-in slot for more storage, it appears as a second drive.

I think you're probably better off with a second-generation device, say 9" to 10", with better keyboard, longer battery life, and 160GB internal HD, something like an Acer Aspire One.  There's a good comparison chart of netbooks in Wikipedia (although look at the raw weight numbers only, not the colours, since they've made an eccentric decision to colour the weight ranges differently depending whether it's measured in pounds of kilograms).  END SIDEBAR

Twitter modes: real-time news and event reporting, topic rendezvous, mobile and power interfaces

There is one core use-case for Twitter which I have discussed before, that of using Twitter as a "social network maintenance" tool, to engage in an ongoing conversation with friends and colleagues, across distance and time (some of the people I tweet with are in England, others in California).

In discussion on FriendFeed, one of those far-away contacts, Deepak, reminds me that I should discuss some of the other modes, the other use-cases for Twitter.

1) Real-time news: if something happens, you should be able to pick out reports about it (with the right keywords) by using search.twitter.com

2) Similarly, through the use of hashtags, you can get reports from events and about topics.

For example, if you want to know what people are saying at the UK Serials Group conference, a search of #uksg09 will help (I don't know what you will find there, as at the time of this writing, the March 30 event hasn't started yet - right now you just see people doing their final arrangements to get there).

If you want to see a view post-event, try e.g. #jisc09 to see what people had to say during and after the annual JISC conference.

You can also see an example of this in my previous posting, about the Twittering of Obama's first visit to Canada.

And it was by watching event reporting on the #ali social media conference in Ottawa on Twitter that I got connected into the community that is now working on #changecampottawa.  In fact, a lot of the ChangeCamp Ottawa planning and information sharing takes place through Twitter.

Likewise, if you're interested in a particular topic, say #nasa space programs, a search will lead you to other interested people and links about that topic.

You can see a small list of Ottawa social media tags in my posting connecting to Ottawa social media community through Twitter.

3) Mobile and the constraints it brings

A big deal is made out of "only 140 characters".  Well, keep in mind that it's possible the desktop computer may one day be considered as obsolete as the deskset telephone.  For many people, their entire telephone experience is mobile, and it may be that our main computer interface in the US and Canada becomes mobile as well, as it already is in other places in the world.  Mobile means two things: small screens and terrible keyboards.  As anyone who is unskilled in cellphone text entry can attest, 140 characters starts to look like a lot when you're trying to use a numeric keyboard to enter words.  As well, trying to read more than a sentence or two at a time on many cellphone screens is simply not possible.

The reason both Twitter and Facebook have short status messages, is that this supports SMS as transport, and that many of the users only ever see those messages through the tiny window of a cellphone screen; they never use big screens on desktop computers for their social networking.

4) Other interfaces

The Twitter web interface is pretty basic.  There are better clients on mobile phones and on desktops.  In particular, TweetDeck is one popular power-user Twitter interface.  Here's a selected view showing some live searches (you can click through to Flickr then select All Sizes to see it at original size):

Using Twitter in this way is really a qualitatively different experience.  Not only is it much easier to do some things (such as retweet), you also can get a big picture of what is going on - incoming filtered tweets next to your incoming @ replies, next to direct messages, with the option to have people sorted into columns by group (work, personal, etc.) as well as to be continuously running realtime searches on topics of interest.  This is a very powerful window on the world of information, if you want to be grand about it, it's a sort of realtime world dashboard.

UPDATE: 5) Search and the Twitter ecosystem

I should mention a couple things:

First about search -

* Twitter search is (mostly) an exact match.  If you search e.g. social, you won't see hits for socialize.

* If you use Twitter search from the home page (or add &source=serp to the search URL), Twitter will show matching user accounts as well, and those are sliding matches.  e.g. here is a search on #gov that shows matching accounts for various US Governors.

Secondly, because Twitter was smart enough to provide an API, a huge ecosystem has grown up around Twitter - this includes tools I have mentioned before, but many many more.  See e.g. this giant list.

Change-tweets come to Ottawa

(A post rescued from draft, somewhat dated but helps to explain a bit about the aspect of Twitter for news and event reporting.)

This graph from TwitScoop shows the activity on Twitter for the hashtag #obamawa - the tag people used for President Obama's visit to Ottawa on February 19, 2009.  Graph captured around 4 PM.  You can see a peak as he arrives in Ottawa, specifically when he gets to Parliament Hill, and a second peak as the joint press conference takes place.

The use of hashtags and the powerful near-realtime search provided by search.twitter.com is a powerful engine for connecting people together who would otherwise never communicate, and for connecting across many different communities.  If you haven't been paying attention to Twitter, you may be surprised at a sampling of the news and government organisations that made postings ("tweets"):

• the US embassy in Ottawa - yes, the real US embassy officially live-tweeted the visit, including the visit to Byward Market
  
• CBC
• TVO's The Agenda

as well of course, many Canadian citizens just going about their lives in Ottawa and elsewhere posted their thoughts.  Whatever you may think about some of the trivialities that people post on Twitter (which are to be expected, since some of Twitter is small talk, which is usually not exactly groundshaking), I think you will agree that the first visit of President Obama to Canada was an event worth people's time and online words.

Here's what the scoop looked like at 5:30 PM that day

If we're talking about laments for democracy and citizenship and news reporting - what this means is people were engaged, they were excited, and they were participating in a shared experience as equals with major news organisations. This is what democracy is all about. I'm not saying that means they have an equal level of expertise, I'm saying the technology enables them to have the same level of participation, and to share their own observations.  Even if we wanted citizens to be passive consumers of broadcast news (and surely we didn't?) that age is gone.  The new era is about the newsmakers, the newsmedia, and the newscitizenry all engaging in a discussion together.  Surely that's a more profound engagement in our own democracy than sitting on a couch watching Peter Mansbridge, or skimming the Globe over morning coffee and then tossing it in the recycling bin.

Twitter for late adopters in the media

This is specifically for mainstream media late adopters - I know many people are trying legitimately to understand Twitter at the moment.

I have a suggestion however for MSM late adopters: why don't you listen to the early adopters, so you don't end up sounding like curmudgeonly prats, every single time.

This is what happens: a bunch of people quietly and without fanfare find a tool that is useful in their lives, and use it.  End of story... except eventually enough find useful value in this tool that the mainstream media Discovers it (in the same sense that Columbus "discovered" America).  There are then four main approaches:

1) (the media) Hype the tool beyond belief as the solution to everything
2) Ask the actual users and then dismiss their answers
3) Say that it sucks
4) Try to understand it, but without the necessary years of personal and technological context

Anyone who has seen the news about Twitter recently has seen #1, along with Jon Stewart/Samantha Bee's artful skewering of it.

Margaret Wente goes for #2, in an article in which you could replace "Twitter" with "blog", "computer", or for that matter "horseless carriage", depending on the time period.  Ego tweeto, ergo sum.  I can summarize in less than 140 characters, although she takes hundreds of words:

"What's this new thing?  I don't get it.  It must be a waste of time.  Downfall of civilization possible."

(You can join my Twitter summarization challenge, if you wish.)

I admit, it took me a long time to understand Twitter.  But I took the time.  That understanding enabled me to give a presentation including Twitter as a topic, and to write my previous posting about Twitter broadcast vs. Twitter engagement.  You can't arrive on March 20, look around quickly with no (or very few) followers or followees, and get a sense of what it's all about in time to have it in print on March 28.  Taking the time to figure something out - might be something the mainstream media should try, before they all go bankrupt.

Ian Brown goes for #4 and is quite thoughtful, but missed the point.  Give me Twitter or give me death.  Blogs are to some extent about being published, which is to some extent about being remembered beyond death.  Twitter?  Do you seriously think I want to be remembered for "I went to the diner, then did some laundry"?

If people were tweeting into a void, Ian, it might be true that they are raging against the dying of the light, but for the most part they're not.  They're telling their friends and colleagues what they're doing.  You know, like human beings have done at home and at work, for thousands upon thousands of years.  This is not new.  This is just a tool for something that has always been done.  I'm willing to bet if you listen to people answering their cells on the bus or train, for at least 50% first words in response to the other end are "I'm on the bus" or "I'm on the train", followed by "I'm going (somewhere) to do (something)".  Questions about Where are you? and What are you doing? are fundamental to human nature, they're part of the social glue that holds us together.

And I have to say, in the end, Ian you get it

Even so, the average Twitter user is 31 (not a teenager), urban and almost certain to own a personal digital assistant. More than half read newspapers every day (albeit online, three-quarters of the time). That doesn't sound like the profile of a bunch of revolutionaries, or even a group to be afraid of. Computers are replacing human beings in more and more venues in which public life was once enacted — at the bank, in meetings, at work, at the library, at the newsstand, dating, chatting. People need to replace lost face time somehow. Tweeting does that.

Could you maybe have a face time chat with Ms. Wente and explain that?

UPDATE 2009-03-29: A great posting on Writing about Twitter, via... Mathew Ingram on Twitter.

what are you doing on Twitter?

This is a serious question.  Twitter is a tool to engage with your community, in fact it doesn't make any sense if you don't have a community, as I said in my Web 2.0 history talk.  If your community is in Facebook, mailing lists, MySpace, a Battlestar Galactica fan site or for that matter the local coffeeshop or pub, there's nothing wrong with that.

I can certainly see you might be there just to follow interesting people, but I'm not sure this going to get you more value than following their blogs, since you're going to get quite a bit of noise, due to the nature of the medium.  I would never write a one-line blog post that I'm fighting with the cafeteria vending machine, but I do write tweets like that.

Darren Barefoot has been thinking in particular about the follower count issue, and has an elegant lifehack for those who can't help watching their count - a GreaseMonkey script to remove it from the screen altogether.

He also points to a fantastic thoughtful piece by Dave Gorman - When Twitter Gets Weird...

But I hope Twitter doesn't turn into Myspace with all that 'thanks for the add' nonsense. It's not a competition to collect as many friends as possible. And anyone who follows thousands and thousands of people can't actually be following them can they? So relax. And interact. I mean really interact.

Gorman suggests one way to find out if an account is actually interactive is looking at their @ replies in TweetStats.

I fare ok (I think) - 23%. (Below is barchart of replies on left, and interface used for Twitter on right.)

An account whose identity I won't mention, but it rhymes with Mrime Pinister, has 0% (no @ replies, so "no data").

I got followed by a "social reporting something" account, which was following over 8000, so I immediately blocked it - I have to say in fairness that when doing the TweetStats, it actually turns out to be very interactive (36%) - but I have to wonder if this is a microcommunity within a larger community. That is, you have a dozen or so people you know and @ reply with (and maybe make a Tweetdeck group for) and 8000 other people you "follow" but can't keep up with or interact with in any meaningful way.

To be fair though, the architecture of Twitter rewards (or if you're a corporation, maybe requires) following, since you can't DM someone who doesn't follow you, and they can't DM you back unless you follow them.  (You can however send @ replies to people who don't follow you, and to people you don't follow, and they will show up in their @ replies section or in a search - probably some people don't realise this.)

What I said on Darren's site (forgetting, as usual, to use CoComment) is

I think in part the stats obsession is about status, and in part it’s about extending a tired broadcast model of audience and demographics into the online world. In social networking, what matters is not number of followers, what matters is whether you are engaging with your community. It’s about engagement and influence, not racking up a high score. When I see someone who “follows” more than a couple hundred people on Twitter, I know they can’t possibly be engaging with them in much of a meaningful way. I just got followed by some “social research application” guy who follows over 8000 - to me that’s an immediate signal to click the block button, which I did.

UPDATE: Via FriendFeed I see that Bora had a good post related to this topic last year: PLoS - on Twitter and FriendFeed.

UPDATE 2009-03-29: I should mention that Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, follows 186 people and has 3196 tweets.  (He is followed by a rather epic 279,077 people).  So when it comes to who you follow and how much you tweet, it's about quality, not quantity.

plan your strategy first - select your library technologies later

A fantastic post from Meredith Farkas about why Web 2.0 initiatives succeed or fail at libraries - It’s not all about the tech - why 2.0 tech fails.

Whatever we’re doing should be tied to the library’s strategic goals and planning.

If it’s not tied to the library’s goals, then how will it be seen as a priority? Similarly, 2.0 technologies should be planned for in a strategic way, which I think has not happened at a lot of libraries. Some libraries jumped on the blogging bandwagon because they thought (or were told) that every library must have a blog. Other libraries started wikis because staff were really excited about the idea of having a wiki. Neither are good reasons to implement a technology. We first need to understand the needs of our population (be it patrons or staff) and then implement whatever technology and/or service will best meet those needs. We need to have clear goals in mind from the outset so that we can later assess if it’s successful or not. These technologies may be fun, but they’re simply tools.

The paragraphs above are as good a description of the need for a strategic planning function (which, being an enterprise architect, I naturally think of as an Enterprise Architecture function) at a library.  This is what I said on FriendFeed

It is absolutely not about the technology. In enterprise architecture terms, it's about determining the target (most commonly, a strategic plan) and then ensuring all activities are aligned with that plan. It can be hard for an org to understand that both working really hard, but on the wrong things AND indulging 'side' projects because the tech is trendy will get them nowhere. If it doesn't move you forward to your goals in a sustainable way, don't do it.

That's not to say you shouldn't allow "20% time" for experimentation, but draw a clear line between a blog experiment, and an official public blog presence. One can be tried and disappear, the other had better be sustainable.

Dorothea has quite rightly called me out for talking in my blog more about the technology than the people,  (The great thing about blogging is I get to test my ideas and their expression against an audience that thinks about these issues from many different angles.)  So I want to be very clear: the specific technology implementation does not matter, at a high level.  You must first decide, will creating this business function (e.g. "store organisational output") move me towards my strategic goals.  You must do this with a clear-eyed view of the ROI (that is, don't ascribe silver-bullet capabilities to a commodity technology - my joke at work is, to the extent that an IR is just a hard drive spinning in a corner, I could run an IR from home - I have 750GB of RAID 1 mirrored, networked storage).  The point being of course that an IR is not just a hard drive, it's a whole set of people and processes that make it valuable, sustainable, and worthwhile.

In summary - based on where you want to go (your strategic goals):
1. Chose the right set of aligned activities.
2. Ensure you have the right people and process to support those activities.
3. Only then concern yourself with the particular technology implementation details.

This is an echo of what I said in "librarians don't need to know SEO" - start at the high level first, don't just grab onto the latest buzzword.  I wish I could fit more about enterprise architecture into this blog, but it is a huge topic (I'd make a joke about "I have a wonderful solution, but sadly I've run out of space on the margin").  I have spent years trying to explain various aspects of it here, see the Enterprise Architecture category for my various attempts (including this one).

Libraries in Computers - March 31, 2009

I was thinking about the post title and it occurs to me - no offense to InfoToday - that "Computers in Libraries" is kind of an old way of thinking about things.  The reality today is Libraries in Computers.
This is not a new idea - Mark Weiser was writing about ubiquitous computing in Scientific American in 1991.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Is your library becoming a part of your patrons' everyday life?  All this to introduce CIL 2009 session

D203: Embedding Services: Go Where the Client Is

coming up on March 31, featuring my colleague Natalie Collins.  She'll talk about the process that got us to "allowing discovery to happen in the user’s regular work environment".  If you want more details, a previous post about a thousand words may give a hint.

Brady Gilchrist - presentation notes - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa

Social Media Breakfast Ottawa #7
Brady Gilchrist

Summary of Presentation

I would say his message was: instead of marketing TO your customers, market WITH your customers.
In other words, instead of just repeating "Cos-tanza" over and over again, you'll have to actually be interesting and engaged (which is much harder).  Be a real person, not a faceless "brand".

My Thoughts

Brady is a very good speaker and I thought he made a compelling case for the transformation that is sweeping over the media landscape - and he understood that this has been coming for over a decade, and that it's about engagement, not particular technologies.  Also he gets bonus points for mentioning Battlestar Galactica and showing the Star Trek: The Next Generation PADDs as precursors to our modern mobile devices (I made this same point myself - using the same image - on slides 4-5 of the Trendspotting presentation I gave two years ago).

You can see the power of customer engagement just by following the #lost and #bsg hashtags as the shows are airing on old-fashioned television (and of course before and after as well) or by seeing all of the work that has gone into the Wikipedia Battlestar Galactica pages and the entire dedicated Battlestar Galactica wiki.  This is all work that consumers do for free, because they are engaged with the product.  They're not doing this because it's some obscure thing that geeks do, they're doing it because people will share what they're interested about.  That could be your thing they're talking about and creating content around and (implicitly) promoting - if your thing is interesting enough.

There were some good (thoughtful) questions from the audience.

On the Interweb

You can follow Social Media Breakfast Ottawa discussions using hashtag #smbottawa , they also have a blog.  Brady said the best way to connect with him is through his Twitter (bradygilchrist), he also has a website.

Raw Notes

he's talking - good speaker

* talking about challenge of getting people to understand the technology
* talking ab0ut Kurzweil - rate of change - things changing so quickly we need open minds

* blogger in 1999 accidentally
* digital life - wired sailboat
* Starship Millenium - "most expensive blog ever done"
* ISDN-B Inmarsat channel
* (lots of talk about) rate of change
* more voices and more knowledge
* Tim Berners-Lee (not recognized - photo)
* business models are based on scarcity - but we live in an age of abundance
* everything is coming out of its containers
- music
- starting to happen with books

World we live in
* Near Web (desktop)
* Mobile Web
- "there isn't anything that isn't connected"
- "digital snacks" - low price
- fundamental shifts - "unboxing of newspapers"
- newspapers are made more interesting by social media
- the community joins the media
* Far Web (broadcast + Internet) - (ed comment: more like video on demand web)
- (paraphrase) has anyone noticed that the people with money aren't watching commercials
- what do people talk about: Lost, BSG...
- Eee PC-in-a-keyboard
- social media are great tools for creating a revolution (ed comment: maybe)
- could have very rapid adoption curves, e.g. Twitter
* Not so new.  1991. - Third Wave - ubiquitous computing - ubicomp - Mark Weiser - "The Computer for the 21st Century"
- (paraphase) we are now surrounded by computer chips / computer technology

*** Star Trek PADDS
- in science fiction technology doesn't really matter for technology's sake
* William Gibson
- "The future has already arrived.  It's just not evenly distributed yet."

* when creating a business: work in the space between early adopters and early majority - GET OUT EARLY before it becomes commoditized

* discussion about whether lurking has negative impact - it's ok to be a watcher -
1. You need to pay attention to what's going on
2. even if there's a small amount of interaction it's still good
* Black Swan - changes all the rules

* (paraphrase) if you're a business you'll never see it coming - you're out of your mind if you're waiting for it to hit the mainstream media
* social media as early warning medium for business

* "social media makes people smarter" - "deeper connectors on subjects"

* Rome burns and few react
- no one is paying attention to PVRs
- just "digital" doesn't solve anything - "Understand how to create abundance, knowledge, trust and connection is (the solution)."
- The One Computer Theory - the Internet as one big computer
- don't silo yourself

- "all roads must lead to dialog" - Age of Connection - lateral connections

New Rules

1. Be Present
2. Connect to others
3. Participate in ways that enhance social capital (ed comment: "don't be a marketer, be a market")

* master ubiquity and engagement

* "Many decision makers have no clue"
- the idea of the media buy (or he's maybe saying media pie) (old thinking)

* (advertising) money is being spent in places where people aren't looking

* "Motivation is the new segmentation"
- (I think he said) by participating in the conversation you can help shape the motivation

END PRESENTATION

Q: What do you tell broadcasters, newspapers to do?
A: Understand your audience / Ask your audience - create a platform for dialog

Q: Is social media just the vocal majority
A: (paraphrase) well, mass media is all lurkers - so social media is "truer"

Q: Is what's working well companies creating their own social networks?
   e.g. some companies go awry on Facebook
A: What is participation - add value to existing dialog, or spark a new one

"semantic web for marketers" - (ed comment: ???)

Q: some industries are starting to adapt
how do we compete as a country if a lot of new technologies are not available here
(Kindle etc.)
A: (paraphase) CanCon is killing CanCon

... consumers find a way... (geoproxy)
"the more you deny it, the more bittorrents..."

Canada as a digital ghetto?

Q: how does the Globe continue to create... they have extraordinary content that makes their platform worthwhile... now what do they do in terms of costs and sustainability?

A: no one knows - engage with audience/... "I don't have the answer"

Comment on music industry - they tried to fight with DRM and are now giving up...
A: "information wants to be free" - but everyone spends money on things they find interesting

"DRM sucks!"

END QUESTIONS

People Promote Their Events

* (didn't catch name of event) Mark Evans April 2
"brandividual" ????

* cupcakecamp.ca
March 29

podcastersacrossborders - Kingston, Ontario - June 19-21

The usual sidebar about wifi

I was (as usual) the only person I saw with a laptop (my little Asus 7" Eee PC 4G) - this did make it easy to camp the power outlet.  Also the only person to ask about wifi (AFAIK) - result:
* tried to get online but no luck - user/pass doesn't work
"The User Name and Password combination you have entered is invalid. Please try again."

Sometimes I feel like I'm back at Internet Librarian 2004 all over again (where I was in a giant room full of people, and almost the only one have a laptop, open it up and start typing).

I think I probably annoyed people with my aggressive typing, I'm sorry (but welcome to the 21st Century).  In a way I feel on the outside as usual - I'm not in the "writing on paper about how technology is transforming our lives" crowd (which I could never understand - writing URLs and notes on paper?  so then to share it, you have to transcribe it to digital?  what?) - and I'm not in the 3G-erati, the iPhone crew who never have to worry about Wifi access.  (I refuse to pay for the iPhone which doesn't meet my needs, just so I can get 3G, and I'm not getting a 3G stick for the small amount of usage it would get - what I'd like is pay-as-you-go 3G - there's a market opportunity for you.)

I think they're going to work on getting wifi access for future events.