Science Library Pad

City of Toronto Web 2.0 Summit Nov. 26-27, 2008

Looks like you can go to City Hall Council Chamber (?) or attend the webcast.
They have a gigantic speakers list, including Ken Cochrane, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Government of Canada and Peter Cowan, Director of Enterprise Information Management at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan).

The site says

City of Toronto Web 2.0 Summit will be an exciting, interactive forum to explore how Web 2.0 technology can change the way governments interact with citizens, create policies and make decisions.

City of Toronto - Moving Toward Government 2.0 - Web 2.0 Summit

via Michael Neilson in FriendFeed

meta: 4 year blogiversary in charts

A series of charts from various stats services, as today is this blog's 4 year anniversary ("blogiversary").
(This is not my first blog, my oldest blog will be 8 years old next May.)

This is my 2047th post.  Thanks for reading.
Coming up in future posts: thoughts on "why I blog", and more thoughts on conference blogging/reporting.

I started tracking my blog in these services at different times, and they all record something slightly different, so they aren't exactly 1 to 1 comparable. The most complete data is from TypePad itself, followed closely by Google Analytics which I started using just a few days after the blog launched. In most cases the dates should be clear from the chart. Also some of the declines in hits are attributable to me starting up a new blog (Richard's Tech Reviews) for the content that gets the most search hits (gadget reviews and info).

You will see two peaks in the hit charts below, the first is when I wondered whether research libraries are obsolete, and the second is when I got digg-dotted for linking to a little animated map of a day of Google traffic.

StatCounter daily
StatCounter monthly
FeedBurner subscribers

FeedBurner most popular items
(Note: the Library 2.0 presentation wasn't one of mine, it's a link to one by Donna Bourne-Tyson of Mount Saint Vincent University.)

Google Analytics overview
The most popular item (Content Overview section) is my review of the Sony GPS-CS1 GPS logger.

Google Analytics country map

Google Analytics country map (enhanced colours) Except for a few countries in Africa and what appears to be a total lack of interest in Turkmenistan, I have hits from pretty much everywhere in the world.

Google Analytics city map and list

TypePad summaries

Previously:
November 20, 2007  blogiversary year 3

SPARC 2008 on the web

SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 - November 17-18, 2008

A few channels for you to follow the meeting:

• Twitter hashtag #sparc08
• I made a FriendFeed room sparc2008 that includes the RSS feed from the Twitter hashtag (anyone is welcome to add additional content)
• I have been trying an experiment with the CoverItLive "liveblogging" tool -
  

  SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

• Dorothea Salo blogged about John Wilbanks' inspiring call to action (just share, innovate and hack, rather than talking about it)

SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

Just an experiment with CoverItLive - may fail totally, we'll see.

in which I meet Lincoln Stein

Arrived at Baltimore Airport for SPARC Digital Repositories.
Stood at under two large green signs reading "Taxi Stand".
Waited. 
Waited.
Looked way down at the opposite end of the terminal, where all the taxis appeared to be congregating, and wondered why none of them were coming to, you know, the Taxi Stand.

Walked over to what apparently is the main taxi stand.  Got taxi.
As we were driving away, we were about to pass two more people at the "no taxis at this Taxi Stand", so I suggested to the driver that he let the other drivers know people were waiting.
Instead he decided to see if anyone waiting was heading in the same direction, offering me a "discount" if I was willing to share.

Some guy said he was going to Bethesda and the taxi driver deemed this good, so he got in.

It turns out, once we were well under way, that Bethesda is in the opposite direction from where I was going, I was heading north to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, and Bethesda is to the south.

It also turns out that my cab-mate was Dr. Lincoln Stein, who is doing some very interesting work with the Reactome, a database of human pathways, extracted by hand (by humans!) from the literature.

D’Eustachio, Peter, Croft, David, de Bono, Bernard, Gopinath, Gopal, Gillespie, Marc, Jassal, Bijay, Matthews, Lisa, Schmidt, Esther, Vastrik, Imre, Wu, Guanming, Lewis, Suzanna, Birney, Ewan, and Stein, Lincoln. Reactome – a knowledgebase of human biological pathways. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2007.1281.1> (2007)

or if you have a tool that recognizes DOIs - doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1281.1

I also see that he is an expert on many things Web.

So Dr. Stein: sorry my cab led you astray, it certainly wasn't intentional, I don't actually know where anything is in the United States.

I don't think I got a discount either.

UPDATE: I was thinking "he's doing some cool work, they should invite him to SciFoo"... but apparently they already did, to SciFoo 2007, which I also attended.  I wonder what the odds of that are.  I don't think I met him there (I didn't go to the biology presentations), but if our paths did cross and I have forgotten, I apologize doubly.

City of Ottawa connects to citizens using Web 2.0

I had never really thought about it, but it does make sense for our local government to draw upon the highly talented tech workforce in the area.  And for that tech workforce to create systems to help citizens who are passionate about a particular topic (e.g. transit) to connect to their government.

I wonder if this community supporting City of Ottawa could be connected with the Federal Government Web 2.0 initiative.

Via an ad (which I didn't click on, but googled about) I happened to find

Ottawa builds online community out of Igloo - Igloo PR - October 14, 2008

which led me to

Cities that want to jazz up their citizen interactions with social media tools, but have shoestring budgets to work with, should look to the City of Ottawa for inspiration.

In June, Ottawa introduced a social media site to engage citizens in city planning at earlier stages of the process...

Developed by Igloo Software, a social media platform provider based in Kitchener, Ont., the site was set up by a group of high-tech volunteers in just a few weeks, says Rob Collins, chairman of the City of Ottawa's task force and former CIO of Cognos, a business intelligence vendor acquired by IBM this year.

"We went to the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance and said, 'We want to develop this site but we have no money - but you have a few bucks and you can use this as a forum to show off what your members can do. Igloo offered to put in the time and energy to help us.'"

The project is part of a larger initiative by the City of Ottawa to tap into its high-tech community to find ways to squeeze more benefits with the strategic use of technology, he adds.

Current city planning processes don't encourage citizen involvement and are ripe for improvement with social media, he says. Citizens must travel to a specific meeting place at a particular time to comment on plans that have often already been cast in stone and are difficult to change. "You have to debate ideas long before they become firm plans," says Collins.

Ottawa builds online community out of Igloo - InterGovWorld.com - October 14, 2008

Unfortunately the article doesn't provide an actual link to the site (a common failing of many news articles).
Some more googling turns up OpenOttawa.org

OpenOttawa.org is a volunteer organization with that builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community areas of their lives.

Based on the posting Mayor’s Taskforce Report on E-Government, I guess the Igloo-powered site is

http://ottawa.taskforcereport.ca/

There are lots of other interesting pointers in the OpenOttawa blog as well, including this presentation about Metronauts and the Toronto Transit Camp from mesh 2008.  (Note to self: Try to go to mesh in Toronto in April 2009.)

Government 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mesh08 gov20)

The Ottawa online transit consultation (now closed) used different software from Igloo, the system is called eDeliberative, from Nanos.

http://ottawa.econsultation.ca/

I don't know if there is an equivalent of the Toronto Transit community in Ottawa, the main place I've seen it discussed is on SkyscraperPage.com, in the Ottawa-Gatineau forum.

As the next step in the Government of Canada's Web 2.0 initiative is to set up a social network for government employees, it will be interesting to see what technology they choose, and whether they connect to the OpenOttawa community.

billions of photos

Facebook says

we've added 20% more photo servers and 50% more upload servers to process this year's Halloween traffic. We've also packed in 40 terabytes of additional storage (that's 40,000,000,000,000 bytes). By comparison, the words of all 20 million books in the Library of Congress could be digitized in about 20 terabytes of text. So we're making room for the equivalent of two Libraries of Congress.

The popularity of Facebook's photo application, home of more than 10 billion photos, has compelled us to think big for a while.

Click or Treat: Halloween Photo Bonanza - Facebook blog - October 31, 2008

Wow, that's a lot of photos of drunk college students...

It's also an order of magnitude increase from last year.  In an infrastructure posting from 2007, they said

We have:

    * 1.7 billion user photos
    * 2.2 billion friends tagged in user photos
    * 160 terabytes of photo storage used with an extra 60 terabytes available
    * 60+ million photos added each week which take up 5 terabytes of disk space
    * 3+ billion photo images served to users every day
    * 100,000+ images served per second during our peak traffic windows

Facebook Photos Infrastructure - Facebook blog - May 21, 2007

I discovered the Facebook has a Statistics page in its press area

* More than 120 million active users

* More than 10 billion photos uploaded to the site
* More than 30 million photos uploaded daily

Let's see 30x30 = almost a billion photos a month, so yeah, the math works out.

Flickr, photo-sharing darling (which always has had a buzz disproportionate to its actual number of users and photos, due its "look, folksonomy stuff" usefulness for the technorati), Flickr reports its 3 billionth photo.

Take the pinky of either your left or right hand, hold it next to the corner of your mouth and say “3 beelleeeeon photos…”

3 Billion! - Flickr blog - November 3, 2008

I don't think any of us quite know what it means to have photos at the giga-scale, using storage in the tera- and peta-scale.  (It's quite possible evolution has not equipped us to think at such scales, although it appears the Maya were quite comfortable thinking about time at the mega- and even giga-year scales.)

UPDATE: As libraries, we also need to think about what this means in terms of our position as information managers.  Pre-digital, the central library in your town or city probably did contain the largest (or nearly the largest) collection and concentration of information available to you.  My organisation has millions of items (articles mostly) that it can make available to thousands of patrons.  But compare that to billions of items and tens or hundreds of millions of patrons.  Or compare that to home users who may have terabytes of storage and tens of thousands of photos.  Can libraries still claim to be the centre of knowledge management expertise when they are tiny players in the digital environment?

blogging (becomes ordinary)

A couple recent items on the changes to blogging.
Once you strip the hype away, they both basically say that blogging is a part of the commodity infrastructure of the Internet now, it's just one communication option.  This is not too surprising, considering that blogging will reach its 10th anniversary next year (by my estimation anyway, see end of previous post for more info).  10 years, that's what, 70 years in Internet time?

Blogging: not dead, just resting.  Just an experienced old man, actually.

I've found that as I'm using Twitter and FriendFeed more, I'm doing more content consumption and less content generation, which is unfortunate.  I don't plan to deal with this by going as far as Steven Cohen and deleting my lifestreaming accounts, but I have recognized a need to blog more.

It's also interesting the way that FriendFeed in particular changes how I use other services - for example I had to change my delicious postings to clearly indicate when a quote was from the site being blogged (a "pullquote") - otherwise it was confusing for people to read in my FF that "I have created this wonderful new thing" when the "I" was actually the person on the site I was quoting, not me.  (Unfortunately, unlike Furl, delicious doesn't provide any separate fields to distinguish between a Comment about the item and a Clipping from the item.)

Wired has a typically hyperbolic piece in Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.

Wired Magazine - 16.11

and the Economist has a piece that concludes rather reasonably

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions.

Blogging grows up - The Economist magazine - November 6, 2008

So, from an item I read in the print Wired, to the Economist item which I found via FriendFeed.

Which is to say, it's not paper vs. digital or blogs versus lifestreams, it's all technologies, as appropriate.

UPDATE 2008-11-09: From the brilliant mind of Hugh Macleod, April 17, 2007

Cartoon via Twitter fan wiki http://twitter.pbwiki.com/

UPDATE 2008-11-21: title and slight content alterations due to unfortunate search hits.

Nature launches blogs aggregator

Like a butterfly emerging from the code cocoon of Postgenomic, behold:

http://blogs.nature.com/

When I saw it appear in my FriendFeed I of course thought, ooh, I want to be on there, but then I saw

# composed mostly of original material
# primarily concerned with scientific research
# updated (on average) at least once a fortnight

and thought, hmm, mostly I rant about technology and even that has died down a lot since I moved to mostly tweeting and FriendFeeding.

But nevertheless I discovered that I'm in there under escience, so I'm staking my claim.

Interesting Historical Sidebar: Blogging is approaching its 10th anniversary.  Blogger.com launched in August 1999, according to Wikipedia.

Here's a timeline I've cooked up of "Web 2.0 and stuff leading up to it" for an upcoming presentation

http://www.dipity.com/scilib/Web_2_0

(set it to 25 years and scroll to the left to see a reasonable overview)

END SIDEBAR

NRCan uses Web 2.0 to improve collaboration

In his posting Canadian Government Launches Internal Wiki, Library Boy points to an interesting article in a magazine I had never heard of, Networked Government .ca

Challenges of change

Breaking down barriers to create an open and collaborative work environment comes with barriers of its own:

§         Fear of the unknown
§         Varying rates of acceptance
§         Trust
§         Reluctance to change
§         Indifference
§         Official languages
§         Inappropriate use. 

There is risk in each, but none as great as the risk of not proceeding.   

For employees reluctant to contribute their content on an open forum, the team encouraged them to use the Wiki to share non-sensitive information only. Allowing groups to create their own separate work spaces on the Wiki would only perpetuate the very barriers collaborative technologies were trying to break down – limited knowledge sharing at an enterprise level and lack of integrated content. Organizing information based on organizational hierarchy was purposely not replicated to allow subject classification structures based on content to emerge.

Collaborative Revolution - Networked Government .ca - October 2008

Italics in above article mine.

In strongly hierarchical organisations, such as some libraries, people often identify more with their group or organisational silo than with the entire enterprise.  Also these silos may represent areas in which specific control or budget is allocated, and it is traditional corporate culture not to want to share control or resources.

Enterprise Architecture and enterprise-wide collaboration can try to break through some of these silos, but as the above article states: "Changing the culture is much more difficult than implementing new technology."

Government of Canada launches official wiki for federal employees

The Government of Canada has launched an official wiki for its employees.
You probably won't be able to access it if you're outside the gc.ca domain.
They are inviting people to participate as wiki "gnomes".

The url is

http://www.gcpedia.gc.ca/

Via Michael Ireland on CISTI's internal Tech Watch - Government creates own version of Wikipedia - Ottawa Citizen - October 29, 2008