Science Library Pad

Talk Science at BL and in SL - Wednesday 24 September 2008

[email protected] is a series of events hosted by the British Library, providing opportunities to inform, engage, debate and network with scientists and all those who use scientific information.

Wednesday 24 September 2008

• Is Web2.0 all about attitudes or technologies?
• What can Web2.0 do for your research?
• As a scientist, are there good reasons for getting involved beyond social ‘not working’?
• Web3.0: another buzzword or a semantic revolution for science on the web?

Timo Hannay is the Publishing Director of Nature.com. ...

Timo will be speaking live in the British Library and the event will be simultaneously screened on Second Nature. Following Timo’s talk, attendees from both the British Library and Second Nature will have the chance to question Timo and discuss the topics raised.

Date: Wednesday 24th September [2008]

Time: 18:00 – 20:30 London time, 10:00 – 12:30 PDT [1300-1530 EDT]

Location: Second Nature Island

Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social 'NotWorking'? - Joanna Scott's blog - September 16, 2008

via FriendFeed

Second Nature: Science and Science Fiction

Title: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Speakers: Prof Mark Brake and Rev. Neil Hook, Glamorgan University

Date: Mon 28th April [2008]

Time: 9am SLT, Midday NY time, 4pm GMT, 5pm London time

Location: Second Nature Island

from Nature Network - Joanna Scott's blog

I certainly think a common background of consuming science fiction informs both physics and computer science (the only science areas I've worked in).

Monbiot in Second Life, round 2

Speaker: George Monbiot
Topic: Global warming and what to do about it
Date: Thurs 21st Feb, 2008
Time: 5pm GMT, 9am SLT (Pacific)

Nature Network - Joanna Scott - February events: Manatees, George Monbiot

Previously:
December 06, 2007  Nature Climate Change series in Second Life

Science Friday in Second Life

From

to

thanks to Ira Flatow doing Science Friday on the radio and in Second Life.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/

the SL audio stream maxed out, I'm listening on http://wkms.org/listen/

The topic is [US] Federal Government and Science.

UPDATE: If you missed it, they have an audio podcast as well as video and other features.

Sci Foo Lives On: Nature's web experiments

Some screenshots from the Sci Foo Lives On session about Nature Network, Connotea, Precedings, and Dissect Medicine.  Berci took notes.

Aerial view (after everyone left):

Turning to view the audience:

Ian presenting about Connotea:

Presentation on Nature Precedings:

Presentation on Dissect Medicine:

Nature Climate Change series in Second Life

Tues 4th Dec 2007, 6pm GMT, 10am PST, SLT [1 PM Eastern]
Tara LaForce, Imperial College, on her research into carbon capture and storage

Thurs 6th Dec 2007, 6pm GMT, 10am SLT, PST [1 PM Eastern]
Professor Euan Nisbet, Royal Holloway, London on why it's so important to monitor the climate properly, and the many ways in which we've been doing it wrong.

Tues 11th Dec 2007, 6pm GMT, 10am PST, SLT [1 PM Eastern] POSTPONED
Dr Simon Buckle, Director of Policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change

Thur 13th Dec 2007, 5pm GMT, 9am PST, SLT [12 PM noon Eastern] POSTPONED
George Monbiot, Guardian Columnist and author of Heat: How we can stop the planet burning

See http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/joannascott for more information and a SLurl to the Second Nature location.

There was an interesting and season-appropriate podcast on Christmas Commercialism and Ethical Travel last year featuring an interview with Monbiot, but I can't locate the file any more.

DLF in Second Life

There will be a session on the Digital Library Federation in Second Life at the forum today (Tues. Nov. 6, 2007), it's not in the programme, it will be at 5 PM, I'm not sure where in the Pine Room on the 3rd floor.

You may be able to join it within SL as well, but I couldn't find the DLF in SL, anyone know where it is? (Remember that for SL you have to give both the island name and the x,y,z as coordinates are not globally unique, they're per-island.)  You can send me a teleport (Rakerman Yellowjacket) or use that 20th century technology, email.

UPDATE: The island is called Entropia, you can't find it yet through a places search, but if you bring up the Map and search within that interface, it will come up.  ENDUPDATE

You can see Peter Brantley's posting DLF moving into Second Life for some background.

discussion of open science - SciFoo Lives On - 20070904

I did an informal presentation as part of this week's SciFoo Lives On in Second Life, about definitions of open science.  Here's a snapshot followed by a transcript of what I said (my avatar is Rakerman Yellowjacket)

[9:17]  Horace Moody: Richard, would you like to say a few words before Bill?
[9:17]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: sure
[9:17]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: let me run some ideas up the virtual flagpole, as it were
[9:17]  Vidal Loon: I personally think that these tools and much more can be weaved together to make a real "office" type of setup for the scientist to keep tabs on the info and have it available for other.
[9:17]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: my perspective comes from software engineering and enterprise architecture
[9:17]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: both of which have big aspects of technology planning based on requirements gathering
[9:18]  Vidal Loon: there are just so many tools available to juggle data nowadays. it's a question of knitting them all together.
[9:18]  CW Underwood: VL: as long as each module stands alone and doesn't lock anyone into anything, that's a great idea (don't like the idea of Office as model though...)
[9:18]  WhiteWizard Chemistry: Agrees with Rakerman
[9:18]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: so when I saw the discussions at SciFoo I thought it would be useful to apply that kind of thinking, to systematise the discussion
[9:19]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: I found a lot of things were getting mixed together - desire for speedy publication, desire for recognition for grants/tenure/post-doc, and issues with the current scholarly communication system
[9:19]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: so i think the key is to focus on what problem you're trying to solve
[9:19]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: To me, when I hear the core of the discussions about open science
[9:19]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: it's about making better *science* through collaboration and open sharing
[9:20]  CW Underwood: better science, yep
[9:20]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: that is quite different from some of the goals of open access, which address availability of science later on
[9:20]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: so I would suggest focusing around the aspect of making better science happen through open communication
[9:21]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: then that leads to a clearer discussion of the kinds of tools that would support that
[9:21]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: we have already seen a good discussion about using wikis
[9:21]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: from a library perspective, I think one of the most useful aspects is to preserve more of the scientific work from the get-go
[9:21]  Horace Moody: yes Richard is right - first and foremost get the science done then worry about technology
[9:22]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: often today data and failed experiments are lost from the record, even if they had some original ditgital format
[9:22]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: we don't want the current science work to be a digital dark age when seen from the future
[9:22]  WhiteWizard Chemistry: Scientists should worry about the science ... someone else should (working with the scientists) think about the technology that makes lives easier for scientists
[9:22]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: I see some positive developments in terms of science communication
[9:23]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: one example is eSciDoc, a project in Germany to develop end-to-end communication - from lab notebook to publication and beyond
[9:23]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html
[9:23]  Horace Moody: As long as authors retain copyright - they don't have to worry about re-formatting their work :)
[9:23]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: I also think Fedora Commons presents a lot of opportunities in this area
[9:23]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: http://www.fedora-commons.org/
[9:24]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: as a mostly-technology guy these days, I'm interseted in gathering the best requirements so that the tools support the real goals!
[9:24]  Horace Moody: have you looked at the escidoc richard?
[9:24]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: So I agree with WhiteWizard
[9:24]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: What I'm concerned about is if we're not careful, often we end up with closed systems - like Facebook, or even Blackboard and WebCT
[9:25]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: Horace I have seen the eSciDoc people present, I think they're doing great work
[9:25]  Horace Moody: I think redundancy is a way to safeguard getting locked in
[9:25]  Horace Moody: is their work open to anyone
[9:25]  Duriel Akula: I would not mind to have a company making a profit with such a system
[9:25]  Duriel Akula: as long as the data was open to anyone
[9:25]  WhiteWizard Chemistry: and examples like Aordpress/Automattic provide excellent examples for profitable open source platforms
[9:26]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: as far as I know, they plan to share the Scholarly Workbench once it is developed
[9:26]  WhiteWizard Chemistry: oope Wordpress
[9:26]  Horace Moody: the company interface is interesting - for example ChemSpider
[9:26]  CW Underwood: I don't mind who makes what money, but I'd like to see the software on SourceForge...
[9:26]  Horace Moody: is a company but giving out database for free
[9:27]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: I think there are lots of different models, the main goal is that the information should be open to improve science collaboration and preservation
[9:27]  WhiteWizard Chemistry: There are models oand made available to other developers to build on top of
[9:27]  Rakerman Yellowjacket: Horace, do you want to move to Bill's presentation now?
[9:28]  Horace Moody: sure

Berci also liveblogged the session.

Does anyone know exactly what the availability of the eSciDoc Scholarly Workbench will be?  I'll have to contact them.

Previously:
August 27, 2007  Medicine 2.0
September 22, 2006  ECDL 2006 - DLSci06 - eSciDoc
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:45 - Rebuilding Information Services for the Digital Age

science in Second Life: CSIRO and Nature

CSIRO

Participate in this Second Life seminar as Dr Peter Clifton discusses anti-ageing and the prospect of human life extension.

3 September 2007, 2 AM Second Life Time (Pacific timezone)

Examining the prospect of human life extension

Dr Gautam Tendulkar will be discussing how CSIRO is using Second Life to research the limits of virtual worlds, data exchange between worlds and custom interfaces.

17 September 2007, 2 AM Second Life Time (Pacific timezone)

Researching the limits of virtual worlds

both at

ABC Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ABC%20Island/130/137/43

Nature

a discussion with Phil Holliger from the Medical Research Council Molecular Biology Lab in Cambridge. Phil works with ancient DNA: DNA samples retrieved from specimens of forensic, paleontological or archaeological interest. DNA naturally degrades over time, making it very difficult to amplify and analyse, and Phil will be talking about a new way to more accurately repair the damage, which he recently tried out on a 60,000 year-old cave bear.

13 September 2007 at ?6 PM GMT?

Events on Second Nature and Events on Second Nature (2)

On one of Nature's Second Nature islands in Second Life, presumably.

Medicine 2.0

I must say I'm amazed at the number and quality of weekly presentations in the SciFoo Lives On sessions in Second Life.  This week Jean-Claude and Bertalan (Berci) Meskó moderated "Medicine and Web 2.0".  I won't post the full transcript, but I did learn of some interesting links.

One thing is I don't know if all the in-world presentations are also available externally as PowerPoint/SlideShare/PDF/whatever.

* List of medical blogs in English
http://medblog.nl/2007/08/15/sneak-preview-ranking-english-written-medblogs/

* HONcode standard for trustworthy health and medical web sites
http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/Conduct.html

* Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics
http://medbloggercode.com/

Above two are perhaps interesting additions to the Peer Review Logo discussion.

* Ann Myers Medical Center - Sprott Shaw College - Hospital Island
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hospital/132/119/49

* Berci's Medicine 2.0 presentation and extensive link list
http://scienceroll.com/medicine-20/

* BioWizard medical article ranking tool (articles from PubMed)
http://www.biowizard.com/

* TiroMed social network for physicians and med students ("your portal to the medisphere")
http://www.tiromed.com/

I have added these all to Connotea with tag "medicine 2.0"

UPDATE: Jean-Claude has posted the transcript and other notes.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2007-08-28: Berci has also posted his experience in SciFoo lives on in Second Life: Web 2.0 and Medicine.  ENDUPDATE

Next week will be Tuesday Sept 4th (since Monday is a holiday) with topic "definitions of open science".

Previously:
August 20, 2007  open science and the impact factory

open science and the impact factory

Jean-Claude Bradley instigated a session in Second Life - SciFoo Lives On: Open Science.

Next week will be something like "Medicine 2.0".

You can see in the transcript that one part of SciFoo that definitely lived on was a discussion around Open Science and webliometrics, both definitions and how to handle impact.  It seems to me that we get tangled in endless debates about definitions.  I have proposed that the nodalpoint Open Science wiki page be used to come to a consensus definition, but in the meantime:

open science

opening your scientific activities up to public examination, making work available without it having gone through formal peer review

peer review

The process of a group of scientific peers assessing the quality of a submitted piece of scientific work, currently most commonly associated with gatekeeping into a scientific publication, wherein it may also involve aspects of improving both the scientific thinking used in the paper and the expression thereof.  There is no relationship between peer review and closed or open access.

open access

making a publication available without subscription fee, but possibly with usage limitations

free access

unfortunate term due to existing definition of open access, adding element of unrestricted usage and reuse (e.g. text mining)

impact factor

An imperfect measure of the scientific "importance" of an entire journal.  Misused to measure the quality of individual scientific output

(Marked up using HTML definition lists, which you have probably never heard of, which incidentally is why the Semantic Web will fail.)

Yes, there are many types of peer review in different disciplines, and yes, things are often considered published and citable without having gone through peer review, such as conference papers and presentations which often go through a sort of editorial board selection instead.

I know these definitions are far from perfect, but good lord, can we get to good enough and go beyond this debate?

What I keep hearing is, how can we impact factorize open science.  Well, the answer is, you can't.  Let's stop trying to find some magic algorithm whereby a machine tells us what quality science is.  What's completely mad to me about this is that we already have processes to assess science quality.  Every time you review a new student, every time you look at a grant proposal, heck, even on the infamous tenure committees and research assessments, a group of humans looks at a portfolio of existing or proposed work, and decides whether it is good enough.

So if I may modestly propose, let's continue to do that, and no one other than journal publishers should ever look at impact factor numbers again.  Arise, qualitative assessment, begone quantitive nonsense.

There is still a place for technology, but it's not in providing some bogus seemly-quantitative quality measure.  It's in enabling us all to present our scientific portfolios online, or to use Euan's words, our "professional lifestreams".  And there is a real problem to be solved.  It starts with students and their scholarly output stuck in closed university systems.  Students move around.  Scientists move around.  Their work history should move with them, not be lost in some scholarly dark web, or frozen as some web page at their previous institution that they no longer can access.

The European e-Portfolio is one effort to address this for students.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations is another piece.
The next step is to have those integrate into some, shall we say, flow or... flux (sekrit inside Nature joke) of the rest of their scholarly activity when they graduate.  Bookmarks created, databases curated, papers reviewed, etc. etc.

That's the technology piece.

The other piece, however, cannot be solved with technology.

Find better ways for humans to review scholarly portfolios and make decisions based on them.  That's going to address this problem of evaluation far better than anything else.

SIDEBAR

And of course you can do some side bits with technology of course once you have all this info circulating around, like ranking relevance to help people find the best, most relevant work in the flood of science that is sloshing around.  Usage factor, other metrics, these may all help in recommending things to read.

END SIDEBAR

References

Richard Monastersky, "The Number That's Devouring Science", Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 52, Issue 8, Page A12 (2005)

The PLoS Medicine Editors, "The Impact Factor Game", PLoS Med 3(6): e291 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291 (2006)

Peter A. Lawrence, "The Mismeasurement of Science". Current Biology, 17 (15), r583. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.06.014 (2007)

Bruno Granier, "Impact of research assessment on scientific publication in Earth Sciences" (PDF), a presentation at ICSTI June 2007 Public Conference on Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information

Richard Akerman, "Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone" (PDF), a presentation at ICSTI June 2007 Public Conference on Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information

Corie Lok, "Scifoo: day 1; open science" (2007)

Alex Palazzo, "Scifoo - Day 2 - Science Communication" (2007)

Alex Palazzo, "Scifoo - Day 3 (well that was yesterday, but I just didn't have the time ...)" (2007)

Previously:
June 2007  Science Library Pad: ICSTI 2007 category

report on Library Future Roles webcast

I liked the EDUCAUSE Webcast Architectures for Collaboration—Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries.  Peter Brantley (currently of CDL, soon to be Director of the Digital Library Federation) gave a very clear-eyed assessment of the current state of library IT engagement, and proposed many areas in which the library can do better.

I have to admire the boldness of a presentation whose 4th slide is "Libraries have failed in critical ways".

He said that a key role that libraries have to embrace is to enable discovering books, and searching inside of them.

He had many well-constructed phrases, I particularly liked "technology wipes out our current understanding of how libraries engage the world".

He then moved on to explore the many roles that libraries can still play, both in the physical and digital worlds (including Second Life).

I asked a rather long question about the DLF Architectures group, their DLF Service Framework, library SOA and relationships to the JISC e-Framework.

In his response (and several other times in the presentation) he highlighted the DLF Aquifer project.

If I understand it correctly, it's about building frameworks for discovery and use of distributed digital resources.

We support scholarly discovery and access by:

    * Developing schemas, protocols and communities of practice to make digital content available to scholars and students where they do their work
    * Developing the best possible systems for finding, identifying and using digital resources in context

When asked about new DLF initiatives he has planned, he indicated a few key areas:

• mass digitization
• policy issues (e.g. rights, privacy)
• new virtual communities
• new media and discourse

He had a lot of ideas about engaging with faculty and students, as well as making better connections between the library and IT, and between libraries and publishing.

In particular, he said that libraries should explore the community aspect of dealing with faculty and students - libraries as enablers of community.

In terms of IT engagement he said libraries need to move together with IT to enable deep information discovery.

He also talked about ensuring that we take full advantage of the potential of virtual worlds, and not artificially constrain ourselves to old ways of operating in them - new libraries in new worlds, or to paraphase: No OPAC IN SECOND LIFE!

He said we need to rethink social learning, recognizing that virtual spaces are social spaces with the added aspect that they are freed from normal physical constraints.

He also talked about investigating new social media, having the library as a richer and more imaginative participant in the digital publishing process.  Again a paraphrase: "imagine what the book looks like in an interactive, networked future."

He said libraries need to re-engineer scholarly communication with faculty and with the public.

He mentioned a critical task, which is that we as libraries need to learn how to get our content harvested and ranked appropriately by search engines, perhaps by working more closely with the companies making such engines.

He identified "Collaborative problems, collaborative solutions":

• massively distributed information
• rich data
• new indexing architectures
• mining and mapping our data to build interactive linkages
• challenge of providing ubiquitous access

Successful digital libraries bridge communities, build new services, and help others discover new services to build.

Digital Libraries are the architects of collaboration.

Publishing should be increasingly online and interactive, there should be digital workflows.

Challenge of "open access" to our applications - challenge for IT and libraries.
He talked a lot about how to permit remix, mashups, and combinations/

Of course my solution to that challenge is to ensure that libraries are building on a good service-oriented framework.  I very much hope that the DLF will further pursue SOA initiatives under his guidance.

Thanks to Glen for pointing out this webcast.

In case it's not clear, you can hear the audio of the presentation (which is essential, as the slides are just very high-level talking points) by following the instructions on how to log in to the "HorizonWimba archive" on the presentation page.  Once you're in the interface, switch to the Archives tab and scroll way way down to the bottom.  (Unfortunately, I currently get 503: Service Unavailable from their QuickTime server.)

UPDATE 2007-01-31: I was able to play the QuickTime audio on both my home Mac and home Windows box, with Firefox.  On the Mac the slides didn't display though.  It would be nice if EDUCAUSE offered just the audio as an MP3 / podcast.

nanotech island in Second Life

NPL, the UK's National Physical Laboratory, intends to develop an island to provide visitors with new intuitions into the properties of matter at the nanoscale.

Proposals are invited from experienced SL developers for this project. Read the detailed request for proposals here: http://nanoisland.wordpress.com

deadline for proposals from SL developers is February 6th, 2007

from SL Science Center group list

TVO's The Agenda discusses Second Life

TVO - The Agenda - Get a (Second) Life

Post a comment on producer Mike Miner's Blog (Mike's posting is actually about World of Warcraft)

Online video for The Agenda - watch the January 4, 2007 episode.  The SL part is about half-way through.  Anthony D. Williams, one of the Wikinomics authors, was one of the panelists.  Jesse Hirsh was another.

via Clickable Culture - ‘Second Life’ Explored on TVO Tonight

Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA

Yes, I can relate anything to SOA.

I was thinking about the experience that Steve and I had with Second Life, which is, we went in, we wandered around, but we couldn't quite figure out what it was for.  There was no game.  There was nothing to do.  We were homeless and impoverished.  (Well, I was impoverished.  Steve has six dollars.)

I think the answer is that it was the wrong question.

Second Life is platform, not narrative.

We were tripped up by assumptions, based on our previous experiences and background.  Computer Science people of my generation are used to being outside of programming environments.  In Google Sketchup, you also create 3D objects, but you don't create them from inside of a virtual environment, you create them from the outside, Godlike view.

Second Life is like the blinking cursor on a Commodore 64 screen.  READY, it says, and you don't say "what is the narrative" you say "what can I do with this?"  Second Life is like the Tron version of the C64, where you're inside the computer looking out.  The fact that you're inside the SL environment is what threw my thinking askew.  I'm used to programming environments where you're outside, looking in.  In my lifetime, rich visual interaction (well, as rich as was possible on the technology of the moment) has been mainly used for games.

Second Life is a hammer and nails, not a book.  You don't ask "what's the narrative of a hammer?"  Our difficulty with SL was contrasted with our immediate understanding of World of Warcraft.  WoW meets our assumptions, in that it fits into one of the visual game assumption slots, the "Dungeons and Dragons on a computer" one.  There are only a few types of computer games really.  I won't list them all, but here's resource management like in Civilization, there's first-person shooter like Doom, there's abstract shooter like Asteroids, these are all narratives that long-time computer users of my generation understand immediately.

Second Life is not a book, it's a World Processor.  It's interesting that we didn't immediately perceive Second Life as a command-line prompt, because that certainly would have made things clearer.  I don't expect any narrative from the prompt of my terminal application.

There is actually a whole set of relationships to command prompts that I think is interesting to explore.  (And yes, we are getting to SOA eventually.)

David Brin got a lot of attention in the CS community with his article Why Johnny can't code, and certainly those of us from the TRS-80 / Commodore 64 / Apple II era have been wondering how kids get into computer programming these days, without that flashing prompt of the BASIC programming language.  I had been speculating that "the new coding" was designing levels using game editors (many of the Doom / Unreal type games include editors to create new game environments).  Second Life would be a natural extension of this.  So maybe "Johnny doesn't code, he creates in SL?"

The path for my generation of programmers looks quite different.  Flashing READY prompt.  Then maybe an Adventure game (text-based).  They're related in a twisted way.  Most of the adventure games suffered from a limited and extremely specific vocabulary, which turns out to be the same "suffering" that a computer programming language has.  As we were decoding the syntax of C64 commands and lines of BASIC, we were typing stuff into adventure games like

"open the golden cage"
UNKNOWN

"unlock the gilded cage"
CAN'T PARSE THAT

"use heavy hammer on cage"
UNRECOGNIZED OBJECT "ON CAGE"

"get the ^%$^ bird out of the *%&^&*^% cage!!!"

and so on

Eventually that led to MUDs, and MUDs are a clear lineal antecedent of Second Life.  In MUDs you could also create objects and do programming.  However, I think few people embraced the platform aspect of MUDs, most people used the narrative of the D&D type quest game.  Second Life is sort of like a MUD without the game built yet.

This difficulty between the abstraction of an empty platform and the immediate understanding of
a narrative is evident to me when I talk to librarians and others about SOA (you see I told you I was getting here eventually).  They always say "that's nice, but give me concrete examples".  In the context of this posting, I guess I would say, "Web Services are a hammer, not a book, and SOA is the architecture of the house you could build with that hammer".

In a similar way, this illustrates some of the challenges between the catalogue and the idea of a general open library technology platform.  The catalogue has narrative.  I would argue it's the wrong narrative, with concepts mis-adapted from the traditional librarian-card catalogue-patron world of paper, but it is as least something one can grasp.

The attraction of narrative is probably one of the reasons that Steve and I have been spending way too many hours in WoW, while our visits to SL usually last about five minutes.

In my next posting, I will talk more about how assumptions can create challenges and barriers, specifically about how extending analogue library paper world assumptions to digital can lead to incorrect conclusions.

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

my Web 2.0 presentation to InfoConference

Here's a presentation I did on a few Web 2.0ish topics, with LibraryThing as an exemplar

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/web-20

You may want to click on the "full" icon (lower right of the presentation) in order to get the fullscreen view.

Interestingly, SlideShare uses Amazon S3 for storage.

The presentation was given to a CISTI internal event, our yearly InfoConference for information specialists.  It was originally done in Keynote 3, exported to PowerPoint for the purposes of SlideShare import.  In uploading it, I was as usual reminded of my difficulty in tracking as-presented files.  By the time it's gone through various drafts on various local and network directories, circulated in email a few times, and passed through a laptop and USB drive or two, it's a wonder I can still find the file at all, let alone know which version I actually presented.  This one has been very slightly redacted to remove some internal info.

The main points of the presentation were:

1. it is difficult to predict the future
2. Web 2.0 is very new (about 5 years old at most)
3. we can extract some basic characteristics of Web 2.0 applications, as demonstrated by LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/

These characteristics are:
- a personal or person-centric nature ("your library")
- user created/generated/submitted content ("add books")
- novel, informal description and discovery tools ("tags" / folksonomy)
- recommendations generated based on human-generated content and relationships, or human intentionality ("pssst")
- social networking ("ratings, reviews, shared books")
- open, active participation (discussion groups, easy inward linking)

4. In addition to text, audio and video, there is a new type of data being added to the web: geographic information.
4a. As a secondary note, the patterns of the (now over 6.5 million) geographically tagged photos tell us something about the profile of active web users - the Flickr map of photos

http://flickr.com/map

to me bears a striking resemblance to the classic "earth at night" satellite view, and I have also seen this pattern in Google Analytics maps of web traffic.  It seems that it is mainly in the developed world, in Canada, the USA, Europe and Australia, that people have the free time and wealth to be able to afford to participate in these kinds of peer production activities.

5. Web 2.0 is also opening up science to the public - I give four examples of projects that invite public participation.
5a. As a secondary note, these projects have a relationship to the Amazon Mechanical Turk concept - it turns out that there are many tasks for which a crowd of humans is dramatically better than machines (artificial intelligence).  Humans are particularly good at visual recognition tasks.  There is a general Web 2.0 idea I think, that people (if you have a big enough crowd) are better in some sense at producing content, relationships, and certain types of analysis than machines.  Machines are better at some classes of meta-analysis, e.g. deriving recommendations by data mining Amazon user intentionality.

6. Blogging is growing tremendously (in fact, all Web 2.0 graphs seem to have a sharp upward curve).  That means a lot of junk, but also a subset of valuable content, including serious scientific content.

Although not covered in the presentation, I also think Second Life and World of Warcraft (WoW) tell you a lot about the kinds of efforts that people are willing to put into online activities.  To me WoW indicates that people will actually tolerate a very high level of complexity and tremendous time investment, if the (perceived) reward is very high.  (WoW has over 7.5 million paying subscribers, far outstripping other online 3D environments.)

the Internet, it's made of people

Time puts it rather generously: Man (err, Person) of the Year 2006?  You.

This paragraph is awesome

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

The usual suspects like Second Life are reported upon, as well as the required "this bubble is different" story: Web Boom 2.0

You know what people always say during a bubble?  "You don't understand, it's different this time."

I'm sorry, you can dance whatever 2.0 dance you want, but you can't change the laws of economics.  If you don't make any money, you can't stay in business.  There is no Money 2.0

BusinessWeek is rather more mercenary about it: Best Idea of 2006?  Free labor.

The year 2006 may well be remembered as the annus mirabilis of free work. Whether it comes from open-source developers, obsessive fans, angry customers, or lonely Web addicts looking to burnish their egos with a little attention online, businesses have learned how to leverage the gratis workforce as never before. So much so that futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler argue that “prosuming,” or creating what we consume, is restructuring the economy by funneling free money from the hidden economy back into the mainstream one that economists track.

via The Toronto Star - Tasty reads from the newsstand - December 17, 2006
The prosumer concept seems to be having a resurgence.
I mentioned it in my review of The Long Tail.

more Second Life, plus South Park

Or should I say, Second Life 2.0?

Networman - Great Northern Way Campus & Second Life - October 31, 2006

Netwoman - New Masters of Digital Media Program - November 24, 2006

I just wanted to pass on some information about a new Master's program - one of the many hats I wear is that of a Virtual Research Consultant for the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. On Saturday, November 25th, 2006 the Masters of Digital Media (MDM) program at the Great Northern Way Campus will host an Open House for prospective students from around the globe in the online metaverse Second Life™, where a Virtual Centre for Digital Media building is currently under construction. This event will be held in conjunction with a Real Life Open House taking place simultaneously at Vancouver's Great Northern Way Campus. At both events, potential students will learn about an innovative graduate program in digital media planned to launch in September 2007.

More information can be found online here:

http://www.gnwc.ca/mdm/
http://www.mastersofdigitalmedia.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnwc

Incidentally, the campus is at Erie (136, 32, 25).  (In Second Life, a location is a placename + X, Y, Z coordinates.)  Here's a SLurl for the location - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Erie/136/32/25/

Le marketing à l'écoute - Novembre 2006: Faire des profits tangibles dans l’univers virtuel, est-ce réel? (podcast)

Michel Leblanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique - Archives pour Second Life

Michel Leblanc - Edgar Bronfman interviewé dans Second Life - December 4, 2006

L’un des plus célèbres Montréalais, Edgar Bronfman Jr., de la célèbre famille du même nom et maintenant P.D.G. de Warner Music, est interviewé dans Second Life par le journaliste de Reuters Adam Reuter.

and for no particular reason, here's some info on the South Park "World of Warcraft" episode...
Ok, ok, um, "in order to better understand the Gaming Generation, I present this insightful examination of using machinima to produce television".

South Park recently aired an episode involving World of Warcraft in which half of the show featured custom machinima footage.
...

Q: How were the custom animations created? How were they used inside of World of Warcraft - were they imported back into the game? What hardware/software did you use?

JJ: When Trey started thinking about how he wanted to start off the current run of episodes, he really wanted to do something big, and new. So, the idea of the "video game show" as we were calling it, resurfaced. We had a production meeting at Trey's house on Friday, Sept. 1st, and went over all the experiments and design work we had done to date. Once again, the idea was brought up of using WoW to shoot the in-game footage, with the added possibility of re-creating the characters in Maya, the 3D animation program we use to produce the show, in order to do close ups with full lipsynch and facial expressions. I mentioned that Blizzard had been very eager to help us when we ran our initial tests, so perhaps they'd be willing to let us use their own character models as well, which would save us a great deal of time and effort. All we would have to do then is re-rig the faces so we could animate them to the degree needed.

Eventually, it was decided that we would push forward in both directions, starting to model our own characters as well as contacting Blizzard and seeing how interested they would be in participating. We met with several people from Blizzard on Thursday, the 7th of Sept. and it became obvious that they were extremely eager to make this happen, and seemed willing to do whatever they could to make sure it did. Luckily, they also use Maya to do their in-game character animation, which meant we would be able to just grab their files and go, in theory. So, we asked them for a couple of their Maya character rigs to test with. Less then 7 hours later, we had male and female models for every race in the game, all fully rigged with every single animation cycle already assigned. It was exactly what we needed to get started.

from Machinima.com

Second Life: reality bites

Did we learn nothing from the dot-com bust?

Um, no.

It's just five years after everyone woke up to the absurdity of investing in loss-making petfood retailers promoted by sock-puppets and other wonders of the dot-com bubble. Yet the only advance we seem to have made is that our financial naivety has reached new levels of sophistication. Here in the 21st century, investing in companies that retail physical goods and property is old hat. Now we invest in imaginary companies that trade in imaginary goods and services using an imaginary currency — and yet still we complain when the bubble bursts — or at least the denizens of the Second Life virtual community are complaining.

via Software as Services blog - Reality pricks the Second Life property bubble - November 23, 2006

Amazon Web Services in Second Life

I can't believe there is already a Second Life Business Magazine, but there is, and they have interviewed Jeff Barr about using Amazon Web Services in Second Life.

If you would like to read it, simply download the PDF and then skip forward to page 71.

via Amazon Web Services Blog - Shopping For Real: Amazon Web Services in Second Life - November 1, 2006

It just goes to show that exposing your internal capabilities and data as Web Services can lead to uses you might never have imagined.

Also see Jnana - Build Your Own Expert-Powered Amazon Store in Second Life.

in which I attend a virtual science conference

I sill have some major issues with Second Life as a platform for much more than sitting around a virtual campfire.  Stability and scalability is one aspect, but also the display system is not designed to handle text well.  You can do "this is a red ball next to a green box" well, and "watch this QuickTime media" well, but not "read this complex text with diagrams".

So when I attended a virtual science conference in SL, I found it a bit of a frustrating experience.  I couldn't easily read the posters, it was awkward.

The conference is at Lupus (225, 125, 31).

Second Life on First Life TV

I think that the Reuters presence in SL got the attention of a lot of other newsagencies.  CISTI's Michael Ireland pointed out that there was a report on CBC TV's The National last night (this is the flagship news programme from our national broadcaster).  They had a ten minute report--that's a major amount of time for a TV news show to devote.  It's not available as a separate segment online--I have emailed them and asked them to "liberate" it.

UPDATE 2006-11-22: Colin located the story, including links to the video segments.

CBC - Reports from Abroad - Adrienne Arsenault - London File - On the vagaries of a Second Life - November 21, 2006

I bow before the linkmaster.

ENDUPDATE

John had a look around and found some other TV news reports about Second Life.

virtual poverty in Second Life

I quipped to Steve that being a newbie with a free basic Second Life is a bit like being virtually homeless - you have no money and no place to stay, you don't know anyone and all you can do is wander around aimlessly, looking at things you can't have.  A very disconcerting experience, really.

webomatica expresses this experience well in the posting Second Life: I Have 4 Dollars

Canada library building in Second Life

I don't actually know who is involved with this project, but here it is, on Cybrary City

I don't think "Canada House" is a good sign though, as in the real world it means the building for the High Commission in the UK (Wikipedia - Canada House).

UPDATE 2006-11-21: I've spoken to the creator using a strange non-Internet device, the tele-phone.  She's open to ideas about how to use the space.