Science Library Pad

Work blogs: Sean Boots

Since I rarely blog about work anymore, I thought I should highlight people who actually do.

Sean Boots continues to post thoughtful commentary on the challenges of the digital transition in government and on ways to improve how we work.

https://sboots.ca/

Meta: A rare post

Although I do work in the Canadian National Science Library again (the origin of Sci-ence Lib-rary = SciLib), I rarely have work-related blog posts anymore.

I will note that just one URL over I do still maintain a more technical blog, about using Apple devices, smart speakers, and how to get data from websites, along with other tech things.

https://scilib.typepad.com/techreviews/

It is a separate blog with a separate RSS feed and mailing list.

SGC Open Notebook Science - January 2018

On January 19, 2018 the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) launched an initiative for Open Notebook Science at an event supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Wellcome Trust.

Open notebook science is basically the concept that researchers publish their research publicly as they conduct it, with all the challenges and successes along the way.  You can read more in Wikipedia - Open notebook science.

An interesting aspect of the particular model of open notebook science being employed by SGC is the combination of described datasets uploaded to the SGC Open Notebooks community in Zenodo, with links from more general descriptions of activity in a blog platform hosted by SGC.

There was coverage related to the event in various venues:

• eLife - Open notebooks galore: The Structural Genomics Consortium - Jan 19, 2018
• University of Toronto news - Open science: University of Toronto researchers to publish lab notes in real time - January 19, 2018
• Springer Nature - Research Data - Data Dialogues - Open Lab Notebooks to increase impact and accelerate discovery - by Matthieu Schapira - Jan 26, 2018

UPDATE 2018-02-19: Rachel Harding and Aled Edwards discussed open notebook science before the event on the Colper Science Podcast.  ENDUPDATE

Twitter hashtag was #SGCOpenNotebooks

Webcast is available at https://youtu.be/vxoxKVUWsUY

Presentations (including mine) linked in the agenda below.  Note that due to technical difficulties the first few slides of my presentation don't show in the webcast.

09:00 - 09:10	Matthieu Schapira, PI, SGC - Twitter @mattschap Introductory remarks
Session 1 – Chair: Matthieu Schapira
09:10 - 09:30	Aled Edwards, Director, SGC - Twitter @AledMEdwards Scientists and society: striking a new bargain (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158763)
09:30 - 10:30	SGC Extreme Open Science Unit: Carla Alamillo, David Dilworth, Genna Luciani, Heng Zhang, Jolene Ho, Jon Fu Wong, Liz Brown, Mandeep Man, Megha Abbey, Nirav Kapadia, Roslin Adamson, Rachel Harding. Scientific project outlines (5 minutes each) (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158769)
10:30 - 11:00	Rachel Harding, PDF, SGC and open notebook trailblazer - Twitter @labscribbles 2 Years of Open Notebooking; lessons learnt from Labscribbles (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1155846)
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
Session 2 – Chair: Arij Al Chawaf, Director SGC Strategic Alliances - Twitter @TweetsFromArij
11:15 - 11:45	David Carr, Open Research Program Manager, The Wellcome Trust, UK Open Research – a funder perspective (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158767)
11:45 - 12:15	Richard Akerman, Senior Policy Analyst, Environment and Climate Change Canada - Twitter @scilib Open Science in the Government of Canada (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1160435) - also available on Slideshare - starts at 2h35m into webcast on YouTube
12:15 - 12:45	Kelsey Merkley, Open Program Designer, Creative Commons - Twitter @bella_velo Creative Commons CC-BY: opportunities for open (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158765)

Previously:
September 21, 2007  Wired on open data
August 9, 2007  the peer review logo
June 28, 2007  thinking about open science - me being sceptical

working in the open - public servants in Canada

While there have been public servants using social media including blogs and Twitter for a long time, there has been a recent upsurge in government employees deliberately choosing to use various online sites to do what I would call narrating their work.  This kind of open sharing of work in progress can be a great way to demystify what happens in government as well as to make new connections and get broader feedback.

Some recent examples from within government:

• Doing user research for the [Ontario] Digital Service Standard by Kate Kalcevich (Ontario Digital Service)
• Progress on the [Ontario] Digital Service Standard by Honey Dacanay (Ontario Digital Service)
• Hello Ontario! by Hillary Hartley (Ontario Digital Service)
• Responsible AI in the Government of Canada: a Sneak Peek by Michael Karlin (Government of Canada, guest post for Code for Canada)
• GC trip to UK — reading list day 1 by Olivia Neal (Government of Canada)

The above examples are all on Medium, a platform developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

You can also find public servants sharing their activities in other channels, for example CIO of Canada Alex Benay on Twitter and LinkedIn.

This increased public visibility of individual public servants and their work builds on years of conversations and experiments both "inside the walls" of government and on social media.  For example, there was a Canadian government event in 2010 called Collaborative Culture Camp that touched on many of the challenges of working collaboratively and openly.

I found that Twitter took a lot of my energy away from longer-form writing about my work.  Here's what I wrote about it in 2011

I think one loses a lot by not blogging. Twitter can to some extent maintain a presence online, but it can't expand it or make substantial impact. .... If you want to share your ideas in a way that will generate substantial discussion and spark interest in a major way, you have to write in the long form. ... to have an impact you must be writing your ideas, narrating your work. Not just for others, but as importantly, to better understand yourself, to have an online archive of your thoughts and work over time.

I am trying to return to doing more blogging and working in the open.

The above has a particular focus on the descriptive type of working in the open, there are other kinds of open work as well, for example open code on Github.

Kudos to Mary Beth Baker (Twitter @bethmaru) for her leadership role in getting the GC on Github.

As one example of open code, the website for the Canadian Digital Service digital.canada.ca is generated from Github, and is available for people to file issues or pull requests at https://github.com/gcdigital-gcnumerique/digital-canada-ca

For more on these topics, see my blog categories social networking and open source.

Note: Crossposted to Medium https://medium.com/@scilib/working-in-the-open-public-servants-in-canada-e103b4145dfd

Every Blog Its Reader

I did a keynote in 2008 where I said "Every web resource its machine reader", reinterpreting Ranganathan for the computer age.

I want to look back on how we almost built an ecosystem of information for human and machine readers, and then it fell apart.

Below, I will see if I can tell the tale of the decline of the blogosphere and end up with thoughts about the Antikythera Mechanism and scholarly communication.

In 2007, Darren Barefoot wrote in The Tyee about an era that just 9 years later, is totally gone.

It begins:

I subscribe to the RSS feeds for about 175 blogs.

Later down, it says

Technology reporter and uber-geek Tod Maffin runs Inside the CBC. It's kind of an industry blog, in that it covers the world of Canadian public broadcasting...

The Rise and Fall of Inside the CBC

Let's have a look at Inside the CBC now, in 2016

It is definitely not by Tod Maffin, nor does it cover the world of Canadian public broadcasting.  It's more or less what we would call this year fake news.  More specifically, it's a kind of human content written for robots, but not at all in the way I intended.  It's most likely, given the jumble of topics (neopets, skates, weddings in Gatlinburg), a search-keyword-driven tasking of quick content creation.  "Neopets searches are peaking, quick, write something about neopets!"

Which is to say, the ecosystem of interlinking conversations that Barefoot describes in 2007 is quite gone.  It's clear there's some complicated history behind its demise, but for simplicity's sake, here's what we can find from the Internet Archive: by February 1, 2011 the blog has a posting from January 10, 2011 at 8:58 pm.  And that blog post remains, frozen in time at the top of the page until at least January 28, 2013.  By June 21, 2014 the page reads simply "The domain insidethecbc.com is no longer parked by GoDaddy." By December 21, 2014 it has become, rather unexpectedly, a blog in German: "Wir haben ein großes Forschungszentrum mit über 100 Mitarbeitern und Niederlassungen in Übersee und Asien." / "We have a large research center with over 100 employees and branches in overseas and Asia." By September 9, 2016 it has transformed again, writing in (sort-of) English about "The advantage of getting nucific bio x4 coupon codes" and by October 22, 2016 it has settled into its current format.

The long and short of this is firstly, this is a disaster for a "many small pieces, loosely joined" ecosystem, and secondly, without Internet Archive, or even if the current owner of Inside the CBC changed their robots.txt, all of the original site would be gone.

The Other Shoe Drops

The story of Inside the CBC turned out to be more complicated than I thought.  Is it illustrative of the decline of the blogosphere?  Well just seven years after his article in The Tyee, Barefoot is blogging "In 2014, what is my blog for?"

Whither Alexandria?

What has happened?  Well, basically, it turned out that this world of interlinking blogs and feed reading at best fell apart, at worst was deliberately dismantled.

I realise the latter is a more compelling story than the former, but it's a combination of factors.  In the In Our Time episode The Library of Alexandria, we may look to hear again the story of how the library burned, but the conclusion is actually that it really just faded away.  With the rise of the Christian Roman Empire, the old knowledge and the old conversations, the dialogues between the books, just weren't of as much interest any more.

But one of the reasons we still have this discussion about the destruction of the library is because of the reality of so much loss of information.

In Reality Is Not What It Seems (BBC Radio 4 adaptation episode 1, Fiat Lux), Carlo Rovelli tells the history of physics in the conventional way that most western European scientists do, beginning with the Greeks.  In particular, he speaks of Democritus, and of his dismay at the loss of Democritus' original writings.  "We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.  I often think that the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of Classical civilization."

SIDEBAR

This formulation of the history of physics is so common that The Big Bang Theory parodies it in episode 3x10, where in order to teach Penny about Leonard's current research, Sheldon will only present the topic by starting with "It is there in Ancient Greece that our story begins..."

The episode is entitled The Gorilla Experiment, it aired in 2009.  It's not to be confused with 7x23 The Gorilla Dissolution which aired in 2014.

ENDSIDEBAR

Consider that while Rovelli is lamenting the loss of writings from 2400 years ago, we are not even doing a good job of maintaining writings from 9 years ago.  In fact, some Internet content is only now available through quotations and references made by other bloggers.

(And its worth noting that when you read this, you probably won't be able to listen to Fiat Lux, because the BBC is only making it available online for another 25 days.  And depending on your local copyright laws, you may not be able to legally view a clip from The Big Bang Theory without having purchased access to the episode.)

Thanks Google and Facebook

It didn't help that Google closed Google Reader.  It's a minor miracle that Google FeedBurner still exists.  The demise of (Facebook-owned) FriendFeed removed a conversation option from the web.  Overall, the ecosystem has shifted to closed commercial services and to search results driving traffic to commercial sites.

Whither Quebec?

If you want an idea of how fragile this ecosystem is, turn to the Elections Quebec page on Electronic Voting.  It used to include four press releases.  These press releases have now been "archived", which in this particular case means removed entirely from the web.  This is what the page looked like September 16, 2016 with the press releases (page from the Internet Archive)

and this is what it looks like now, with no indication the press releases ever were there.

There is nothing insidious about this, this is just standard web procedure - the press releases are from 2006, probably they were rarely accessed, so you run your ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) analysis and conclude that ten years online was enough, it's time for the press releases to go.

But once they go, they're gone.  Are they in the Library and Archives Canada web archive?  Are they in the BAnQ web archive?  It's hard to know.  Neither provides a public search interface that can uncover the Elections Quebec pages.  Without coverage in the national archive, and in the provincial archive, and in the Internet Archive, content that is removed from the web is just simply gone forever.

So this is where we find ourselves.  We have a single main service, the Internet Archive, that depends on private funding and that is attempting to make a backup of itself in Canada.  Coverage from other web archives is unclear and may be nonexistent.  Every day, as websites are reorganised, or content is deliberately removed for various reasons, or websites are simply neglected until the domain expires, our online Library of Alexandria fades.  Not in some blaze of destruction, but more from lost interest, the same as the original.

You might think this is not a problem, because we can get the press releases from the Internet Archive, but it never indexed them.  So for all intents and purposes they are gone now.

SIDEBAR

Because I happened to be paying particular attention to Canadian electronic voting information over the past few months, I was able to recover three of the press releases using a combination of Pinboard, Google and Bing caches.  The search engine caches would have been replaced very quickly, so it's only good fortune that I was able to grab the content before it was lost.

I have also become a bit obsessed about adding manually adding pages to the Archive, which you can do by going to https://web.archive.org/ and pasting the URL into the box under Save Page Now and clicking Save Page.

ENDSIDEBAR

The Loss of the Immune System

Blogging, with its interlinked web of discussions, was a kind of web immune system.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a way to have a conversation, and a way to provide signals to Google about what was and wasn't important, and to some extent, about what was and wasn't true.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get discovered through the network of blogs, to get added to feed readers, to become a new information source.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get good Google search ranking, to be discovered through search and thus be an important contributor to the conversation.

This is all basically gone.  Many of the blogs are gone, the blog discovery ecosystem is gone, the feed readers are gone, and Google search rank is very hard to get.

The Post- Era

Here's a quote

For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system.

Can you place it in time? It's from... 1997.  Jon Katz wrote enthusiastically in Wired about how online conversations were going to transform political discourse.

On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.

...

I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.

I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation – the Digital Nation – and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.

Jon Katz, in 2016, now writes books about dogs.

So how did the hopes for online conversation and engagement go to the dogs?  How did we get from a postpolitical philosophy to post-truth as the word of the year?

Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2016

2007 may have been the tipping point.  The iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

Sitting in front of a desktop, you have a keyboard and a mouse and a screen.  This drives a certain kind of text-based, highlight-and-insert content creation.

Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are terrible at long text and inserting content.  They are great for creating photos and videos.  And so now that's the world we have, the photo and video world. 

All of the signals that we needed to rank and sort and link and discover are gone.  Now it's just bam! image, bam! video.  No context, no links, just endless streams of content.  The web now is, in short, television rather than a library.  And the consequences of this are huge.

In MIT Technology Review, Hossein Derakhshan writes

Before I went to prison [in 2008], I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

...

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy.

In other words, we used to be able to use the web to have a conversation, and now we are basically using the web to amuse ourselves to death.

The blog ecosystem helped to create a kind of web immune system, an immune system that Google could use to surface healthy information.  With that gone, it's no wonder that false news can spread easily.

Finding the Antikythera Mechanism

Science depends on a web of citations, a web of knowledge.  Without a web of knowledge on the actual web, how can we hope to make discoveries and determine what is of interest.  How can we challenge information when we're in our filter bubbles, Facebooking to one another, off of the public web?

In 2008 (remember my talk from 2008? it's way back at the start of this blog post), I thought we might be able to meld human and machine understandings in order to advance the conversation.  I promoted the idea of better formatting information for machine processing, in order that we could benefit from machine-aided search and discovery.

I deliberately chose not to emphasize automatically-generated information.  Depending on the era, I've heard that the Semantic Web would solve discovery, or that OAI-ORE was going to link everything together, or now that Artificial Intelligence and Big Data will discover all connections automatically.

Would that this were so.

In Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Adrienne LaFrance writes

What if other objects like the Antikythera Mechanism have already been discovered and forgotten? There may well be documented evidence of such finds somewhere in the world, in the vast archives of human research, scholarly and otherwise, but simply no way to search for them. Until now.

This is a compelling vision of knowledge that we don't even know that we have, that could be unearthed if we just digitized and translated everything, and then sent our AIs digging for connections.  Maybe Democritus is out there, in some copy of a copy of an Arabic translation.  Maybe this whole lost world of complex mechanical devices is out there on paper somewhere, just waiting to be found.

But there is a pretty harsh collision between that vision and the reality of the web we've created.

We were on a path that might have enabled this scholarly discovery, although probably with a lot more human intervention than techno-utopians would like.  But now we can't even find things from a few years ago.  We were assembling the book-to-book conversations of a new Library of Alexandria, and now we're scraping down the pages like in the Archimedes Palimpsest

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204.^[7] There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book.

But we're doing far far worse than writing over thousand-year-old knowledge.  We're erasing completely information from last year, with no xray to recover it.

Which is to say, as much as I love the vision of recovering the lost history of the Antikythera Mechanism, I'm more worried we won't even have a history of last year.

Remaking the Web We Made

This is the web now

The Web of Desperate Popup Intrusion.

That used to be the web of users deciding to subscribe to feeds, instead of being badgered to sign up to email newsletters, or to view ads, or to pay up immediately.

So let's try to unwind some of our mistakes.  Rather than some AI utopia that will unearth lost connections from millenia past, let's deliberately build a human reality of intentional reconnection.  Some suggestions:

• more slow, less fast
• more longform, less shortform
• more blogging, less Twitter
• open your feedreader, not your email
• less reaction to images, more thought about text
• get more sleep
• read more books
• put the smartphone down
• more services that let us pay for them, less ad-supported data-mining intrusion
• more public broadcaster support
• systematic public investment in web archiving
• less closed conversation, more open public conversation
• a more realistic blend of human-created metadata and machine analysis

I will readily admit that I got pulled away into the quick rewards of Twitter from the slow work of blogging.  And it's become a self-reinforcing system.  As blogging and feedreading faded, blog hits and links and comments faded.  Blog rank in Google faded.  Wearing another hat, I wrote 595 blog posts about online voting from 2004 to 2016.  All that work, and (for the particular Google results I see today on this computer), the blog shows up once on page 5 of results for "online voting" canada.  It's hard to maintain one's enthusiasm for 5th page ranking.  It's hard to maintain one's blogging for two web hits a day.

But then I remember I originally started blogging just for myself.  I didn't anticipate my blog would grow and connect in the way that it did for a while.  So I am going to try to get back to blogging, because everywhere I go now, even for the few seconds of an elevator ride, I see people lost in their smartphone screens.  I don't see how we can continue on losing ourselves in those little personalized screens.

Bibliothèque nationale de France - open data and Semantic Web

The open data portal is live at

http://data.bnf.fr/

There is also information about their use of linked data (semantic web) at

http://data.bnf.fr/semanticweb

Info via @arthurlutz Arthur Lutz and @davidbgk

RT @davidbgk: Tiens, le portail #OpenData de la BNF est propulsé par CubicWeb :) data.bnf.fr/semanticweb

retweeted by @LiberTIC

BNF social media presence

blogs - http://blog.bnf.fr/

notably their digital library blog Gallica http://blog.bnf.fr/gallica/

which has an accompanying Twitter account @GallicaBnF

via their Twitter list of BnF accounts @GallicaBnF/bnf I find there is also a BnF labs account and blog

@LaboBnF

http://labobnf.blogspot.com/

The main library doesn't appear to have a Twitter account, but it does have a Facebook page, as well as a presence on French video sharing site DailyMotion and YouTube

Facebook - BnF - Bibliothèque nationale de France

DailyMotion - BNF

YouTube - BibliothequeBnF

welcome to our garden, please provide your personal information

Google+ doesn't seem to be providing an RSS feed of G+ posts on your public profile, it looks like it's providing a feed of your Buzz public posts instead.  In general there seems to be a decline in blogging combined with less use of RSS readers (and less provision of RSS feeds).  I think this is an unfortunate degradation of a distributed content ecosystem that was working well.  Obviously it is in the interests of pretty much all the corporations to centralise content, to have you live "inside" Facebook, Google, Quora, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr or whatever particular content garden the corporation provides.

If this continues along the current track, Facebook will know everything about your relationships and the history of their evolution, as well as all of your personal interests, Twitter will know everyone you share work links with and the topics that you discuss and follow, LinkedIn will know your entire work history and all your work connections, and Google will contain mostly everything else related to your professional life as well as (for some people) aspects of your personal life.  This is the inverse of the original content model, in which you produce content on many many different sites that have no direct interconnections (thus necessitating sites like FriendFeed to aggregate it all back together).  Your photo self is separate from your work blogging self is separate from... etc.  Now instead it appears we are being pushed to, on our own time, wrap up our entire selves in a nice incredibly-detailed demographic package for corporations.  How nice of us.

metadata implicit and explicit in Tumblr

I wrote previously about Tumblr as a sharing-driven site, primarily used for photos.

Now that my Tumblr has been up for a while (it holds images I have licensed in the Creative Commons), I have more information about how Tumblr is used to share and tag photos.

You can think of Tumblr as a giant exercise in the crowdsourced assembly of photo collections.  People extract features that interest them, grouping photos in their own Tumblr streams.

So Tumblr has both explicit metadata, implicit metadata, official & unofficial collections, and social mechanisms for description and discovery.

For explicit metadata, Tumblr allows tags, creating a folksonomy of tags about an image (when you reblog an image, you can add your own tags).  You can also attach descriptive text to an image.

You can see both per-Tumblr tag views, e.g. http://rakerman.tumblr.com/tagged/books
as well as Tumblr-global tag views http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/books.  (Be aware that Tumblr has basically no concept of separating adult content, so take care when browsing even the most innocuous of tags.)  Search is entirely tag-based, e.g. when you enter "books" into the search box, it will return the tagged/books page.  It doesn't search the text in descriptions.  UPDATE 2011-06-23: Upon further examination it is not entirely clear how the search works.  Sometimes it returns hits that appear to be on description text, sometimes it returns hits for photos that don't appear to have any metadata at all.  ENDUPDATE

(Google does index the descriptive text, so you could search e.g. site:rakerman.tumblr.com reading.)

Tumblr also has (I presume manually-assembled) official collections for topics, e.g. http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/books however these collections are not surfaced automatically in tag-based search (that is, if you search on books, it won't highlight the fact that there is also a books spotlight topic).

Where there is an additional layer of implict metadata is through the collections that people assemble themselves (to some extent using Tumblr to reblog photos in this way is one of the main use cases for the site).  For example, when I posted a picture of the Uppsala University Library it was discovered and reblogged by aveclivres, a Tumblr devoted to images with books in them.  (It was discovered even though I had no followers at the time, presumably by watching/searching the books tag.)

This particular image also gives a chance to see the "transclusion" reblogging effect, as a photo spreads in the Tumblrsphere.  It is last-in first-out, so it is essentially a most-recent-first activity stream specific to this photo (to this blog post, technically).

So in addition to the explicit metadata, we have the "collections" (aveclivres, bibliofila) that the post is in, which adds additional implicit metadata, "this is like these other objects in this collection".

"Reblogging" is like Twitter retweeting, and "liked"/favorites are similar to Twitter faves.  The reblogging mechanism is powerful as it lets the content spread, with popular images going viral in the same way that a popular tweet can go viral.

To some extent, this reblogging of images is a continuously running categorization "game" - more unstructured but also requiring less effort to create than a special online museum game site (see http://museumgames.pbworks.com/ for more information about this approach to online engagement).

Images present a special problem for categorization as unlike full-text it's much harder to use their contents for self-description except in a crude way ("mostly red", "lots of circles") - their "aboutness" requires human interpretation - interpretation which machines still struggle with, to the extent that image search mainly replies on surrounding context, user-supplied metadata, and image similarity.

The idea of posting images online for users to categorise is of course not new, it has happened through the Flickr Commons and other channels.  But Tumblr is a new way to tap into this user interest.

Tumblr has the concept of "following", which is also similar to Twitter - you see the stream of posts from people you follow on your dashboard, and it is one click from there to reblog or favourite a post you like.  In this way you can watch feeds of interest, giving a social channel for discovery of content.  In other ways Tumblr by default is not social in the way we think of traditional blogs - it doesn't have comments by default, and it has very limited mechanisms for feedback (the "ask me a question" option which allows for a question with a single response).

While Tumblr does provide powerful "Twitter for photography" features, its important to recognize that it is not a fully-featured photo management platform.  Here are some feature comparisons between Flickr and Tumblr.

Flickr has a multi-level access rights scheme per-photo (public, private, friends, family).  Tumblr is mainly for public blogging.

Flickr has a concept of adult ("unsafe") photos and "safe" public photos, with options to flag images.  Tumblr does not.  Tumblr has no advanced searching that will let you search only "safe" images.

Flickr records and exposes rich photo metadata, from date taken and location (if available) to the EXIF details about what camera was used, the exposure settings etc.  Tumblr does not surface any of these details, not even the date the image was taken.

Flickr has detailed per-photo rights information, including standard copyright and Creative Commons notices.  Tumblr does not.  You could apply a license to your entire Tumblr feed, but there are no built-in mechanisms to do so easily.

So be aware that in posting images to Tumblr you're moving from a personal photo collection environment where you have a lot of control about the individual photos and there is rich metadata, to basically a pure image sharing environment in Tumblr, where most if not all metadata is lost from the photo.

Tumblr is also about more than photos, it's a full microblogging environment where you can post text and video, but I've only looked at the photo aspect because its a common use of Tumblr.  There are lots of hybrid approaches as well, for example the US State Department Tumblr always features a prominent photo at the top, but has explanatory text as well.

UPDATE: Another great example of how Tumblr can provide infrastructure and a collection idea can go viral is http://dearphotograph.com/ -  the idea of overlaying old photos on top of current scenes.  A June 20, 2011 Globe and Mail article discusses how the idea started and the sudden spike of popularity for the site.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-06-22: http://www.tumblr.com/explore is another way to discover top tags and content.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-06-28: Tumblr has added the option to display basic photo EXIF metadata (and presumably could support richer EXIF metadata).  ENDUPDATE

Previously:
November 8, 2008  billions of photos

Tumblr photo blogs - transclusion goes mainstream

Tumblr is a quick way to set up a blog, particularly an image-based blog (one that is mostly photo posts).

Ted Nelson's vision of hypertext (Xanadu) included the concept of transclusion - everything would be linked back to an original source, with a full citation trail, rather than copy & pasted.  Transclusion turns out to be hard to do for complex things, so we basically didn't do it.  Even a block quote is just copy & pasted text, with the onus on the author of the HTML page to embed the correct links back to the source.

Tumblr gets you to transclusion quickly without knowing you are doing it.  In some ways this is an extension of the retweet and modified tweet (RT and MT) that we see in Twitter - trails of pointers back to the original source.  As with the new style Twitter, the metadata is created automatically when you click (Retweet for Twitter, Reblog for Tumblr).

Tumblr does a much better job of explicitly surfacing this metadata however, leading to popular photos that have incredibly long chains back to the source, showing the originator (at the very bottom), and crediting the secondary sources that it was picked up from.

So you start out with e.g.

* scilib posted this

and then it builds

* Bob reblogged this from scilib
* Sue reblogged this from Bob
* Alice liked this

all in one long unbroken chain (assuming everyone is using the Reblog or Favorite button)

Tumblr as a whole (all *.tumblr.com sites or custom-domain sites backended by Tumblr) surpassed 250 million page views per day (reported on May 17, 2011). 

It's easy to use with a particular emphasis on sharing, which tends to reach better the majority of people who like to share but don't necessarily create many images themselves.  Its focus on easy sharing (and good viewing experience e.g. on the iPad) make it a much more powerful sharing platform than Flickr.

Flickr is really focused on helping you maintain and tag your own gallery of photos, but pretty poor at helping you to share them or discover others (within the site).  Flickr does now let you easily link images to a Tumblr blog though.

These various characteristics (along with many other features I haven't covered) have led to Tumblr being adopted by some government organisations.  You can find some here

http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/politics

mixed in with other political opinion tumblrs.  A few key ones are:

• http://blog.usa.gov/
• http://statedept.tumblr.com/ (official US State Department presence)
• http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/ (from the US National Archives)

I think experimenting in this space is entirely appropriate - the nature of the web continues to evolve.  The current engagement levels with content appear to be low though (you can see the number of "notes", which combines reblogs and faves, on each posting).

To better understand some of the context around using Tumblr in the government, read Measured Voice's post Why We Recommended Tumblr for the New USA.gov Blog.  Their core point was "an interface that encourages sharing and interaction".

In general reblog & like tend to be the main methods of engagement, as they are built-in.  Beyond that Tumblr has very minimal communications features, with an asked-answered single question system.  There is no commenting by default - you can add a comment when you reblog something, but there is no discussion thread attached to a post, although one can be added, as blog.usa.gov does.

When everything is working well, you see both traditional network behavior, in which a posting may stumble along with a few hits until it gets reblogged by a supernode, followed by a flood of likes and reblogs, as well as global attention behavior, where the reblogs and likes sweep around the globe from east to west as parts of the world awake and fall asleep.

In case you're wondering how the discovery takes place, the Tumblr dashboard is sort of like a tweetstream - it shows postings from people you follow, updated continuously.  Your Tumblr dashboard becomes a bit like an RSS reader for the Tumblogs you follow, except with much more emphasis on the streaming nature, rather than trying to make sure you don't miss a single post.

I'm doing simple experiment just to see whether using Tumblr helps photos circulate more widely, by starting to post my Flickr Creative Commons licensed images to http://rakerman.tumblr.com/

As you can imagine, there are lots of potential issues with copyrighted images being endlessly reproduced, although at least as long as the original source is the creator (which is not always the case) there is an advantage in that the endless reproductions are tracked in detail.

18,000 tweets and counting - three years of Twitter and how it has impacted my blogging

"created_at":"Wed Jun 06 15:35:14 +0000 2007" (extracted from http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=scilib)

Closing in on four years on Twitter.  I can't remember exactly, but I think I noticed people were talking about it more and more, on blogs and in person, so I decided to check it out.  It took me about six months to figure out how I could use it, to understand what Twitter was for me.  It has aspects of "social bookmarking that works" (that is, that actually shares bookmarks rather than just keeping them to yourself) as well as a social network maintenance layer - a way to keep in contact with people in your network, during the sometimes-long gaps between in-person conversations.  It's also a way to get some understanding of people you have yet to meet, to discover a bit about their interests and personality.

It is not, exactly, a blog killer.  But it has dramatically reduced the amount of routine news or links that I post.  A bunch of factors led to a dramatic reduction in my blogging.  The main one had nothing to do with Twitter - in June 2009 when I posted the blog is quiet and said it was because of "Reason I can't tell you which will be announced soon" it was because I had planned to move to scienceblogs.com.  I was excited about the move.  But then there was some minor setup... and I started second-guessing what I wanted to post, I was uncertain about what to say, now that I was outside of my own space.  I started a few posts in draft, but I was really hesitant to do a completely new launch, on a new site.  Whereas previously I would have had an idea and immediately fired up my browser, I no longer felt that I should just share anything, anytime.  (This was nothing to do with ScienceBlogs, they were perfectly welcoming.)  And so my momentum drained away, and my energies were all channeled entirely into Twitter.  To the extreme that my posts went June 2009... August 2009... July 2010.

Meanwhile, my tweets are up to 500 or more a month, according to the (probably imperfect) stats gathered by TweetStats for my account.

What have a learned, from this long sejour entirely in Twitterland?  First and foremost, I think one loses a lot by not blogging.  Twitter can to some extent maintain a presence online, but it can't expand it or make substantial impact.  Pretty much all of the opportunities that have come to me from sharing online came from sustained blog posting, from long-form sharing of my own ideas, not from tweeting or retweeting.  If you want to share your ideas in a way that will generate substantial discussion and spark interest in a major way, you have to write in the long form.  It's the content creators who are the top of the Internet pyramid - to have an impact you must be writing your ideas, narrating your work.  Not just for others, but as importantly, to better understand yourself, to have an online archive of your thoughts and work over time. 

Nick Charney puts it nicely

As a knowledge worker myself, I feel that my blog is one of my strongest assets: it helps me contextualize my thinking, forms a narrative, is searchable, can hyperlink to other sources, and allows for comments and debate.

From Briefing Notes to Govblogging - January 28, 2011

When I started a work blog in 2004, it was as simple as wanting to be able to google my own conference notes.  The easiest way for me to make that happen was to just stick them in a blog.  I had no idea it would become more than that, notes to myself.

Our communication channels are evolving continuously.  In 2004 the library blogosphere was evolving rapidly, and my RSS reader was my daily go-to place to find out what was going on.  Later, I found Friendfeed was a valuable addition, allowing additional conversation and sharing around a broader spectrum of material than just blog posts.  I used delicious, but I never found it worked very well even as a personal archive - I was much more likely to find what I was trying to remember by trying some keywords in a search of my blog, than guessing what I might have used for tags in delicious, and it was pretty rare that someone would be monitoring delicious closely enough to pick up a link that I had posted.

Twitter does a much better job of "ambient awareness" in a few senses - it lets me know generally what major events are happening (such as the ongoing events in Egypt),  amd it is also a good way for me to find links of interest in specific topic areas (for me: open data, government 2.0, library technology, scholarly publishing).  But it's important to understand, this is my unique window on to Twitter.  I have very carefully selected whom I want to follow (once I hoped to keep it to 200 people or less, now I am vowing to keep it under 500); I also go through my followers daily and block both blatant spammers and people that I think are coming from keyword searches that don't match my main content.  Twitter for me is very much a curated experience - both from me in curating the information I want to see by selecting whom I follow, and in turn from that group, in the content they write and retweet.

There is a major problem though, which is a dramatic loss in findability.  Twitter is designed as an ephemeral stream.  And once you're following a substantial number of people, the river flows very quickly.  I can retweet and favourite a lot faster than I can read.  And once tweeted or favourited, Twitter doesn't make it easy to search, even to record for a long time what you have highlighted.  I use Friendfeed to consume both my tweets and my favourites but it's not a great solution - its search is imperfect and it is in danger of disappearing entirely at any time (it was bought by Facebook and is no longer actively supported).

There are some dedicated tools, such as T-keeper and Archivist, I tend to use those specifically for recording event hashtag traffic though, rather than to capture all of my tweets.  There are also services that will bookmark any link you tweet, but often these want read/write access to your Twitter stream, and I am very reluctant to grant write access to any app.

I would be interested in hearing what workflows people are using to keep track of their tweets and favourites so that they can go back and read things later - I imagine a lot of people are using Instapaper, but I haven't managed to integrate this into my workflow yet.

Another factor driving Twitter use is the fact that it is easily read/write on mobile.  There are lots of good Twitter clients for mobile devices.  On the iPhone I use Echofon, and on Blackberry the official Twitter app, which has some nice notification integration.  As I use my iPhone a lot on transit, Twitter has provided an easy way to monitor what's going on, and to provide feedback.

Specifically in the Ottawa context, Twitter has been a powerful tool for keeping up with local events, reporting from those events, and connecting to attendees before and after.  For example, the recent Third Tuesday about the NCC's use of social media was announced on Twitter, microblogged on Twitter using hashtag #3tyow, and has also been a catalyst for further conversations with Daniel Feeny (@feeny_d) who was the presenter.  I actually worry about a digital divide in Ottawa, as those who are still using only mailing lists and blogs are missing out on a lot of the events and discussion that now are solely on Twitter.

Also, it's important to understand there are three quite different Twitter experiences: the web site, the mobile apps, and the desktop tools. 

Twitter through the website itself is a somewhat limited experience - although more features are now easier to use and better exposed in the new user interface.  It still won't let you post a retweet with a comment, or shorten your URLs for you, or help you post images.  A Twitter web toolkit thus includes not only an open Twitter window, but e.g. bit.ly for URL shortening and e.g. Twitpic for picture posting - a rather awkward, manual integration.  It's actually easier for me to post a link or a picture using Echofon, as there is a Safari "post to Echofon" bookmarklet, and built-in picture posting support.

Echofon (and other iPhone apps) also give visual indication of new @-messages and direct messages (DMs), unlike the web app.  I probably use Echofon more than any other single iPhone app.

That being said, you only get the full power of Twitter with a desktop application like TweetDeck.  Twitter is not just you and the network of followers and followees you have, it is global conversations.  You can track these using Twitter searches that provide RSS feeds, but it is much easier to monitor them at a glance in a tool like TweetDeck (or the web-based HootSuite).  For example, while I get information in my feed about open data from the people I follow, I also monitor the #opendata hashtag in TweetDeck, along with many others.  Selecting hashtags of interest and monitoring them can be a great way to learn about a new topic and keep abreast of new developments.  Don't forget you can use booleans, so you can e.g. monitor information about the three GC 2.0 core tools by using the search "gcpedia OR gcconnex OR gcforums".

Here's what I'm monitoring right now:

• gcpedia OR gcconnex OR gcforum OR gcforums
• #w2p - an Ottawa networking / information event mostly for GC employees - "Web 2.0 Practitioners"
• #goc3 - GC collaboration community
• #goc - Government of Canada in general
• #opendataottawa or #apps4ottawa - the Ottawa open data community and the just-completed contest
• #smbottawa - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa
• datacite - The data DOI service, provided by CISTI in Canada
• #opendata
• #gov2au - very active hashtag of Australian Gov 2.0 developments
• #gc20 - Government of Canada 2.0 and also the hashtag my group, the GC 2.0 Program Office uses, when appropriate
• #ottcafesci - The Cafe Scientifique that the Science & Technology Museum does (unfortunately not used by the other organisations in Ottawa that also do Cafe Scientifique events)
• #psi_policy - Public Sector Information Policy - another view on open data, mostly from a European perspective
• #SC2011 - the hashtag for the upcoming Ontario Library SuperConference
• #3TYOW - Third Tuesday Ottawa
• #resd - a just-completed Resource Discovery Day at Library and Archives Canada
• #mobileappsottawa - a recent mobile apps event in Ottawa
• #ottawahackathon - yesterday's Ottawa Google User Group hackathon

Like I said, a river of information.  But you don't have to try to drink everything from the firehose.  A good start is just to find the people and hashtags that are useful to you and start monitoring them, when you can - maybe even just check in once a day to get a sense of what's going on.  How you use Twitter, and how often, can evolve from there.  For myself, I was happy to have my deep immersion in Twitter for over a year, but I'm happy to be back blogging now as well.

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.

UK open data, open government

I was sorely tempted to title this "would uk like some data, guv?"

The UK government is picking up the challenges issued in the excellent Power of Information Taskforce report.

Via Andy Powell in my FriendFeed, I find a Guardian article Free our data: UK set to follow successful US data method

Now the UK government has picked up on the idea, and in a post on the Cabinet Office blog Richard Stirling is asking the British public how a UK version of the US site should be implemented. "What characteristics would be most useful to you - feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by FTP?," he asks. "Should this be an index or a repository? Should this serve particular types of data eg XML, JSON or RDF?"

Although there is a list of dozens of the UK government's published data sources there is no clear pan-governmental approach to making data available. The proposal has been received with pleasure by a number of web developers and would-be data users, although it is not clear how free people would be to use the data commercially.

Richard Stirling is writing in the UK Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/

At some point I will no longer be saying things like "yes, that's an official gov.uk blog" but... well, it is.

The four themes they list on their about page: open information, open feedback, open conversation, open innovation.

A more extensive extract of what Richard Stirling asks in his posting Information and how to make it useful :

Any solution must support open standards and would ideally be open source, but there are a couple of other questions we are pondering at the moment:

• What characteristics would be most useful to you – feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by e.g. FTP, etc?
• Should this be an index or a repository?
• Should this serve particular types of data e.g. XML, JSON or RDF?
• What examples should we be looking at (beyond data.gov e.g.http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data)?
• Does this need its own domain, or should it sit on an existing supersite (e.g. http://direct.gov.uk)

There are already 19 substantive comments, and he indicates they are also monitoring Twitter for the hashtags #poit (Power of Information Taskforce) and #opendata

There is a new Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, according to his official Twitter feed, @DirDigEng , he was scheduled to start in his position yesterday.

Sometimes I feel like a certain country often considered to be between the UK and the US is missing out on this whole official open data, blogging, twitter thing...

If anyone were to want someone to start blogging officially about government open data in a certain northern neighbour of the US, I am available...

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.

meta: GoogleBurner

Just a meta blog note that this blog's feed is moving (as in, forced migration) from "old" FeedBurner to new Google FeedBurner (feedburner.google.com)

Google Help - Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ

In theory this shouldn't have any effect on the feeds, but knowing technology as I do, I thought it best to provide an advance warning.

can Canada learn from US open government? - City News reports

Kris Reyes uses the announcement of President Obama's Director of Citizen Participation, Katie Jacobs Stanton as a jumping-off point for discussions of Canadian government and social media, touching in particular on the Toronto-based ChangeCamp.

You can see video of her interview with Mark Kuznicki as well as additional links in a posting on her City News cityonline blog, "All about ChangeCamp".

Incidentally, for those who think one technology kills another, this posting is an example of tech interactions - I saw the end of the story on TV, sent a tweet to Kris Reyes to ask about her blog posting, got her response, and then added info from her blog to this posting on my blog.  New tech adds new capabilities, but it doesn't necessarily replace existing services.

Sidebar 1: Until I read the techPresident posting about Katie Jacobs Stanton, I had forgotten that Google Moderator existed (it's a ranking / discussion site, similar to digg, obamacto, or some features on change.gov)

Sidebar 2: Mark has been pretty busy recently, he was also interviewed by CBC's Spark - "Full Interview: Mark Kuznicki" (Spark is on Twitter as well - sparkcbc) and was part of TVO's AgendaCamp.

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

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.

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

Google gets more social and also tries to take over the client side

Google has been adding more social features to Blogger lately - first it was an enhanced blog list that has "mini aggregator" features, now they've added a social network based around blogs - you can become a blog follower, and blogs can display the list of their followers - kind of like MyBlogLog.

In addition to these relatively minor tweaks, Google has a major announcement, which is a new web browser, Google Chrome, which should be available today (September 2, 2008) on Windows only.  Google positions it as a more modern, applications-friendly browser.  I get a little worried, and there are overtones of Microsoft, at a single organisation having so many sevices, from total domination of the web search space, through various web tools like documents and blogs, to desktop applications like Earth, Picasa (for photos), and now a web browser.

The List of Google products on Wikipedia goes on for something like 10 screens on my large monitor.

That being said, if Safari, Firefox and now Chrome can force the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, to be more standards-compliant in version 8, that's all to the good.  (Note: Safari and Firefox both run on Mac and Windows.)

Facebook Blog Networks

It's your blog, except in a closed social network, except the blog page itself is public, so you might as well claim the public page, which I am doing (reluctantly)... now

Blog Networks

Knol - Google losing view of web?

I think Google has climbed up so high on their knoll that they have lost perspective on what makes the web work.

Let's see what they have to say about Knol in Blogger Buzz

Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic.  The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading.

Introducing Knol - Blogger Buzz - July 23, 2008 (Emphasis theirs.)

Both the concept and the implementation of this are wrong on so many levels.

1. After we've worked hard to put forth the position that you can present serious science and ideas in a blog, Google says, nah, blogs are just quick and easy jottings.
2. Who is Google to say what the tone of a Knol is?  Is there going to be a Knol Tonemaster?
3. Knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content?  So ideas are all graven in stone?

In addition, Google is hacking away at the web in various ways.

4. The entire Knol is nofollow.  You can't have a web if search crawlers don't follow links.

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

5. The Knol search engine is utter shite.  It gives different results depending whether you're logged in (i.e. blessed by Google) or surfing anonymously (i.e. unknown by Google, an outcast).

Check this out.

Exhibit A: When logged out.

No results found for digital photo
No results found for geocoding
No results found for akerman

Exhibit B: When logged in.
Results 1-1 of about 1 for digital photo
Results 1-1 of about 1 for geocoding
Results 1-2 of about 2 for akerman

What the heck?  That's not the way people expect a search box on the web to work.

6. In Wikipedia, making a link to a relevant topic is as easy as [[topic]] - the topic doesn't even have to exist yet, someone can come in later and click to create it.  In Knol, making a link to a relevant Knol... doesn't exist in any easy way.  You're supposed to search for URLs and make links.
7. You're supposed to create authoritative articles with references, but many of the examples are just formatted text.  Which is to say, references that don't even link anywhere.  Isn't the whole point of the web supposed to be that you FOLLOW a link to check the referenced source?
8. Given that it has no concept of bibliographic reference metadata, it's no surprise that there are no features to link into the scholarly literature whatsoever - not even a quick way to insert references from Google Scholar, Zotero or RefWorks.  No DOIs, no COINS, no nothing.
9. On Google, PageRank IS AUTHORITY.  Higher in the results, higher (implied) authority.  This may not be right, but it is true.  How do you gain PageRank?  Well, for one, you write a blog (or create a website) which has lots of content.  Lots of good content.  People like that content, people link that content.  PageRank accrues... to your site.  I'll say that again: PageRank accrues to your site.  So instead of blogging, Google thinks you should put your knowledge in a Knol, where PageRank will accrue to... wait for it... knol.google.com
10. Not only are you supposed to give away your PageRank, and your ability to give PageRank to others (through having your links followed), you can't even discover a community of clicks.  What's that?  Well it goes like this.  Joe Biglibrarian's never heard of me.  I link to him and write something reasonable (one hopes).  He sees the incoming clicks from my readers in his web stats.  He reads my thing.  He writes a post.  And so it goes.  Webstats may not be a perfect community discovery mechanism, but it is a part of it particularly in the early days of your blog.  Knol provides no webstats whatsoever.
11. Not only does Knol remove you from your click community, its advertising focus gives you a deliberate disincentive to direct traffic to other sites.  Links to other sites = lost AdSense revenue.  The ideal ad-revenue Knol has no links to outside sites other than the ads themselves.

Google says

Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads.

I'm sorry Google, but that's not only not true, the entire Knol system and "introducing Knol" tone show a total lack of understanding of the current state of scholarly blogging, a total absence of support for scholarly citation and linking, and a surprising disregard for critical existing aspects of the web architecture.

If you want to make Knol a system for presenting authoritative information, you might want to look at how scholars do it in modern web-enabled scientific articles (about which, more to come in a later posting).

ResearchBlogging.org

http://researchblogging.org/ is an aggregator that picks up posts (from registered blogs) that have BPR3 tagging to indicate it is a post about peer-reviewed research

via Bora

I think this is a great step in promoting peer-reviewed research on the web.

Previously:
August 09, 2007  the peer review logo

meta: 1000+ subscribers

I suspect a lot of this is due to GPS, digital photo and cellphone technology readers.
For those readers, you should know that all new reviews are on my new site, Richard's Tech Reviews.
(There is a lot of cross-linking to Science Library Pad, since I didn't want to move my legacy reviews.)

The list of all reviews includes both new Tech Reviews postings and older Library Pad postings.

As indicated in a previous posting, this blog, Science Library Pad, will maintain a focus now on library-related technologies and ideas.  If you do want to see some of the older GPS-related postings, they were all gathered in the Mapping category.

Clear as mud?

1000 readers is sort of the point where the number becomes so big I can't quite comprehend it.
André asked me if I felt obligated now to produce content for my readership, but my answer is that I try to maintain the same criteria for postings that I had originally, which is basically "interesting technology that may impact libraries, and rants about how libraries use technology".  In a way, being in that many feed readers actually reduces posting urgency, because you know that even if you go on hiatus, your posts will still show up in some readers after you return.

A more compelling is question is whether I feel obligated to create content solely to get the attention of Google's crawler and maintain PageRank... the answer there is a bit more complicated.  While I feel that "if you write good content, they will come", the impact of Google correctly crawling, indexing, and returning blog results is literally a factor of 10 in incoming traffic.  So I have to admit I do try to post in a Google-friendly manner (e.g. choice of post titles), and I get very annoyed when Google does a bad crawl (as it did from mid-December to mid-January for Tech Reviews, crippling my results).

Thanks again to everyone for reading.  I have a new e-science posting coming up next week...

edit Science 2.0 at Scientific American

Widely reported, but anyway

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0

You can add your thoughts at: Scientific American - Edit This - Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? - January 9, 2008

It has some interesting discussion on the reputation issue

"The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."

The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. ...

Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. ...

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."

Here's what I left as a comment:

As I wrote in a recent blog posting, in the online world one has to think about both reputation and attention.  In the traditional print journal world, the only way to get attention was by first gaining reputation through publication.  In the online world, I would argue particularly for young scientists, the amount of attention they can get (from search hits, incoming links, and others reading their blog postings and wiki entries) can be invaluable in finding collaborators, and in building an "online reputation".  This means there is a challenging balancing act between waiting to gain reputation through traditional journal articles, versus taking a risk and being more open, and gaining both attention and reputation through the digital medium.  In my experience (as a non-scientist), the opportunities opened up by blogging have been much greater than I could ever have imagined, and the responses are more rapid and more numerous than I get when I publish in a journal.