IAlog

The rumors are true: the Google Books Library Project is partnering with UT.

Since the day I heard of Google Books I’ve been hoping it would come to UT’s Benson Latin American Collection. The Benson is one of the largest collections of Latin American materials in the world, filling a void created by inconsistent institutional support for libraries in the region. There are legends about UT researchers who got grants to travel to national libraries in Latin America only to find that their holdings were a shadow of the Benson’s. As a student I was always enchanted and frustrated by the Benson because it is an open-stack, non-circulating library: you can see and touch and smell the books but you can’t take them home. It’s a perfect candidate for using digitization to address needs that will not be met otherwise.

The announcement doesn’t specify that the project will focus on Latin American materials, but the fact that the Benson and the PCL Map Collection are mentioned by name is encouraging. The latter also raises the question of whether Google might be interested in digitizing UT’s maps, ideally not only scanning them as UT has already been doing but perhaps georeferencing them: providing Google Earth-like access to specialized and historical maps could yield some amazing results.

I’m sure that there are many hurdles to be faced by the project, not least of which will be to deal with thousands of small publishers in dozens of legal jurisdictions.

I’d love to hear from people at other Google Library Project sites about what it has meant for you on the ground. (Ed?)

Recently I’ve become a nearly daily Wikipedia user, and I have to say that I find the assertions of Wikipedia’s quality to be overstated. Although I’ve rarely noticed outright errors, almost every article includes at least some examples of poor organization, unclear writing, major omissions, or obsessive attention to trivia.

I’d like to do my own personal A-B test of Wikipedia vs. Britannica, but the sad fact is that the information I need on a regular basis just isn’t in Britannica. The problem isn’t limited to Britannica’s eschewing of pop culture or lag time in covering technology. Last week I needed to look up a grab-bag of information studies theories that came up in class (Bradford’s Law, Zipf’s Law, Lotka’s Law, Bates’ Model of Berrypicking). The only one of them mentioned in Britannica at all was Zipf, who got three sentences in an article on linguistics, with no mention of how Zipf applies in information studies, media, culture, economics, or biology. Wikipedia had full articles, however imperfect, on three of the four (omitting only Bates).

Forget authority vs. populism: Britannica can’t possibly compete with Wikipedia if it doesn’t even cover the topics people need and want.

(Not to mention free one-click access vs. a subscription-only service locked up behind cumbersome authentication…)

Last week’s New Yorker had a thoughtful review by John Cassidy of Chris Anderson’s long-awaited The Long Tail. The review is generally favorable, and a good intro to the topic for those of us who haven’t been following it, but it does offer a few interesting criticisms.

One is that the idea of technology-enabled niche marketing isn’t new. Cassidy cites dusty old futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book The Third Wave as predicting an end to mass marketing. I’m sure that precursors of the idea of “mass customization” have been kicking around for a while. But I wonder, did Toffler understand it as related not only to the technology of production and delivery but also to the technology of communication? In other words, did he anticipate not only the forces driving down the price of niche goods and services but also the forces identified by Anderson (blogs, search engines, online reviews) driving up the demand for niche products?

Cassidy also criticizes Anderson’s claim that the strengthening of the long tail will directly shrink the influence of the “short head”, noting that the movie industry in particular is still led by blockbusters. As he puts it,

Blockbusters and niche products will continue to coexist, because they’re flip sides of the same phenomenon, something economists call “increasing returns,” whereby the big get bigger and the rest fight for the scraps. A long-tail world doesn’t threaten the whales or the minnows; it threatens those who cater to the neglected middle, such as writers of “mid-list” fiction and producers of adult dramas.

That’s an interesting hypothesis, but Cassidy doesn’t back it up with any data. Are Amazon, Netflix and the other enablers of the long tail really hurting mid-tier artists? I find it hard to believe. To me it looks like any cultivation of an audience willing to look past blockbusters is immediately beneficial to those who stand closest to the blockbusters’ shadow. But maybe it all depends on how you define the head, the middle and the tail.

Finally, Cassidy complains that Anderson has overlooked the fact that the aggregators of the long tail are themselves über-blockbusters. There’s nothing long-tail about the position of Amazon, Google, eBay, iTunes, or Netflix in their respective businesses. Although Amazon is the friend of the small publisher, it is the bitter enemy of the small bookstore. One interesting question is which of these businesses inherently lead to natural monopolies — Netflix’s and Amazon’s hard-copy distribution networks, for instance, have constraints that resemble those of classic distribution networks for water or electricity — and which ones would work just as efficiently as open, distributed systems that could develop their own long tails.

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen at the crafts/tech blog Hobby Princess has pointed things to say about ghettoizing women at conferences:

If you want to make sure that you include the “female perspective” to your program, just invite women to speak about the things they’re doing. Putting smart people to discuss under a separate “women & technology” category is not doing the job.

I can see her point, but I was just at SXSW Interactive where the organizers significantly improved the gender imbalances of recent years in part by inviting BlogHer to program a series of panels. The panels were not a “women and technology” ghetto. Many of the BlogHer-organized panels were on topics of interest to the BlogHer community not strictly related to gender, for example an excellent panel on what happens when you mix personal blogging and professional life. At the same time, part of what BlogHer does is point out sexism in the blogosphere (e.g., the dismissal of “mommybloggers” by people who think it’s dandy for boys to blog about their toys), so some of the BlogHer panels did address those issues. One was entitled “Increasing Women’s Visibility on the Web: Whose Butt Should We Be Kicking?” Works for me!

But speaking of ghettoizing, can somebody explain to me what’s gender-specific about this toolbar?

That’s the Girlawhirl toolbar, advertised through AdSense as:

Like men don’t use Google or block pop-ups?

I get the joke when somebody ironically skins a gender-neutral tool in pink and says it’s for women, like the pink laptops and hard drives at Shiny Shiny, or for that matter Shiny Shiny itself. But the Girlawhirl toolbar appears to be entirely unironic. The idea seems to be that women are afraid to download a toolbar from a tech site but will do so from a fashion site with a violet logo. That’s what I call a ghetto.

Regarding gender and gadgets, I found Hobby Princess through another great panel at SXSW, the one on DIY media. As represented on this panel, the hacker and crafts movements are at work on a grand fusion of traditionally male and female approaches to gadgets and technology. Craft blogs and Make magazine (which is planning a special crafts issue for the fall) are the cutting edge of this fusion. That’s what I call an anti-ghetto.

The Backup del.icio.us blog counts 11 ways to back up your del.icio.us bookmarks but forgot to mention Flock.

Flock is a new open-source browser that uses a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or Shadows to store your favorites instead of keeping them on your desktop. And if you switch services, Flock copies your favorites from one service to the other.

The list does kindly mention that Shadows can import your del.icio.us bookmarks directly as well.

Yesterday I was on the “Tagging 2.0″ panel at SXSW Interactive. Since I figured my co-panelists Don Turnbull, Tom Vander Wall, Adina Levin and Rashmi Sinha would do a good job of articulating the advantages of tagging I decided to introduce a little drama and took the contrarian position. I called my talk “The Six Dirty Secrets of Tagging,” to wit:

1. It’s the content, stupid.
   (Tags are a means to an end, not an end themselves.)
2. Ordinary users don’t understand tags.
   (Present a normal person with a tag box and they’ll ignore it or enter an English sentence.)
3. It’s the UX, stupid.
   (When tagging systems do work it’s because a great deal of care went into the end-to-end user experience. Flickr is a good reference point here.)
4. Tags don’t play well with others.
   (Tagging systems are plagued with interoperability problems, like differing standards for delimiters and different social norms.)
5. Rich applications require rich metadata.
   (Or, where’s my flying car?)
6. Nobody likes real tags.
   (What they want is tagginess!)

On the last point I discussed some of the features people have been trying to pile on top of tagging, like intra-tag syntax (del.icious “for:username” tags and geotagging), consensus tagging, hierarchical tagging and faceted tagging. I actually like faceted tagging. See for example mefeedia.com, a video site with separate facets or “buckets” for place, topic, language, event and people.

That’s the short version. For more you can see my slides with notes, read Christian Crumlish’s summary of the whole panel or listen to the podcast.

For some reason the Interactive panel schedule at sxsw.com isn’t searchable and the panelist bios don’t link back to their panels. The pages don’t have meaningful <title> tags so you can’t even conveniently Google for them.

To address that problem I’ve whipped up a searchable schedule in one-page HTML, Excel and tab-separated text formats. Use cmd-F or grep to look up panelists to your heart’s content.

And for the tag-minded among you, I’ve included links to the Shadows tags for each speaker.

Ed Vielmetti of Vacuum is organizing a Library Camp for April 14, 2006, in Ann Arbor.

Ed’s been doing great things as a techie patron/volunteer at the Ann Arbor public libraries. As I understand it the latest generation of library systems don’t necessarily do a lot of magical “web 2.0″ things themselves but they’re open enough to lend themselves to various kinds of mashups anyway. Ed’s been finding like-minded library geeks who are organizing themselves under the banner of “superpatrons“. (What’s a movement these days without an ambiguously ironic neologism?)

As with other fill-in-the-blank camps, attendance at Library Camp is free but be prepared to participate. You start by signing up on the wiki.

Sure wish I could be there! I also wish I could attend the mass digitization symposium this weekend at UMich. But I’ll console myself by hearing the panel on “Book Digitization and the Revenge of the Librarians” at SXSW. Daniel Clancy of Google Print will be there to answer the question, are we evil yet?

More interesting news from my employer, this time regarding a project I haven’t worked on myself. BlogBurst is a new blog syndication service connecting bloggers with some major news outlets including the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman.

They’re looking for blogs with a topical focus and a full-content RSS feed and in return offer major media exposure. Some of the topics in most urgent demand from the publishers go beyond what what I would have expected, notably travel and women’s issues. It sounds like there’s an opportunity there for international bloggers and the BlogHer crowd. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

My employer, Shadows.com, is running an experiment in encouraging tagging at the upcoming South By Southwest conference and festival here in Austin.

It’s now common at tech conferences for participants to agree on a common tag so they can more easily find each other’s posts to Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. (See for example iasummit or aoir6.)

We’re taking it a step further. We did an ad hoc survey of how people have already been tagging and otherwise abbreviating the names of the bands coming to SXSW and put together a list of “official” SXSW tags. We’ve been seeding the process by tagging band websites into Shadows but don’t mean this to be an intra-Shadows thing. There’s always a lot of Flickr and blogging activity surrounding SXSW and we hope people will use this list as a guide wherever they tag.

It will be interesting to see whether the idea catches on. Since SXSW opens with the very tag-aware Interactive portion of the conference the idea may at least reach the early adopters. At the moment we’ve only settled on tags for the bands but hope soon to get to films, directors and Interactive panelists too.

By the way, the consensus tag for the whole SXSW experience seems to be “sxsw2006“. The four-digit version is leading over “sxsw06″ everywhere we’ve looked, and that was the case in 2005 as well.

This weekend I’ll be at the Information Architecture Summit in Montreal and then next weekend I’ll be back in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. If you can read this and you’ll be in either place, let’s get together.