Four short links: 18 September 2009

More Twitter Clients, GLAM Tech, Retro Homebrew Audio Hardware, Emerging Open Source

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Echofon -- novel take on Twitter apps: sync your unread list between phone, browser, and (ultimately, they promise) desktop Twitter app. (via auchmill on Twitter)
2. GLAM Tech (MP3) -- Radio New Zealand new technology slot about the use of technology in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. For links, see the programme page.
3. Man With Miniature Radio -- 1950s DIY proto-iPod amusement.
4. Open Source in Emerging Markets -- the emerging markets — which include India, China, and Brazil — have more FOSS adoption and a higher concentration of effort in open source. Three quarters (74%) of developers in emerging markets use open source software for at least part of their work, compared to 65% of developers worldwide. In this context, "use" means personal use or corporate use, and could include both developer tools and desktop or server applications. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 8

Somewhere between the realm of Personal and Shared media lies the realm of the Universal.

The realm of the universal is the Library of the Commons, a global repository of user-generated and crowd-sourced media and information.

Services that logically nest in the Library include: Amazon, Yelp, YouTube, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter tweets, Bit.ly items, Scribd docs, Expedia, Google News, Google Maps, TripAdvisor, iTunes, the App Store and any other services and/or information sources that 'just work.'

In other words, these are services that have defined the 'IT' to the point that we can now pretty much take their utility and availability for granted (typically via API access and/or embed codes with some form of customization wizard).

The Genesis of a Library

So how did we get to this place in the story? What gave birth to the Library of the Commons?

No one formally deigned it so, but from the countless me-too services borne of the dotcom and Web 2.0 land rushes, the above-referred services are the ones that cultivated the biggest audiences, grew the richest ecosystems and inspired the deepest engagement levels.

In Darwinian terms, these are the survivors, whose structures and workflows have been defined and refined by time/experience.

As such, they are generally well thought out, holistic and integrated, but more to the point, have large, engaged user bases.

Thus, the Commons presents a riddle. Almost as if inspired by Herman Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game', the riddle is this.

If all of these services yield a smorgasbord of best practices, why not systematically emulate them so as to...FEDERATE them?

Put another way, what if a time came when people ceased trying to perennially re-create the wheel, and instead, started to 'decompose' these services; to empty their function sets from whatever nesting they were contained within; and to re-apply them into new contexts supported by a now federated data flow proxied within the Cloud.

Couldn't the composite feature set be exposed switchboard-style to enable any number of custom services and client apps?

To put some meat on the conceptual skeleton, consider the following exercise that I recently did:

A decomposition of Craigslist and TripAdvisor yields deep profiles that are accessorized and interconnected via context traversal flows, such as categorization routines, places, events, airfares, posts, pages, ratings, discussion threads, offers, jobs, businesses, products and personal listings.

Craigslist offers up 36 different sub-types of items For Sale; Services represent another 19 sub-types; Jobs 41 more; Discussions, another 72. And so it goes (including Housing, Personals and Community) across 175+ geo-locales.

TripAdvisor is an instance of this model that overlays a set of time-tested workflows specific to the relatively complex task of planning a vacation.

These workflows make it easy to match a travel plan to specific tastes, requirements and budget - regardless of the information traversal path you pursued to being ready to get pricing on desired travel dates.

Could these same workflows be re-purposed for researching and then purchasing other similarly complex products or services?

I will come back to that thought, in a moment.

The Rise of the Infodex

What is de-composed, can be re-assembled, and thus begins the Infodex.

The Infodex is a kind of next-generation Rolodex, with aspirations to grow into a real-time marketplace.

What exactly is the Infodex? It is comprised of three parts.

Part one is a listing tool for linking to content, creating a metadata wrapper around media items and encapsulating the above-referenced services (i.e., Yelp, YouTube, WIkipedia) into listing containers that define and expose the methods that one can interface to the media item (framework integrity stuff).

Part two is an indexing engine so that, once simple rules are defined, your media libraries and the information in the listings themselves becomes 'self-organizing.'

Named picture types (globes, animals, historic or famous images), for example, could be a federation of multiple picture services (Flickr, Photobucket, Getty Images) and 'discovered' pictures from past queries.

Looked at from this perspective, the goal, in part, is to establish a cloud-based, crowd-sourced Dewey Decimal System built around the outcome of facilitating better searching, compositing, cross-indexing, sharing, archiving, and analytics functions for specific media and information 'types.'

Part three of the Infodex is a unified runtime player that is congruent with the information flows of the mobile broadband age; namely, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook and Web (Javascript/Flash embeds/Adobe AIR) based viewing/playback environments.

One simple example of a basic type of function that might be propagated across all of these environments is the Three Item Topical List (e.g., Top Three Favorites or Three Most Related Items). Define once, propagate everywhere.

A core assumption of the model is that both the media player and the service integration layers are open-sourced. This ensures that the user experience is uniformly good across all of these services, and pushes proprietary-ness higher up the stack, thus raising the floor for all comers.

A final thought. Google became Google by indexing the web. Couldn't the next generation extend this approach by being federated, crowd-sourced and context-specific (i.e., media, information and service aware)?

Are their obvious best practices for The Commons? Obvious gotchas? What about the Infodex?

Related Posts:

1. Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons


2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication


3. The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

Four short links: 14 May 2009

Open Source Ebook Reader, Libraries and Ebooks, Life Lessons, and Government Licenses

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 22

1. Open Library Book Reader -- the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for.
2. Should Libraries Have eBooks? -- blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the potential for libraries to lend unlimited "copies" of an electronic work simultaneously. He suggests turning libraries into bookstores, compensating publishers for each loan (interestingly, some of the first circulating libraries were established by publishers and booksellers precisely to have a rental trade). I'm wary of the effort to profit from every use of a work, though. I'd rather see libraries limit simultaneous access to in-copyright materials if there's no negotiated license opening access to more. Unlike the author, I don't see this as a situation that justifies DRM, whose poison extends past the term of copyright. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Lessons Learned from Previous Employment (Adam Shand) -- great summary of what he learned in the different jobs he's had over the years. Sample:
   • More than any other single thing, being successful at something means not giving up.
   • Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
   • In a volunteer based non-profit people don't have the shared goal of making money. Instead every single person has their own personal agenda to pursue.
   • Unfortunately "dreaming big" is more fun and less work than "doing big".
4. Flickr Creates New License for White House Photos (Wired) -- photos from the White House photographer were originally CC-licensed (yay, a step forward) but when it was pointed out that as government-produced information those photos weren't allowed to be copyright, the White House relicensed as "United States Government Work". Flickr had to add the category, which differs from "No Known Copyright", and it's something that all sharing sites will need to consider if they are going to offer their service to the Government.

Ada Lovelace Day ABC

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

Ada Lovelace Day helps to "make sure that whenever the question Who are the leading women in tech? is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues". I was tempted to talk about Mitchell Baker (Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla) but the Ada Day specifically requested "unsung heroes", so I'm going to give you the ABC of great women you probably don't already know:

The first, actually, you probably do: Allison Randal. She sometimes blogs on O'Reilly Radar, but not as often as we like. Allison succeeded me in four projects, and made me look bad every time! She ran the Perl Foundation better than I did, she ran Perl 6 better than I did, she was a better editor than I was, and you don't need a math degree to figure out how smoothly OSCON ran without me last year .... I admire the way Allison is a humane manager who succeeds in getting forward progress, even out of the most difficult to manage people, yet she'd much rather be coding. She's a linguist, a compiler writer of mad skills, has been the driving force behind Parrot (congrats on 1.0!), and is a deeply sane person in an industry too-often burdened by ego, vanity, and fantasy.

The second is Brenda Wallace. She's also a rock-solid developer, but has taken on much of the social organising of geek events in Wellington, New Zealand. Software folks are great at spotting gaps in code coverage, but they often have a blind spot for gaps in social coverage. Brenda's run geek girl events, SuperHappyDevHouse, Open Days, Hack Days, and more. She's always finding ways to get developers meeting developers. She rallied many troops for New Zealand's fight against bad copyright law. And, as if that wasn't enough, she has more gadgets than anyone else I've met in NZ!

The third is Courtney Johnston. She works for the National Library of New Zealand. I especially appreciate liminal people, those who live at the intersection of worlds. Courtney bridges three: art, libraries, and the web. She can bring the world view, the values, the techniques, and knowledge from one community to the others, enriching them all. She's passionate about the potential for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to not just survive but thrive in the digital world. And, like Allison and Brenda, Courtney is an amplifier: she is working to share knowledge and build networks that make other people more effective and powerful in what they do.

Lady Ada would be proud.

Flickr Community Fills Gap

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

In the recent round of Yahoo! layoffs was someone I'd just met, George Oates. She started the Flickr Commons, where galleries, libraries, archives, and museums can post photos and the community can tag them. She was a tireless ambassador, as well, with a gruelling travel schedule to bring the word to other institutions on what's possible. Her blog post about how she found out about being laid off is moving.

Still shocked. So fucking brutal.

Within the sadness of that, however, comes some good news. Flickr group and George is taking heart from it.

I'm reminded of Google's philosophy around groups. They were so happy with the way that the Google Maps community rallied to support apps developers, they've rolled out a similar "help-less" support system for their other developer products. The thinking is: if we hold their hands then the work for us will grow faster than we can meet it, so it's better to stand back even at launch and let the community form and do the work. From other experiences I've had (Google Docs, I'm looking at you) this community support is sketchy at best, and Google may well have learned the magic ingredient that creates a vibrant helpful community as opposed to a question-filled answer-free ghetto. With the passion for Flickr Commons that I saw at National Digital Forum last month, I'm sure the community's on the right track.

(hint on the magic ingredient: Maps apps were public works, so the reward for helping was seeing another cool app appear. Google Docs are generally private, so there's rarely any direct reward for helping someone with their DNS configuration or email client setup. Flickr Commons: very public)

If Libraries had shareholders

by Peter Brantley | comments: 30

In my day job as the Director of the Digital Library Federation, I represent a small number of very large research libraries. Given my constituency, I've often wondered what the real impact of networked electronic information resources is on the core traditional business of libraries - lending books - but I've never run across any statistics on this. I have wondered in other blogs (see: "Lost Cathedrals: Libraries and Steel") whether libraries might (to put it crassly) turn into acquisition agencies for licensed content, with small cafes on their ground floors or basements, existing in the physical realm primarily to serve as community centers for students. My conversations with university librarians (the library directors) have recurrently seemed paradoxically positive; I still hear comments like: "We think the Internet is probably increasing traffic, because people see information online, and then they come into the library and utilize our resources." They then go on to discuss the steady increase in numbers they see in "gate counts" as more and more people come into the library.

And then yesterday my friend Jerry McDonough of the University of Illinois' Graduate School of Library and Information Science forwarded me a talk that he gave recently at the British Library called, "We Are Not Alone: The Role of the Research Library in a Suddenly Crowded Information Universe." It contained some slides that made my eyes open very wide. His explanation of the slides is better than I could provide, so I've replicated the analyses on my own, uploaded them below, and with his permission, interleaved his narrative.

These statistics come from a larger collection of research libraries - the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) - than my own organization represents, many of whom are smaller; typically DLF institutions are more idiosyncratic in their profiles. The statistics that Jerry and I generated use median figures across all ARL member institutions for which data exist on the variables utilized (year endpoint = 2003). ARL and the University of Virginia have built a simple web interface to the main ARL statistics, so anyone can replicate or play with other analyses to the extent the data permit.

Over to Jerry -

---

(continue reading)