Weibel Lines

Book Review: My War -- Killing Time in Iraq

Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq came to my attention through Paul Jones' lecture at OCLC in May. Paul is chair of the Blooker Prize selection committee that chooses the best books-that-began-life-as-blogs. Colby's book won the prize.  As a parent of a Marine, I'll read most anything that illuminates the day-to-day of life in America's biggest foreign policy debacle... well... maybe ever.

Buzzell is an unlikely man of letters.  A disproportionate number of his happen to be "F". Prior to joining the Army, his major investment in his future involved skateboarding, and at 26, his enlistment was as much as anything an escape from a future of dead-end data entry jobs.  He drank a lot of beer, and then recruiter's Koolaid, and next thing you know he's in Mosul.

His stories of humdrum will ring true to anyone with even passing familiarity with military life, and that credibility punctuates the power of his descriptions of events that most of us (thankfully) will never be able to judge from first-hand experience.

Buzzell is far from unread.  He quotes liberally from a diverse cross-section of literature.  As a fellow facebooker (Brenda Petays) wrote about this book:

My favorite quote is where Buzzell quotes battalion commander Lombatton who quotes Marcus Aurelius: "Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates is own darkness."

This is a must read if you have someone in Iraq or who might be. Or maybe even if you just want to know what its like for an American soldier serving in Iraq. It is witty, profane, evocative and just plain entertaining. The author became an unwitting celebrity for his natural style and up front description. His MOS is the 240 machine gun and humor piercing irony. An interesting case of someone whose life is probably far better off for the war, and has turned his advantage to a network-effect benefit for the rest of us. It isn't great literature, but it is terrific narrative.
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Image: The foyer of the newly opened Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia.  See more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/weibel-lines/sets/72157594479322602/

There's gold in them thar bib records

My esteemed colleague, Thom Hickey, shared with me a list created using the WorldCat.org Lists beta application.  I told him I'd give him a 15 minute head start to blog about this (he found the list, after all): it is too good to pass up.   

We've made it a little challenging to find (or even know about) LISTS so far, but early in the life cycle, there are apparently a few intrepid souls that tried it out.  One of them, Daniel Cornwall, generated an instant classic:

Best. Titles. Ever. - Oddly titled Government Documents

This gem of 52 items (what, no joker?) belongs on David Letterman or All Things Considered.

Some of my personal favorites (my annotations):

• Citizenship and the strawberry jam. (Got milk?)
• After the cold war : living with lower defense spending. (ok, so some of these aren't exactly current... thank heaven we were saved from THIS particular fate)
• Everything you always wanted to know about shipping high-level nuclear wastes (a new candidate for the Dummies series?)
• Gobbledygook has gotta go. (what chance do we have?)
• The national money laundering strategy for ... (I think this rounds to the Ways and Means Committee)
• State-of-the-art dummy selection. (A fast moving field if ever there was one)

Daniel has set a high bar for us... or maybe he did this list AT the bar... but next time someone says librarians (or gubmint writers) aren't very funny, point them at Daniel's list.

If you want to make your own lists, funny or otherwise, register at WorldCat.Org and get busy.

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Image: rites of summer (June, 2007)
 
 

Change can be brutal

Lorcan passed along the following link about from Skrentablog that illustrates how quickly things change in the world we live in. The rapidity of change in momentum from one business-networking-site to a new one is pretty amazing (terrifying if you work for the latter).  It seems to be happening far more quickly than any business unit can possibly respond to effectively. If you work for Linked-In and just bought a house, you might not be sleeping so well just now.  This particular case is an extreme example of the sort of change that we've been living with on the Web since it started. Upheaval... opportunity... uncertainty... no solid ground. Innovate or perish... maybe perish anyway.

We in the library community find ourselves astride two operating environments with different business rules.  One is fixed, well understood, and a bit long in the tooth.  The other is characterized by constant change, huge opportunities, and risks to match, with no clear distinction between collaborators and competitors.

Social networking platforms are clearly important to our future in the second domain. At the moment, Facebook is on the mind of lots of librarians who are looking for the right platform.  A week there convinces me that there is a good deal to be excited about. I am just as convinced that it isn't where we'll end up. Facebook lacks important dimensions of what we want... Here is a starting rough cut that Eric Miller and I squeezed out of a couple of beers in the June sun in my backyard this afternoon:

1. Data portability

Export into Facebook is pretty decent.  Getting stuff out is another issue (no surprise... they want  FB to be  a terminus, not just another node).

2. Ownership of your own data

This is a corollary of the first problem. Marshall Kirkpatrick puts it thusly:

Lately I’ve taken to framing questions about data export and identity standards as rights questions. I own rights on my data; I want to be able to easily and quickly take it with me from one social network to another. If I want to have a single login across those different networks and perhaps even have multiple personas (personal, professional) then I ought to be able to do so. No one is doing all of that well, but I expect consumers to demand all of it in time.

3.  DRY provenance 

Dont Repeat Yourself: Every piece of content should have a persistent identifier that  makes it simple to audit where it came from and where it went, so the platform can pipe data from person to application to person without ambiguity or repetition.

4. Typed Relations 

Friends are nice.... we should all have lots of them, but there are lots of other named relationships opne might want to use to charactize relations among users, applications, and agents.  And we won't know what they all are at the outset, so they have to be flexible and dynamic.

5. Policy Infrastructure

How is data shared, and when is it channeled narrowly?  Family, friends, the public, groups... these are only a few of the options.

Some of these are about business models, some complicated to do (and convey).  Their appearance in an easy-to-use system may someday cause Facebook the same sort of indigestion that one might imagine among Linked In folks today.
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Its a dog's life (Buddy in Whetstone Park last weekend)

 

 

Facebook, Academia, and Intellectual Property

When you buy a new car, you suddenly notice how many of them there are on the road, and Facebooking feels a lot like that... seems like everyone is there, and the people who aren't will probably show up tomorrow.  Andy Powell points to a recent article detailing FB's unprecedented growth, and certainly this growth is manifest among my colleagues.

Andy also has been writing about FB as a tool for scholars, and drawing comparisons with the faceless stagnation that characterizes institutional repositories at this stage of our journey into the new tools of scholarship. I think he is very close to the mark.

One of my Facebook contacts, Jennifer Lang, posted an interesting link from Blogscholar.com about the darker side of the FB business model:

Academia and the dangers of Facebook reads in part:

Facebook is a very ingenious business model with the capture of a global network of IP at its heart.  For reference to this see the almost unfathomably bold terms on the site regarding posted user content ... "By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."

I think what this really means is you can't tell them to take something off because you changed your mind.  It also means you might want to think twice before publishing chapters of your book there.  I'm not sure that I have a problem with this sort of license, given that I mostly WANT others to see and reuse what I talk about publicly, but on the other hand, I do want attribution for my thoughts and ideas, and there seems to be no assurance of any such thing in this boilerplate... quite the opposite.

Still, I don't expect to lose much sleep over this... nor do I expect a scholarly publishing environment to blossom from within a technology born of college hookup aspirations.  The primary value we hope to reap from social networking services isn't really the content at all, but rather the emergent relationships among content objects (and the entertainment value of the asides of our extended cohort).  The content can live happily (and safely) elsewhere, including in institutional repositories (and blogs!).

When I tab to my Facebook page, what draws me is the feed... the changes in the status of my colleagues (twitteresque status notes), but more importantly, links to important ideas or discussions...and why not repository objects?  Guided serendipity that helps me understand the ever-changing state of mind of my community. 

Ideas of importance have a fixity that is itself important, and to which our community pays great tribute. Social networks are the antithesis of fixity: fluid, capricious, whimsical, spontaneous, emergently creative (ok, and tedious, self-absorbed, and noisy).   Still, I want to live in the amalgamation of this sort of Yin and Yang.  Facebook is unlikely to realize this fully, for lots of reasons, but it feels to me that it is the right direction.

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The Gazebo at the Whetstone Park of Roses, Columbus, Ohio

Random notes on Facebook, Fathers' Day, and library stuff

I'm a 40 hour veteran  of Facebook now.  Some early reflections:

• I've made some contacts that surprised and pleased, with colleagues and friends I haven't been in touch with in some time.
• I became my son Brendan's 700th friend
• I realize that having friend-access to one's progeny enables a degree of familiarity I'd rather not exercise (but thanks, Brendan!)
• My favorite thing so far is seeing what one's friends are 'up to', whether a throw away status message, or, more usefully, what groups they are joining.  Though I cannot currently claim having learned or done something useful as a result, I think there is great potential in this as a sort of guided serendipity.
• My least favorite things thus far:
  • giving out an email password so that Facebook can pillage my contact list for members.  Its a perfect example, though, of the tradeoffs against our privacy which beckon to us, and changing passwords isn't so onerous, I suppose.
  • Facebook forces you into radiobutton category choices which constrain artificially (for example, the How do you know X dialog box) [as I was writing this post, Lorcan appeared in my Facebook Friends feed, having posted a note by David Winer about just this problem
  • I want the Web to work more like this, and not be bounded by a Web-platform utility.  The value that comes from this stuff is proportional to the number of participants (well, participation in general I suppose).  Should we really want or expect Facebook to become the dominant platform?  Monoculture is always more productive in the short term, and always pathological in the long term.

I must say, its fun so far.  It will be quite interesting to see if it can be productive as well.

On an entirely different topic, two BBC radio reports caught my attention on Saturday and Sunday mornings respectively.

The first was a BBC Global Business report (Peter Day, the presenter, has become a favorite of mine) about Tim Smit's, a 'social entrepreneur' and his Monkey Business principles.  Basically, they all have to do with creating and nurturing a creative business environment where people will surface rather than bury their passions, where social discourse fuels work, where people entertain and even cook for one another, and can openly articulate why they like working somewhere.  One that struck me... Make important decisions at night, in social engagements.  It reminded me of the wine-besotted working group meeting in OCLC's Conference Room 1 (I think it was 1... I was the besotted one) during the second night of the first Dublin Core meeting.  We broke  some rules, and broke through some barriers that night.  Ever since, the social events at the DC meetings have been a key part of progress, and laptops-at-the-bar was standard operating procedure.

The show this morning had to do with mobile libraries around the world: where they are fading, and where they remain a fundamental aspect of connecting people and resources.  The Kenya Camel library (I almost typed Kamel) is an example, but  I'm not sure these pictures were even from the specific  show I heard.  It frustrates me that I couldn't easily locate audiofeeds for either of these reports... they were great.

Speaking of connections, I heard from both of our boys today for Fathers' Day... one calling from London, the other from a moving truck (Pensacola to Corpus Christi).  Life is good.

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The lilies in my yard are in full bloom

no place to hide

So, I signed up to Facebook today, it having been much abuzz these last weeks, and more to the point, because a colleague seemed to be having too much fun with it. I confess, the first time I tried to do this, when the buzz first broke, the screen where they asked me for email passwords stopped me in my tracks.  I crept quietly away.  Well, privacy is one thing, but duty prevailed.  So, I'm there.

One of the colonization rites is selecting one's picture.  Interesting to see what others choose to project.   My wife immediately objected to my choice (its that near-smirk face!).  I frowned, wavered, and decided I liked it anyway.  Hrumph. Upload.

Now I'm cooking, selecting tabs to see what is there, and lo... 8 minutes in, I have messages!  I have friends! As it happens, one of the first was from a fellow photographer in Seattle:

Nice picture! Hmmm, was that taken in Seattle by any chance?

So... this social networking stuff is great... 8 minutes in, and not only have I violated copyright, but been caught at it... by the owner!

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My friend Wes on the Olentangy at Whetstone Park (June 2007). 

Transitions

OCLC has become increasingly global in recent years, having acquired or developed business units that deliver services to libraries on 6 continents. Changing the enterprise from a collection of dispersed business units to a more coherent global organization is a challenge involving major reorganizations and a concerted effort to be inclusive of the skills and perspectives of the whole of the organization. We are learning to embrace a globally-distributed working environment.

The merger of RLG and OCLC last year occasioned the transition of OCLC Research to OCLC Programs and Research, broadening the outlook of both units, as well as our geographic footprint. Beginning in September, my role in Programs and Research will evolve, and I will be relocating to Seattle to work more closely with the Digital Futures Alliance at the University of Washington Libraries, and the Information School, as well as with WebJunction and ContentDM.

Readers of my blog will recognize the provenance of this relocation as rooted in my sabbatical experience of last year, but my new role will be centered on strengthening the connections between OCLC and the research library community. I will continue to work closely with my PAR colleagues in Dublin and Mountainview, and to contribute to strategic directions in the deployment of identifiers in WorldCat products and services.

From a personal point of view, this change is both exciting and daunting. It represents an opportunity to work in one of the information world’s strongest centers of innovation. But it comes with the difficulties of working at a distance from colleagues whose company and ideas have conferred weight and stature to my own that would otherwise have been beyond my personal reach.  It is an opportunity for which I am grateful. In particular, to my colleagues at the University of Washington who have encouraged me and offered an intellectual home, to Lorcan Dempsey, who has been willing to see opportunity rather than dissipation, and to Jay Jordan, whose support has been enduring, and who reminds me that there is but one metric of success for the venture: returning value to the cooperative.

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Image: A crow at Suzzallo Library, UW (April, 2006)