Weibel Lines

David Weinberger and Paris Hilton

Library Link of the Day pointed to David Weinberger's recent Tech Talk at Google, in which he flog's his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous.  The talk is an entertaining rendition of why digitization averts the problem of trying to have a single-best-organization for the world.  The book, which I've just started, reaches deeply and none-too-gently into our notions of how the information domain is or should be structured. David dedicated the book 'to the librarians', though  librarians may be forgiven for squirming a bit, especially during his viciously funny send up of Melvil Dui...er... Dewey.

The essence of his argument is that the transformational technology of Web 2.0 is creating an infrastructure of meaning that, in aggregate, is more about us and what we are interested in, than any authority-mediated source like a traditional newspaper or encyclopedia can possibly be.

This isn't to say that David rejects all authority, but rather that hammering its artifacts into pre-categorized structures is inimical to its efficient utilization, and preemptive about what constitutes authority to begin with.  The distinctions between metadata and data disappear in this view -- any fragment in or about a work can be useful in retrieving that work, and the fact that they are all digital allows us to start anywhere and end anywhere.  Herman Melville can lead us to Call me Ishmael, and Call me Ishmael  can lead us to Herman Melville. The other Melvil need play no role.

The buzz du jour around the the offices here today was Facebook's claim as a social utility -- a major primary platform for social networking (thanks to Lorcan for bringing this to my attention).  Part of the announcement included a piece about book reviews:

For example, Facebook and Amazon.com developed a “Book Reviews” applications that lets Facebookers write and show book reviews on their profile pages, and add Amazon ‘Buy’ buttons.

David and Facebook and Amazon all agree that book reviews are pretty important metadata.  Conversations about the uses and users of bibliographic information in our own community  evidence a rising awareness that our own metadata, designed for management and repurposed for discovery, is sorely in need of re-engineering.  We could do a lot worse than follow Weinberger's (and Facebook's and Amazon's) lead... read a book, write about it, and link to the library supply chain.  Perhaps his book dedication is more in the nature of an invocation.

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Oh... yeah... Paris Hilton.... Stars and planets, and self-rounding... watch the video.

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Image: The Southern Theater Proscenium in Columbus, Ohio, before the Eileen Ivers concert with the Promusica Chamber Orchestra (May, 2007)

Dr. Theory and Mr. Practice

Michael Braley, one of our summer Semantic Web discussion group faithful, brought to our attention what sounds like it must have been a very interesting Q&A session at a recent keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, and a question by Peter Norvig of Google (reported by News.com).  Quite a moment, to have these larger-than-life icons of the New Millenium postulating on our future. 

Piecing the discussion together from various news reports and blog posts, several interesting issues emerge.  Not for the first time, any of them... their appearance at News.com has mostly to do with the respective authority of speakers.  The high level points:

TBL:

 

• Persistent Identifiers are critical
• Developers should use semantic languages and RDF
• Tagging will improve semantic efficacy
• The Web is the database, and RDF defines its syntax

Norvig:

• Users can be incompetent or venal:
  
  • They often can’t configure software or systems properly, let alone tag things usefully.
  • They often intentionally mislead so as to try to sell us Viagra
• Market leaders have a disincentive to standardize – they benefit from differentiated services and products, not being the same. (talking, I infer, about a general competitive attitude, not necessarily about Google policies).

And after-comments by Hitchhiker’s Guide to 650, on the topic of the web migrating towards private ownership and control via the ‘normalization layer’:

The Google search engine is probably in the best position out of all
the EXISTING technologies out there to be that layer, it kind of is
for humans. The unfortunate ramification (that TBL would be sad to
admit) is that SOMEONE will own the semantic web, not as a standards
body or content owner, but as the normalization/extraction layer. If
Google is able to garner monopolitic growth without a naturally
monopolitic product or business model (search engine), it is not
without a huge leap of faith that in the future a player (maybe
google) will be able to exact a toll for being the de facto router/
translator of data on the web. . . this is a scary thought . . . the
end of the open web? (and these guys are freaked out about net
neutrality?)

Aside: I’m happy to acknowledge that I don’t know who all the cool people are, but I sort of wish they wouldn’t be quite so secretive so we might be able to find out without becoming investigative. Looking at the 650 blog, I could find that the author was apparently important at eBay, has since moved to Green Dot (whatever that is) in LA.  Not much more.

More on these topics to follow....

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Image: The Suzzalo Library is the signature structure of the University of Washington.  This stunning reading room has few peers anywhere in the cathedral-of-reason department. (by the author, April 2006)

Irony... yeah, I know what that is...

Evelyne Viegas, a student in the MSIM program here at UW, is doing an independent study with me this summer on the semantic Web and collaborative software, and as part of that, she and I have established a semantic web discussion group that meets at the Third Place Bookstore (and cafe and pub) every couple of weeks.  This is the academy we always dreamed about: books, beer, coffee, and camaraderie.  And people come! 

First of all, how cool is it that bookstores here provide social space for community events?  Not just a place to buy coffee, but a space for events.  Third Place alludes to the place other than home and work, where people congregate for sustenance and community. Is it accident or irony that Amazon, the slayer of independent bookstores, sits high on a hill overlooking Seattle, home of a vibrant ecology of independent bookstores?

But i digress.  Half a dozen to a dozen would-be and actual semioticians gather every other week to explore the manifestations of meaning on the Web, and how to encourage and capitalize on it.   Last night's topics ranged across:

• the slippery boundary between authoring and metadata creation
• SLATES as organizing principles for Web 2.0 (see my earlier post)
• Ranganathan's categories (Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time)
• THERE.COM
• virtual economies
• derived ontologies and electronic warrant
• RDF as the love child of Platonic logic
• ORKUT.COM (you need an invitation... sniff)
• PREFOUND.COM
• TRIBE.NET
• Dogear, social bookmarking in the enterprise from IBM
• Michael Braley and Geoff Froh's enterprise tagging MSIM capstone project
• The Strength of Weak Ties (or, why people should share bookmarks on needle point , knitting, and USB 2.0 devices).
• EUREKSTER.COM
• microformats
• and more....

Most troubling question of the evening (Michael Braley):

Is Myspace the leading manifestation of semantics on the Web?

It is certainly among the most popular... in fact, this past week, Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that US visits to MySpace led all other sites for the first time.  Yikes!

Finally, the award in the category of If-you-can't-define-it-you-don't-really-know, goes to Kevin O'Halloran, graduate of the the iSchool and currently at Microsoft, who offers the following definition of irony:

a measure of the distance between text and subtext

OK... i think I got it.  Finally.

Now... what would MySpace for grownups look like?

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image: Seattle's skyline at night, taken from a pier on Alaska Way on a crisp evening in July

Clean SLATES

A colleague shared with me an article by Andrew P. McAfee in the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

Andrew's blog entry on the topic is also worth attention.

OK... I sense the rolling of eyes (2.0 at a time)… aren’t we all tired of Everything 2.0. Maybe, but if you’re looking for a memorable pneumonic that actually imparts insight, this article has it.

The piece distinguishes between information systems as platforms (websites, intranets, portals) and channels (email, instant messaging, telephone, conversation). The one category, created by the few, accessible to the many. The other, created by many, for the many, but very little sharing. Enter Web 2.0.

McAfee’s pneumonic is SLATES, and it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.

Paraphrasing McAfee:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good | interesting | important | useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

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Image: this owl was kind enough to pose for me along the side of the road on the way to Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park this past weekend. 

 

Tag Team Wrestling

Tim "LibraryThing" Spalding has just announced a new feature on LibraryThing, currently the most impressive instance of so-called Library 2.0 that I know of.  The new feature addresses a topic that many (including myself) have been wrestling with for a while now: the relationship of formal knowledge organization systems to folksonomies.  Tim's Mother's Day blog post speaks to the raging controversy:

Are tags better than subjects? Are subjects better than tags? Are tags just a fad? Will tags replace subjects? Are tags evil? Are subjects evil? (Believe me, the idea is out there.) Librarians have become deeply emeshed in the debate, with partisans on both sides. Until now, there hasn't been much in the way of hard data, at least for books. LibraryThing provides that.

This last is the exciting part.  LT has provided a platform to explore the behaviors of both in a coherent, data-rich system.  Researchers, start your systems!

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image: Carolyn Dunford, of the UW MLIS program,alerted me to a lovely wildlife preserve nearly within slingshot distance of the UW (known as the Montlake FIll).  This is a closeup of one or another species of Horsetail (Thanks to Bob O'Hara for the ID), taken at the preserve. 

Cheep Links

Geoff Froh, one of the MSIM graduate students who has befriended me during my stay here at the UW iSchool, sent me the following link from last September that has a lot of great ideas about creating a richer web of information -- cheaply:

Using Wikipedia and the Yahoo API to give structure to flat lists

Hackdiary is Matt Biddulph’s idea-rich blog of his travels through Web 2.0.

 

The post that motivated this entry is a succinct description of some of Matt’s work at the BBC, but it transfers pretty much wholesale to what we should be doing more of with library data:

"adding value to your own data by using external information"

Biddulph’s post emphasizes some of the benefits of the open Web that are available to anyone with a creative vision of how to capitalize on them to create more value at low cost.

One of my early blog entries was about the addition of name authority data into the German Wikipedia, and I seem to be bouncing back again and again to the concept of public bibliography – creating rich semantic linkages around traditionally-described formal resources that gives them context and heightens their visibility in Web space.   Using the open Web to enrich our assets while in turn contributing to the information assets of the Commons embodies the reciprocal creation of value that fits neatly within our tradition and is, I believe, critical to our future.

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image: Gulls ride for free on the Washington State Ferries.   And they aren't bashful.  March, 2006, near Orcas Island in the San Juans

Marshalling Resources

Marshall Kirkpatrick was kind enough to afford me an interview opportunity in his Netsquared interview series.  Read it here. 
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Pink Boa: Floral flagrante captured at the Volunteer Park Conservatory in Seattle, 2006-03-08

Hybrid Vigor

A week ago I had the happy experience of going to a local pub with three graduate students in the iSchool – Michael Braly, Jason Parker, and Geoff Froh.  I am in their debt for the good times and stimulating conversations we enjoyed!  In addition to learning about session beers, sharing notes about travel, cameras and careers, they shared with me some of their enthusiasms from their classes, and folksonomies emerged as a prominent topic.

The term folksonomy is one of those linguistic constructs that suggests its own definition. When I first heard the term, I wondered what would happen if you hybridized a folksonomy and a formal taxonomy (I can’t imagine that I was the first to have this thought, and I wouldn't claim it as my own), but also imagined that the result might be too diffuse to be of much use.

Michael, Geoff, and Jason pointed me to the del.icio.us site for their class on Web 2.0 trends. [aside: is this a great way to share ideas in a class, or what?] Most germane to folksonomies is the Golder and Huberman article, The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems, in which the authors cite evidence that the proportion of tags assigned to a given resource stabilizes after about 100 tags. If this result generalizes, then the notion of hybridizing a folksonomy and a traditional taxonomy might be both tractable and useful.

A formal taxonomy provides an established hierarchy, but suffers from rigidity (arguably both a feature and a bug). Collaborative tagging affords an electronic warrant of sorts, bringing to the fore new terms and relationships that will be absent from a static taxonomy.

Whether additional value emerges from this hybridization is unclear and would benefit from actual experimentation (insert hand-waving here). The technical challenges of automatically linking these clouds to the taxonomy are also uncertain (we do agree that, in the words of Erik Duval, librarians don’t scale, don’t we?).

The top level syllogism goes something like:

• There is value in formal knowledge hierarchies that have emerged over time and which are established frameworks for existing knowledge organization
• There is value in the ad hoc semantic clouds of collaborative tagging and      linking
• The hybridization of these values should be complementary

Is anyone doing the experiment?

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Image: The Rotunda ceiling of the National Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.  Photo by the author, February 26, 2006