Weibel Lines

Twittering for the Arts

If Twittering can be thought of as 'micro-blogging', might we think of Haiku as micro-poetry?  In my previous post I noted the rather serious use of Twittering in support of emergency broadcast of information in the California wildfire crisis.  In this note, I propose a somewhat more frivolous use, in a sort of mashup-for-the-near-arts. 

The newly minted track facility in Twitter allows users to follow any mention of a phrase that occurs in the Twitterverse. The newsworthiness of this notion in this morning's NPR report on the fires connected with a conversation in the Allegro Espresso Bar last weekend, in which was bandied about the idea of a Haiku-cycle... sharing around Haiku by email among those favorably inclined towards this poetic-medium-for-the-attention-handicapped. 

Why not Twitter instead?  The character limit is perfectly suitable and the pockettweets application on the iPhone is great (and surely there are comparable apps for other mobile devices).  Writing haiku on a bus or in the park is a pleasant enough diversion or means of sharing a moment with others in verse. The track command fills in a missing piece, as it affords the writer a natural way to tag the tweet so that others interested can follow them.

So, in the spirit of eating one's own dogfood, I've launched the Haiku-Twittering mashup with the tag of Haiku-Seattle.  Write your well-formed doggeral, slash-delimited lines, followed by three slashes and the tag "haiku-seattle".  Non-denizens of the Rainy City also welcome. Void where prohibited. No talent necessary to win.

We'll know its successful when we get spam haiku.
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A newly opened building in Singapore near Albert Court.

Tinkers to Evers to Chance (encounters in the information sphere)

I twittered a URL this morning with its lineage (Rubel to Brantley to Dempsey to me), a post on the shrinking granularity of media and how we ignore these changes at our peril.  Its a fascinating essay on a topic that seems to be an important part of the cultural divide between youthful remixers and (generally) older, more passive media consumers.  There are many quotables in the piece, but to choose one:

*Connect people.* The web is transforming into a medium where the greatest value is created when people connect via platforms of participation around a common goal -- to make money, be entertained or informed, to create, etc.

Status messages of the various Instant Messaging clients are ways our youthful mentors stay connected online.  A year ago, Twitter came on the social networking software scene... nothing BUT a status message. Talk about small granularity... can this possibly be useful?  I signed up last January or so, but didn't do much with it until I got a Facebook account, and still felt vaguely silly about reporting on my activities of the moment in a largely haphazard  manner.  When I succumbed to iPhone lust, my Twittering increased somewhat, fueled by the simple enjoyment of watching what my small collection of followees were up to (and the fact that the Twitter folks have one of the best mobile user interfaces around).

From time to time, one encounters quite pithy pointers in the digital breadcrumbs of microblogging (as this ultralight social networking idiom is called).  Soon after I read the Rubel post, I encountered Paul Jones' twitter to Good Copy, Bad Copy, a documentary of really engaging interviews on the topic of copyright in my Twitter feed... must viewing for anyone even tangentially interested in the topic (and how can we not be?).  So, for me, Twittering actually added value to my day professionally, and I'm not feeling so silly after all.  Thanks to Paul Jones, who has become a favorite (and substantive) Twitterer.

Follow my twittering at http://twitter.com/stuartweibel (yikes, I'm STILL embarrassed to say such a thing!).

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The Empire State Building taken from the Rockefeller Center observation deck (2006)

Pet Projects

A few months back, my friend Michael  Braley chided me good naturedly about not having tagged my photos on FLickR (specifically, I hadn't labled pictures of my dog, Buddy, with his given name).  I tucked my tail between my legs and have been rather more diligent about tagging my pictures since then.  I even use the maps locator feature, which I like, and I wish FLickR highlighted it more.

A couple days ago I got an invitation to contribute a photo of Buddy to the FlickR group Dogs named Buddy.   Taking seriously any invitation for attention, I complied.  So, Buddy has a manifestation in the social networking world. 

In today's New York Times, there is an article about GPS tracking of pets, and a new market opening up for collar-borne GPS trackers that relay perambulatory reports to a either a hand-held GPS unit, or a server upon return to home.  Pet movements, home or afield, can be uploaded and viewed online.  One product even supports handshaking protocols (though, as any dog owner knows, in the canine world it would more aptly be described as butt-sniffing encounters).  Imagine, your Facebook-feed could have real-time updates of your pet's activities and meetings with similarly 'tagged' pets.  Parents might wonder if there is a version for sneakers coming soon.

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The image of buddy that came to the attention of the Dogs Named Buddy group (though I like this one even more ). Other of my Buddy pictures are here.

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). 

Neutrality is over-rated

Traditional notions of surrogacy in the library world revolve around catalog records – a neutral distillation of attributes intended to support discovery and management. In the age of the Amazoogles, richness of linking and community-generated surrogates play a welcome role in discovery and evaluation. Several interesting issues emerge from this shift.

Surrogates as first class objects

I’ve alluded to the importance of this in a previous post.  It is part of the perspective shift that is, I believe, fundamental to the transition from Library 1.0 to Library 2.0 thinking.

Neutral surrogates as opposed to evaluative surrogates

Librarians have traditionally positioned themselves in a neutral role… above the ideological fray of content. I think this is as much artifact as intent. A bib record should be a neutral inventory of attributes, and to the extent that the catalog was central to our service, that neutrality served well. Of course, Libraries have long offered reader advisories. Nancy Pearl, Seattle's (the country’s?) best-known librarian (anyone seen a James Billington shushing Action Figure lately?) has acquired a national reputation as a voice of reading.

We have entered the era of recommender services to assist in our every consumer selection. The best example of this in the Library  space is Amazon – the reviews are widely read and eagerly written, and the marketing data (people who bought this, also bought that…) is valuable indeed.  Library Thing has, through the application of now well-understood social collaboration techniques, has introduced a similar functionality that is independent of book purchase.

Which is more valuable as a finding aid? A catalog record or a review? One focuses on discovery, and the other on suitability. But within the everything-indexed context of the Web, both are important, and the distinction blurs.  There is a case to be made for library-mediated evaluative surrogates coexisting cheek-by-jowl with traditional cataloging records.

What about an Amazon-library system mashup?  Just what Amit Gupta has offered (brought to my attention in Lorcan Dempsey's Blog).  All very interesting co-evolution, but what I really wanted to do was show off the Nancy Pearl Action Figure (deluxe Version).  Small Parts. Not suitable for children under 3 or those without a library card.  Who needs Jane Austen, anyway?

Social Networks and Information Retrieval

Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University delivered today's Keynote at SIG IR 2006 here in Seattle.  Jon is a leading investigator in the area of complex networks, and in particular, in exposing mathematical relationships between large networks and small ones.  His talk was dense and provocative, ranging across well-known history and recent experiementation in the domain of search theory in social networks.

The notion of "six degrees of separation" is well known these days, an illustration of how even large social networks (the world) can be traversed in a surprisingly low number of links.  Jon described the clever, pre-computing demonstration of this phenomenon by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.  Theories and experiments concerning network models are not so new, then, as most of us might have guessed.  What is new, however, is the proliferation of large-model systems that leave records of social activity that is unfathomably rich in data for analysis.  As the Web has proliferated, the availability of full-text data and rich linking among resources has superheated the domain of link analysis leading to extraordinary entrepreneurial oppotunity now familiar to all of us, but also to a deeper understanding of linking theory and self organizing systems (see, for example, Albert-Laszló Barabási's Linked: How everything is connected to everything else, and what it means for business, science, and everyday life.

Kleinberg's interest, however, is less on the linkage of information assets than on the linking within social networks that comprise the heart of what we have come to refer to as Web 2.0.  Social networks on the Internet are not all that new, either... indeed, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin boards, chatrooms and email networks predate the Web, and are arguably the most important side effect of Darpa's experiments in robust networking now known as the Internet.

One difference, though, in the Friendster/Myspace/Facebook world that mystifies oldsters (especially legislators) and captivates youngsters is that for the first time, one's place in a social network is visible to all, and subject to self-aware 'gaming' by the participants, as well as exploitation by information retrieval scientists, marketeers, predators, spooks, and even parents with the courage to delve.

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Image: Opening Plenary of SIG-IR 2006 in Seattle, August 07, 2006

There they go again...

The passage of DOPA (HR 5319), Deleting Online Predators Act, is the latest effort on the part of the Congress to manage the unmanageable (and perhaps do some fear-mongering among constituents in this election year?).   ALA's objection to the legislation was expressed in Beth Yoke's testimony before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.  The position is predicated on three premises:
1. The legislation will limit access to a broad range of essential interactive web applications in schools and libraries
2. It will exacerbate the digital divide, impacting disproportionately those with no or limited computing resources of their own
3. Education and parental involvement are the keys to keeping children safe and helping them to develop judgment that will help them keep themselves safe.

That this sort of legislation would be passed in an election year is not so surprising -- the Internet has become a favorite whipping boy for legislators hoping to evidence their inclination to save us from dangers real and imagined.  Who can  argue with keeping children safe from predators?  In fact, as Yoke's testimony suggests, preventing access in exactly the places where children might be instructed to use such services safely and responsibly will probably leave children less safe.  The magnitude of the rejection of this argument (410 -15) is chilling indeed. 

A number of discussions on the subject points to it unenforceability, but this is the sort of legislation that enforces itself... or rather, by threatening the withdrawal of funding, 'encourages' affected institutions to self police -- or else.  Lets hope cooler heads in the Senate prevail.

Like it or not, the trajectory of increased connectivity is an immutable trend of social and technological change.  It pervades our private lives, education, and business. Vague, blunt, clumsy efforts on the part of mostly privileged, middle-aged, white American males will not stem this change, nor keep our children safe from its side effects.  Such efforts can, however, further damage our competitiveness by stifling innovation and complicating local decision making and operations in libraries and educational institutions.

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thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick whose blog post on this topic has links to other interesting commentary on this issue.
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image: When I saw this class-rebuild project on display at the Center for Wooden Boats, i wondered... could that be a....?  In fact it was... a Herreschoff 12 1/2 foot gaff rigged keelboat, a craft designed by perhaps the greatest arbiter of beauty in sailing lines.  If memory serves, E.B. White's life-long passion for 'messing around in boats' was nurtured on the Maine coast in just such a craft.  E.B. White's son, Joel White would later channel this love in his own boat designs.  More about White's boats in Wood, Water and Light: Classic Wooden Boats.