Right there are the beginning of Esther Dyson’s ten-year-old book, Release 2.1, she alerts us to the Web 2.0 challenge we’re we’re now beginning to understand:

The challenge for us all is to build a critical mass of healthy communities on the Net and to design good basic rules for its public spaces so that larger systems do self-organize and work effectively. Rule-making is not the job of legislatures and governments alone. You can make your own rules by designing an online service — or by setting up procedures in your workplace. Anyone you offers a service or product, anyone who votes in a PTA or discusses corporate policy with her boss, is a rule-maker. What will make this world a better place for you and your children (or friends) to live in? It’s up to you to figure it out and to make it happen.

That is, the communities are real, and they’re self organizing and policing, but do we yet understand them?

I’m surely not the only one who smiles kindly and feels bad for those who look for some authority to “fix” Wikipedia, but take a look at the arguments about what is or is not offensive in Flickr and we find it: that’s a community struggling with the Dyson’s challenge. That’s the struggle that makes Flickr’s status as a community undeniable.

challenge, communities, community, esther dyson, release 2.0, release 2.1, web 2.0, web20

It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this.

For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to speak to their customers in language they we understand. I dare a library to do the same next time the opportunity permits.

challenge, downtime, error message, flickr, funny, language, libraries, ted stevens, the internet is a series of tubes, tubes

Jonathan Schwartz made the kind of news that makes Slash Dotters happy: he announced Sun is (sort of) giving away free servers. It’s a promotion, a media play, of course, but one that might make a few lucky people very happy.

Here’s the deal: Sun is really proud of their new T2000 eight core server. Each core runs at 1.2GHz, but they’re apparently applying some distributive power of multiplication and calling it an 9.6GHz machine and touting some impressive performance benchmarks. But rather than play the game of “our experts are better than your experts” against other vendors, they’ve extended a pretty generous try and buy program to users themselves. And, as Jonathan made noise in his blog post, a few people might get lucky enough to keep their machines.

So what’s my angle? WPopac rocks, and performance is excellent with my test corpus (160,000 bib records) on even a lowly single-CPU server with only 1GB of RAM, despite the fact that each bib record is represented in both its composed form in the wp_posts table and as about 20 more rows per record in a separate table (yup, I’ve got almost 3 million rows representing every atomic detail of every bib record), and all of this is full-text indexed.

And I’m fully confident that when I put our entire catalog into WPopac, all 330,000 bib records (resulting in about 6.2 million atomic records), performance will still be up to the task. My math suggests everything should be ducky on a relatively budget server up beyond about 1 million bib records, but what happens for libraries that have more than that, say, perhaps 6 to 8 million bib records (again, 110 to 150 million atomic records; again, all full-text indexed in MySQL)?

It would seem that WPopac’s combination of, um, large MySQL databases with high-volume Apache/PHP should be an ideal fit for the T2000’s big RAM space and support for high numbers of parallel threads. Jonathan claims the T2000 costs a modest $5,000 (but the online store shows a higher price?) and outperforms everything else, but is it up to WPopac? Do they want to try?

C’mon Sun, toss a T2000 this way, let’s see what happens? (Heck, I’ll even try a T1000.)

sun, solaris, t2000, coolthreads, server, 9.6ghz, challenge, sparc, ultrasparc, 8core, free, wpopac, performance, big db, Jonathan Schwartz , try-n-buy, try and buy, free server

I wasn’t really in the game, but when samb posted the above picture of David Brown’s typical meal, I couldn’t help but take it as a challenge. I never did get around to snapping a picture to match samb’s, and now I’ve got accept that there are others with more skill and determination than me.

Slashfood explains that anybody can walk in to In-n-Out Burger and order a sandwich of any size. Pictured below is a 20×20 — 20 quarter-pound patties and 20 slices of cheese. Twenty not enough? Go get a 100×100, pictured at la.foodblogging!

burger, burgers, hamburger, hamburgers, in-n-out burger, in-n-out, fast food, ridiculous, oversize, outsized, challenge, 20×20, 75×75, 100×100

For those people still using Gallery, here’s the last straw: Rasmus Lerdorf got to playing with the Flickr API and quickly wrote up a script to migrate his photos from Gallery to Flickr. He’s didn’t post a script or anything, he’s just saying it’s easy to do.

A lot of things are easy to do, of course, but that doesn’t mean they get done. So it’s probably a great relief to somebody that Paul Baron got on the job. Paul didn’t do any coding, but he posted a rewarding challenge to a Flickr forum, a Flickr member responded (and took home 200 bones for his trouble), and now Paul is sharing the solution with you.

So what’s the holdup now?

flickr, flickr api, challenge, prize, gallery, photo management

Rochelle worries that all this Library 2.0 talk is lost on her library. Ross tells us why he hates the Library 2.0 meme and Dan reminds us it’s not about buzzwords. But Michael is getting closest to a point that’s been troubling me for a while: Library 2.0 isn’t about software, it’s about libraries. It’s about the evolution of all of our services to meet the needs of our users.

Let me step back a bit.

Before the development of the camera, illustrative painting and portraiture was a trade on par with carpentry and masonry. But as photography became a reality, painters found themselves in a quandary. Many said that those early black and white photos were inferior to large and colorful portraits on canvas, but the photos were quicker, cheaper, and offered a scientific representation of reality that suited the times. And so painting, having lost its relevancy as a form of documentary reality, became art. As art, it exploded with new non-representational forms and styles (plot the timeline of the impressionists against a timeline of photography), and became collectable.

Our perspective prevents us from seeing the turmoil of those times, but let me try apply that lesson to libraries today.

We have two choices. We can continue to operate by the old rules and hope that we find wealthy patrons to support us as symbols of the wealth and refinement of our communities. But, if we look hard, I think we’ll find that we can apply the core values of librarianship to new current technologies and new service models, and rather than becoming a sort of art, we will be valued for serving the needs of our communities.

library, libraries, library 2.0, library20, art, challenge, photography, web 2.0, web20, future