News of BrickCon the web and the Flickr earlier this month, but MSE2006’s photos of robot competition have my attention now. But what am I looking at? What was the competition?

It’s an aside to Kathryn Greenhill’s larger point, that all this 2.0 stuff is about a shifting power to the user, but she places L2 somewhere on Ghandi’s continuum of change between ridicule and fight.

The photo above (original by Monster) is in support of Greenhill’s larger point: control is shifting. Trains were once seen as icons of freedom, but that view changed with the development of the automobile — and the way it shifted control of routes and schedules from the railroad to the driver.

We’ve been arguing transportation policy for a long time since, but here’s a simple fact: railroads didn’t realize they were competing against automobiles until it was too late.

Who are you competing against?

libraries, lib20, l2, library 2.0, competition, control, railroads vs. automobiles, change, locus of control

Speaking at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism last month, David Halberstam struck the chord of competition journalists must struggle with. As a newspaper man who started at the smallest newspaper in Mississippi and worked his way up to the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he learned that television’s constant stream of images offered “drama and excitement,” but perhaps incomplete reporting. Not that he was criticizing TV, no, he praised it for bringing images and awareness into our living rooms nightly, raising questions among the viewing audience that “we [in newspapers] had the chance to answer if we used our skills properly.”

But, “if we’re to compete, we’d better be very good storytellers.”

There is, I think, craft. …Knowing where to look. Knowing how to build steam. Knowing how to sustain a narrative drive. How to keep a reader interested — this is a real challenge. Everybody’s attention span is short. We are really competing. I mean, it used to be just television. Now it’s 200 channels. It’s four channels of Law and Order. There’s 20 sports channels. And there’s the Internet, there’s the blog — every person is his or her own editor. First you have to get it right. You have to make it accurate. Then you have to learn how to dramatize it, to bring it alive, to find the people and the events that make it real. So you’re not just a reporter, and you’re not just a historian — not in the world we live in with all the competing forms of information. You are a playwright too. You’ve got to bring in the drama.

competition, David Halberstam, media, storytelling, dissemination, speech, tv vs. newspapers, television news, newspapers, news writing

Found at Baekdal.com, where the author expresses some amount of whiteboard-skills envy.

The video shows Alex Overwijk, head of Glebe Collegiate high school’s math department (more trivia: Alanis Morrisette went there) drawing what appears to be a perfect circle.

This is something I do in my spare time. I draw freehand circles and then I found out there was a world championship…It’s like winning the Masters. Once you win, you automatically get invited back every year.

You won’t hear Overwijk claim it, but the video is often suggested to show the world freehand circle drawing champion at work. The Ottawa Citizen reports, however, that no such competition exists.

“It’s my schtick with my kids. I’ve been telling them this story for 10 years,” the Citizen quotes Overwijk, who later revealed that he’s thinking about starting a competition.

“We’ll do it for real. Yeah, why not?” he asked. “It’s pretty popular, apparently.”

And, if we remember our history, circle drawing and similar feats have been used to impress people for years.

chalkboard, champion, circle, circles, competition, freehand, hand-drawn, perfect circle, skills, white board, world freehand circle drawing champion

ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Future of Cataloging presentation: Collaboration, Not Competition. (slides: QuickTime & PDF.)

Stir my writings on The Google Economy and Arrival of the Stupendous post with frame four of the ALCTS And The Future Of Bibliographic Control: Challenges, Actions, And Values document:

In the realm of advanced digital applications, we are interested in collaboration, not competition.

We take as axiomatic the idea that library catalogs and bibliographic databases on the one hand, and Web search engines on the other, have complementary strengths. No matter what their respective popularity may be among the general population, neither of these broad categories of tools can compete with the other, on the other’s own ground. Realizing this, we maintain that “future catalogs” discussions based on the idea of “competition between the catalog and search engines” have become passé, leading to redundant sets of questions and answers. Such discussions lead to foregone, dead-end conclusions which tend to ignore points 1-3 above. The interesting questions about “the future of the catalog” now have to do with collaboration, not competition. Collaborations with librarians and nonlibrarians who operate social networking sites, implement “Web 2.0” or “Library 2.0” services, and pursue creative mashups of the most heterogeneous types of metadata, will invigorate both our practice and theory, as well as strengthen our relationships with our user groups. These collaborations will also be fueled by our expertise in metadata creation, of the traditional library type as well as in newer forms. Because recent and future data mining products, such as Endeca, will continue to require sources of rich metadata, the value of bibliographic metadata itself is likely to increase.

alamw2007, alcts, collaboration, competition, future of bibliographic control, future of cataloging, google economy, midwinter, presentation

Watch this video a few times. It’s funny. It’s catchy. It’s kitsch.

Now watch it a few times more. The ad, for a Lada VAZ 2109, appeared sometime in the 90s. It reflects the influence of MTV and other cultural imports from the West, but the details betray it’s command economy provenance. The snow appears trodden and dirty, the trees barren, the background architecture bleak. The car has headlights that flash in time to the music, but their dim yellow glow fails to dazzle.

It’s not the badly sync’d instrument solos, or that they portray the car’s owner as a bespectacled goof, it’s the permagrey sky and general bleakness of it all. One thing you can trust of Fifth Avenue: no matter how bad the product or the concept, their ads are technically flawless and the images sparkle. A Western ad would have featured windswept virgin snow below skies painted with the kind of puffy cotton clouds that dreams are made of.

The problem isn’t that the advertisers didn’t know how to produce an ad to compete with those from Western ad agencies, the problem is they didn’t know they were competing.

And then I come across this report from the National Center for Education Statistics:

During the 2004 fiscal year, academic libraries in the United States added 24.6 million books and other paper documents to their collections, bringing total holdings to 982.6 million. During the same year, a typical week saw 1.4 million academic library reference transactions (including computer searches), and total academic library expenditures were about $5.8 billion.

NCES was reporting on 3,653 libraries, but they don’t offer the statistic I really want: average number of reference transactions per FTE student. And nowhere does anybody appear to ask the question: how do our 5.6 million monthly reference transactions (2004) compare to internet search engines’ six billion monthly transactions (2006)? (And, um, how does satisfaction compare?)

With Time Magazine naming you as person of the year for 2006, why are these stats centered on libraries and not patrons? Why is the internet so poorly represented? How will we serve an internet-native generation?

Hats off to Jalopnik for pointing me to that ad.

academic libraries, compete, competition, lada, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, metrics, nces, piddling, reference transactions, statistics, web 2.0

This weekend’s Fifth Annual Rock Paper Scissors World Championships have ended, and Brit Bob Cooper has come out a winner. The Toronto event drew a reported 500 competitors and 250 spectators from 26 U.S. States, four Canadian provinces, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Wales, the UK and Ireland and paid a top prize of CAN$7000.

“I went through extensive training, read ‘The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide’, and studied the 27 possible RPS gambits before competing,” said Cooper. “I prefer not to discuss my strategy because I plan to defend my title at next year’s World Championships.”

I was amused to discover the US RPS league earlier this year, and amused still more to hear NPR’s Steve Inskeep interview Jason Simmons, aka Master Roshambollah last week (Inskeep lost both throws against the Master).

More: pictures and video from previous tournaments, a feature film, and Rolling Stone: Hand to Hand Combat.

Bob Cooper, Jason Simmons, Master Roshambollah, World Championship, competition, paper, rock, rock paper scissors, rps, scissors, sport, sports, tournament

Once upon a time Microsoft was the gorilla to beat. Once upon a time we thought Google could do it.

Perhaps not any more. Amazon has dropped Google’s search results from their A9 search aggregator in favor of Microsoft’s Live search, and while Yahoo!’s on again, off again partnership talks with Microsoft appear dead after Y!’s announcement Thursday of a partnership with eBay, Microsoft still hasn’t given up on the notion.

The Yahoo! news may dull my argument, but look how quickly the board changed, how easily these companies switched allegiances or considered partnering with Microsoft, a company known for swallowing its partners.

Google may or may not truly depend on the goodwill of its customers, but the moment its image turns from all-knowing and happy to big and evil could rearrange the chess board.

allegiance, competition, ebay, google, gorilla, microsoft, partnership, yahoo, yahoo!

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.

I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At lunch, one of the other participants mentioned to the trainer that some of the activities in the software seemed to have too many steps, too many places to go wrong, too many turns between beginning and end.

The answer began by explaining that the most analogous activity would be the acquisition of books for the collection. Adding a book to the collection requires first identifying the book, reading the reviews, choosing to purchase, identifying a vendor and cost, identifying funding, ordering, receiving, cataloging…

The list went on, perhaps with too much detail, but it landed on the following: “there are at least 12 steps to just putting a book on the shelf. When you think about it like that, our software is easy.”

I bit my tongue at that moment, but I’ve been grinding my teeth about it since.

Here’s what’s eating me: You can compare one unlikable thing to any other unlikable thing and come out ahead, but what about “real-world” comparisons?

Paul Graham explains in his “Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn” essay that developers often compare themselves to the wrong things, misunderstanding who their competition is:

A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?”

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. (emphasis added)

Graham is talking to startups, but switch some words around and you’ll get my message: if you compare yourself to something that sucks, you’ll only be able to say you’re more or less sucky.

A better comparison for this product would have been against flickr, where activities that are closely analogous to those in the software we’re being trained on often require only one step. And taking Graham’s advice, the best way to approach it would be constantly ask “can we do this better?” “Could a competitor we don’t yet know about do this better?”

(Aside: social software is that which gets spammed, that which gets you laid, and that which you’ll need no training on.)

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

bad answers, compare, comparison, competition, crap, developers, development, failure, future libraries, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, software, startups, suck, sucks, sucky, training, vendors

From Yahoo! News and Ryan Eby, there’s a funny spelling bee planned in Erlanger Kentucky:

ERLANGER, Ky. – After a five-year hiatus, the Sisters of St. Walburg Monastery in Villa Hills are ready to show whether they are superior spellers.

The sisters were champions of the annual Corporate Spelling Bee for Literacy in northern Kentucky for years before giving others a chance to win.

But now the nuns are back, even if they’re a little timid about challenging the reigning champions — a group of Boone County librarians.

“Librarians give us a scare,” said Sister Mary Carol Hellmann, who says she’s been brushing up on Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Spanish root words to prepare for the bee. Some of the other sisters say they use the Internet to practice.

Meanwhile, the librarians say victory won’t come easy now that the nuns are competing.

“They have that strong Latin background,” said Cindy Brown, director of the Boone County Library. Brown said her spelling team is made up of “voracious readers with a certain verbal attitude.”

The winners will be decided Thursday during the ninth annual bee, which is a fundraiser for a Northern Kentucky Community Action Commission program that helps adults with literacy skills. Twenty teams made up of adults from local businesses, schools and nonprofit organizations will participate.

Erlanger, Erlanger KY, Kentucky, competition, librarians, nuns, nuns vs. librarians, spelling, spelling bee

Ryan Eby and MAKE magazine alerted me to MIT’s student origami exhibit, in which Jason Ku’s ringwraith won the Best Original Model prize, and Brian Chan’s beaver — the MIT mascot — got special attention from the MIT News Office.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, beaver, competition, mit, nazgul, origami, paper, ringwraith

CMS Market Watch tells us that there are 1,800 CMS vendors, and some of them are getting a little feisty.

cms, content management system, content management systems, vendor, vendors, 1800, cms vendors, feisty, marketplace, competition