From Jessamyn: “don’t toss up a bunch of bibliographic citations when a decent URL will do. You’re online, act like you’re online.”

Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.

The New York Times last week announced that it’s giving away TimesSelect to students and faculty that hold a .edu email address. TimesSelect, of course, is the paid access site that debuted in January 2006 to a confused and critical web. Editor and Publisher repeated the Times’ claim that they’re doing this for the good of democracy:

“It’s part of our journalistic mission to get people talking on campuses,” says Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager at NYTimes.com. “We wanted to open that up so that college students and professors can have a dialogue.”

But with fewer than 700,000 Select subscribers and declining (zero?) readership among people under 40, NYT clearly had to do something. As Zach predicted, the Times’ Alexa rank has fallen precipitously since the Select launch. Welcome to the Google Economy Mr. Sulzberger.

nyt, new york times, google economy, timesselect

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

In an anomaly that we would eventually recognize as commonplace on the internet, Touching the Void, a book that had gone out of print, remaindered before it hit paperback, was all but forgotten, started selling again in 1998. Chris Anderson wondered why, and found that user reviews in Amazon’s listing of publishing sensation Into Thin Air had people recommending Touching the Void as a better read. Today, Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air 2 to 1.

Clearly, Amazon and the internet had hit critical mass.

Based on statistics reported in 2005 or earlier:

• Over 200 million Americans have internet access
• 94 million Americans use the internet on an average day
• Over 62 million households (55%) have internet-connected computers at home
• 87% of youth 12-17 are active online
• 89% of college students and 87% of the general public start their research in a search engine, not a library
• 80% of internet users believe the internet is a reliable source of information

But it’s certainly not just youth driving this:

• Over half of 2005 US tax returns were filed electronically; the IRS is mandated to raise that number to 85% over the next few years
• Online banking is a reality for most Americans who have bank accounts
• The leading demographic of those purchasing movie tickets online is adults over 35
• The early adopters for the iTunes music store were adults over 35

And, as a measure of growth in the past year, John Battelle’s The Search in 2005 reported under 5 billion monthly searches on major US search engines. By July 2006 that number had grown to 6 billion.

The internet is truly changing us. The ability to instantly find anything we want and get recommendations from people of similar interest, irrespective of geography or time, is changing us.

Stories:

• Mark Michaelson is passionate about mugshots. He’s posted them on Flickr, people are finding and commenting and blogging about them, people are developing stories about them, and Mark is part of the conversation. Now he has a show, and a book, and if you send him a self-addressed, stamped envelope, he’ll send you a sticker.
• A friend who likes The Decemberists goes searching for more, finds a photographer who’s done some of their photos, browses more from her portfolio, finds some of a band called Dirty Martini, finds their website, finds their MySpace, previews a few tracks, and decides to purchase the album.
• Sam Brown, who can be found at explodingdog.com, bases his drawings on short phrases emailed to him at sambrown@explodingdog.com. He’ll also mail drawings to fans who mail him their phrases — “i will doing drawings from titles mailed to me. mailed in a truck. i will mail you the drawing back to you. in a truck.” Fans can buy t-shirts, books, and prints of his work. Wikipedia, updated faster than any print encyclopedia, offers details of the site and its creator.
• Then there’s Ranjit Bhatnagar, whose photos were discovered on Flickr by NY MTA Arts For Transit curator Lester Burg. Now his works are on display in the Atlantic Ave station through September 2007. I know all this, of course, because the story appeared in the Flickr blog.

How does this work? How do these thin threads come together to be woven into those stories?

If written a few years later, Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point might include a story like that of the re-emergence of Touching The Void long after it had been remaindered among the tales of the boom of Hush Puppies and Paul Revere’s social networking skills. But, as it is, the emergence of the internet does more to support Gladwell’s thesis than question it.

The internet has created new opportunities for people to make the personal — but often momentary — connections that Gladwell identifies as being so important, to the spread of an idea, a product, a phenomenon.

The internet adds links.

The internet adds comments.

The internet changes the basic economics of doing business, of making a sale, or finding an audience.

Chris Anderson, who was so fascinated by the story of the re-emergence of Touching the Void, followed up his initial article with a book-length examination of the changes that made it possible. What he found was that because was able to make findable an inventory of over two million books, dramatically more than a typical bookstore’s 130,000 books, and because Amazon had almost no inventory carrying costs, it was in a position to turn people who’d heard about Touching The Void, through Amazon’s own comments or elsewhere, into customers. By shortening the distance between interest and purchase, Amazon changed the shape of the marketplace.

But it’s not the technology that delivers success. It’s the personal connections made possible by the technology that are build success.

An example how that can go wrong comes from Reprise’s efforts to market Bonnie McKee. After premier a song on Yahoo!’s LAUNCHcast with good results Reprise decided to make a big CD release in September 2004. Despite being a huge hit with girls aged 12-17, and becoming a top searched name, the album ended up selling only 17,000 copies. An explanation cited in Anderson’s book notes “fans weren’t invested in the artist, only the song.” The explanation is that the internet has changed the rules, and music buyers, or consumers of any item, are becoming partners in a marketplace that expects more than the old marketing drivel, and has access to a broader selection than todays top 40 or whatever fits on a retail shelf.

Vincent Flanders author of Web Pages That Suck explains:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation
• They want/need to be entertained

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

And, for emphasis, from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter–and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

There is, perhaps, no better time to be a niche producer, a craftsperson, an artist. The world wants to hear human voices rather than marketingspeak. This is David’s moment against Goliath.

Long Tail, NH Visual Arts Coalition, art, arts, google economy, presentation

Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, but below are the URLs from them along with a tiny bit of context.

Foundation

Increasing use of the web is changing our expectations of information services and places greater demands of self-service on them. If “Web 2.0” has any meaning, it’s this notion that internet services are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a part of our every day reality.

One interesting reflection of this increasing usage and comfort with the web is the development of social software like MySpace, Facebook, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, Flickr, and also LibraryThing.

It takes a moment, sometimes, to realize what’s changed in the ten years since the first Mosaic browser opened the web to a mass audience. Kevin Kelly tried to explain that when he noted: “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.”

Okay, now what?

We need to understand how people now search for and interact with information. Part of that means making peace with search engines and making sense of “findability.” Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability addresses this question in terms directly relevant to libraries. To that I add the notion of The Google Economy and a set of rules for participation (and findability) in it:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

I argue that libraries are rich with the stuff people would like to link to, but the architecture of our systems often fails us on the other aspects.

I’ve been exploring this with my WPopac project, and I’ve seen some interesting results in the four months that it’s been live and available to the public. One example is that a web search for “joe monninger” returns the WPopac page as the top hit. Elsewhere, WPopac content is appearing in blogs (examples: Fuzzyfruit and Angie) and as a result some of the books in WPopac are now highly ranked in web search engines (example: A Baby Sister For Frances is now the only non-commercial result in the first page of Google results).

A rather more controversial look into how the Google Economy works can be found in Google’s explanation of their search results. Interestingly, the same factors within the Google Economy that created the controversy also made possible a solution: the top search result for “Jew” is now the Wikipedia page.

How can we track our participation in the Google Economy?

Alexa might be best described as the Nielsen ratings for the web. Tracking the daily changes in reach and rank (and looking at all the variations of the graph) can be rather addictive. Alexaholic serves that fix by offering more varied views of the same data.

It should be said, however, that the results in Alexa are the slowest to reflect changes or improvement in a service’s role in the Google Economy. A more immediate pulse of things can be taken at Technorati or within Google.

Last word

As we consider ways to improve our online services — as we look to build the online library of the near future — these words echo in my mind:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

In short, our libraries’ web sites are the online embodiment of our libraries. Our patrons don’t want to know how to use our library, they want to find in our online services the value that libraries offer in their in-person services. They want online services that deliver answers.

findability, future libraries, google economy, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, online libraries, opac 2.0, presentation, usability, web, web 2.0, wpopac

It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar.

The link appears among her comments in the discussion about her post on an early letter she’d written to her mom. Fuzzyfruit’s comment spawned more comments about the book from Sarahq and Coffeechica.

We talk here and there about how “libraries build community,” but how does that work in the online world? How do our systems support or inhibit community discussions online?

book discussions, book talk, community, durable link, findability, google economy, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, linkability, online community, permalink, social software

A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google.

There were doubts about the effectiveness of such plans, and concerns about how frustrating it might be for a searcher in California to find books (that he or she can’t access) in New Hampshire.

My answer to the first point was that once we start participating in the Google Economy, we’ll find our records well represented within it, and my answer to the second point is that we already have good solutions to that problem: ILL and OpenWorldCat. Examples: a Google search for my favorite author/friend/example returns with WPopac among the top results. And if you view one of the resulting records, you’ll see a link to “find in WorldCat Libraries.”

Thing is, it’s not just the stuff I’ve been linking to as examples that’s getting found in search engines. Listed below are the top 100 incoming search terms to WPopac from major search engines in the last week. The list is generated by bsuite, my multipurpose WordPress plugin, and the links lead to the item found with the search terms.

• What works: documenting energy conservation in buildings
• Online Recording of Pomp and Circumstance
• recording of pomp and circumstance
• harry stack sullivan
• miguel de unamuno website
• “cathedrals +england”
• athalie
• symbols in art
• Dadaism by Marcel Duchamp and Frances Picabia
• frank moake
• william luijpen
• “Man, Culture and Society”
• music scores elgar wand of youth slumber song
• Cats and Bats and Things with Wings by Conrad AIken
• paul cuffe african american
• biography of george e. mowry
• don giovanni libretto italian english
• Steroids-opposing viewpoints
• ballet plot
• ballet plots
• grice, h.p., studies in the way of words
• african american identity
• Allan Freed and the Big Beat
• The Blue Octavo Notebooks
• The Self Reliant Potter
• kartinki
• the little brown book of anecdotes
• “the fields are full”+“Armstrong Gibbs”
• forty french songs for voice and piano
• Fantasien, Op. 116
• Literary Themes
• biography ramses the great
• ramses II essays
• Rita Rapoza
• deutsche nobelpreisträger
• Erotica
• ‘henry and mudge and the green time’ website
• “Henry and Mudge in the Green Time”
• tally’s corner
• ECCENTRIC MUSCLE LOADING BASEBALL
• indian mythology 0600023699
• climacteric psychology menopause
• emilie flöge
• Brigance Comprehensive inventory of basic skills
• Brigance Diagnostic Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills
• Brigance Diagnostic Inventory of Basic Skills
• brigance diagnostic
• Brigance INventory of Basic Skills
• brigance inventory
• brigance testing
• Brigance
• Metropolitan readiness tests
• Bayley assessment kit
• kaja silverman “fragments of a fashionable discourse”
• palmer hayden biography african-american
• feminist theories on battered women syndrome
• otis lennon mental ability test
• otis-lennon intelligence test
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test
• Poetry from norton anthology of by s.m.gilbert and susan gubar woman writer
• Black Frontiers
• Pioneers Of The American West.
• joycelyn elders biography
• pros and cons of tqm
• Encyclopedia of world biography
• Death Penalty:an historical& Theological survey,J.J.Megivern
• “Jewish Deliberations on Suicide: Exceptions, Toleration and Assistance” — Noam Zohar
• Samuel H. Kress biography
• biomechanical analysis leg stretching
• arguments against suicide
• assisted suicide
• assited suicide
• physician assisted suicide cartoons
• “ice age”+homophobia
• suite española Gaspar Sanz
• leprosy:king baldwin IV
• Socolow The women of colonial Latin America.
• popular music and youth culture
• mandarin revolution Keynes
• sports professionalization test
• “criminology theories, patterns, and typologies”
• xiajia
• Pangwe Africa
• “hanif kureishi+life”
• All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n“ Roll Changed America
• Fraenkel and Wallen validity and reliability
• j.k. rowling biography isbn
• tina modotti biography
• essays on Rescuing a planet under stress
• criticism beatrix potter
• harry potter literary criticism
• ”Jewish Women in the Holocaust“
• crimes and misdemeanors plato
• California and the Southwest history
• Life In the American West
• funny chemistry caricature
• di vinci ”symbols“
• di vinci symbols
• Symbols of japan
• biograph dewey

Some links will leave you scratching your head, others are clearly misdirected. But, I’m especially proud of this link, from a person who was especially happy to get a new book. Making our collections indexable also makes them linkable, and that means people can make libraries part of their lives — wherever their lives take them.

And this doesn’t just help Angie, it means faculty and students can link to library resources from class blogs or share them in AIM.

google economy, google in the catalog, lib20, libraries, library, library 20, library catalog, linking, links, loosely linked, opac, remix, search engines, wpopac

So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.

Here’s the quesiton:

Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by Total Respondents

Based on the most recent search you conducted through [search engine used most recently],how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a search engine.

Based on your most recent experience seeking assistance from a librarian for help with a search or locating information,how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
Base: Respondents who have used a librarian.

It appears on page 22 of part two.

Sadly, search engines beat libraries on all four points: volume, quality, speed, and overall experience. These numbers are alarming, and many will see this wrongly. The correct way to see this is how much value search engines can bring to the library experience.

compare, future, google, google economy, internet, libraries, library, library 2.0, library20, oclc, oclc report, perception, perceptions, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), report, search engine, search engines, user behavior

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.

On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at USA Today, piping mad about some libelous content in his Wikipedia biography page.

Now, I have to agree with Seigenthaler in as much as I would never want anybody to make such claims against me, and I’d probably consider my legal options in such a matter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets a chuckle over the matter. I mean Seigenthaler is the founder of The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, after all.

It all sounds the same as the Attack of the Blogs story in November issue of Forbes Magazine. That story began ominously:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

But Forbes and Seigenthaler both conveniently ignore the fact that lies, libel and invective are common in other, older media. And Seigenthaler should know well the limitations of editorial authority over the millions of words published by hundreds of writers in a newspaper every day. Mistakes are made, and yes, counterfactual material is often slipped in. (Sadly, it’s also worth noting that real lynch mobs of the post-reconstruction South often enjoyed the support of their local newspapers.)

And unlike those old media, corrections are easy and quick, and in context with the original information. Take a look at how the Wikipedia entry addresses Seigenthaler’s complaints as an example.

Yes, the decision structure around these social applications is different from old media, but that doesn’t make it any more wrong or bad or dangerous. It is, perhaps, a comment on the obscurity of Seigenthaler’s biography that it went uncorrected for four months, but it’s also a comment on how responsive the system is that accommodated Seig’s corrections so quickly. Now, imagine how much Seigenthaler could contribute to Wikipedia. Imagine how much richer our online community could be with his participation?

And that’s what Seigenthaler and the Forbes article miss: the blogosphere and Wikipedia are built by those show up to the game. People and companies who ignore it do so at the peril, but there are many examples of success for those who participate.

wikipedia, wiki, social, social software, community, communities, moderation, editor, editorial control, Seigenthaler , John Seigenthaler, usa today, editorial, opinion, slander, libel, blog, blogs, bloggers, forbes, fear, findability, google economy

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

tags: ad revenue, ad revenues, aol, assertion, blog, blogger, bloggers, bought, citation analysis, google economy, link value, linking, links, sale, sale price, sold, technorati, weblog, weblogs, weblogs inc, weblogsinc

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s how it works with hits to websites:

• a few sites become popular and form the “big head” at the left
• a few more sites form the slope
• a huge number of websites score very low and form the “long tail”

Nielsen adds these examples:

• a language has a few words (“the”, “and”, etc.) that are used extremely often, and a library has a few books that everybody wants to borrow (current bestsellers)
• a language has quite a lot of words (“dog”, “house”, etc.) that are used relatively much, and a library has a good number of books that many people want to borrow (crime novels and such)
• a language has an abundance of words (“Zipf”, “double-logarithmic”, etc.) that are almost never used, and a library has piles and piles of books that are only checked out every few years (reference manuals for Apple II word processors, etc.)

But the point here is about Google (or Yahoo, etc.) search results ranking, which puts enormous value in the number of incoming links to a page. It turns out that these links also follow a power-law distribution and it not uncommon to find complaints that Google’s Page Rank recognizes popularity over other factors.

So it’s worth wondering: is popularity bad? Are popularity and quality mutually exclusive? Do search rankings represent some sort of global group-think?

Now put this in an academic library context and consider a student Googling for background for a research paper (think University freshmen the night before it’s due). Is it possible that linking patterns work like Wikipedia and tend to favor quality, or do they simply represent lowest common denominator popularity. Do search results reflect the sum of our altruistic linking intentions or our base crudity?

More about search ranking and libraries:

• Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries
• The Google Economy Vs. Libraries
• Changing Modes Of Communication
• The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”

The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the gardens of our mind. Argument is good. Here’s my side.

It’s important that we understand how modern search engines work. On the web, each link is a citation, and citation analysis is an important component among the many algorithms used to rank search results. Highly ranked content appears at the top because it is frequently cited (linked). This is obvious to many, but what is harder to fathom is that we (those who publish web content, anyway), not the search engines are responsible for identifying value on the web. Each link is a value statement about the resource we link to.

Think about that in the context of this comment:

Just because a document is findable, this does not mean that its contents are *better* or more truthful than a document that is not findable.

My point is that findability is in fact a measure of value. A perhaps incomplete and indirect measure, but one that has shown a remarkable ability to deliver valuable and useful information on demand.

Unfortunately, not all content is available online, and not all online content is linkable. Sadly, many web OPAC pages are not linkable, as is true of most every A&I and full-text database (or the content is linkable but inaccessible behind an authwall).

So now this quote:

As librarians, we are supposed to be experts on helping people find and retrieve quality information.

And I have to follow this with the following question: How better to help our patrons find high quality, accurate, and authoritative information than to take advantage of the search engines that already answer hundreds of millions of questions each day?

As stewards of knowledge, we need to understand the Google Economy. We need to build applications that embrace it. We need to invest the value that librarians bring to the search for knowledge in our online services.

Feh, libraries are full of people smarter than me. Hopefully they’ll forgive me for speaking out of turn.

tags: authority, citation analysis, findability, google, google economy, libraries, library, library systems, quality data, research methods, search, search engine, search engines, web opac, wikipedia

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.

Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.

I noted this gem about why non-profits need to pay attention to their search engine placement and web traffic previously, but it’s worth noting again:

At [the National Cancer Institute], the [web development] team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

The National Cancer Institute, it turns out, was poorly ranked in many relevant searches. Though it may seem obvious now, it doesn’t matter how authoritative their information is, it has no value until it’s found. Nach: findability.

My copy has has notes scribbled in the margin and a bunch of dog-eared pages marking things I need to revisit. No, you can’t borrow it when I’m done with it, go get your own.

tags: ambient, ambient findability, designing web usability, don’t make me think, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, jakob nielsen, new books, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, steve krug, steven krug, the effects of findability, the hidden web, the search, top rank, usability, web usability

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut allergy:

I can tell you from personal experience that Google does not perform well when it comes to health. [...] Google sent me to specialized sites such as peanutallergy.com, a shallow and grossly commercial web site pushing favored brands of nut free chocolate and soynut butter. Yahoo! and MSN didn’t perform any better. I did eventually find what I needed, but only by drawing on my advanced searching skills and familiarity with authoritive sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. If I weren’t a librarian who lives on the Web, I would have failed to find the right answers.

But don’t mistake Morville. He’s not blaming the search engines, and he’s certainly not blaming himself, for failing to find the information he needed. He’s blaming the people and organizations responsible for collecting, gathering, producing, and archiving this information.

A few pages later, he talks about some consulting he did with the National Cancer Institute. It turns out that the organization’s cancer.gov web site got top rank for a search on “cancer,” but fell off the front page when Googling specific cancers like “prostate cancer” or “mesothelioma.” Anybody who understands the Long Tail probably already suspects that searches for “cancer” are hugely outnumbered by the sum of all the searches for specific cancers, and Morville spends considerable time on that. The real question, however, is why did the cancer.gov folks miss this point? The problem is that very few people understand “findability.”

Because, like so many other design teams, they viewed their responsibility from a top-down perspective. Can users find what they need from the home page? It’s an important question, but it ignores the fact that many users don’t start from the home page. Powerful search tools, directories, blogs, social bookmarks, and syndication services are moving deep linking and content sampling from the exception to the rule.

At NCI, the team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

From where I sit, in a library, that means us too. As stewards of knowledge, it is our responsibility to make sure we catalog it in ways that optimize its availability and findability on the web. That means understanding the Google Economy and taking advantage of it.

If you’ve read this far, you definitely need to go order the book.

tags: ambient findability, find, findability, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, long tail, non-commercial information, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, the hidden web, top rank

Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search.

Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. From the description at Amazon:

Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond?

Here, as always when thinking about information, think about “marketplace” in broader terms than pure commercial, pure profit. This is the Google Economy.

tags: ambient, ambient findability, digital networks, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, john battelle, new books, peter morville, search, the effects of findability, the search

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…

Blogs:

• Church of the Customer
   
• Seth Godin
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com
   
• Threadwatch.org
   

Randomness:

• Writing, Briefly
   
• Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines
   
• definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia
   
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
   

tags: building buzz, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing, google economy, googleeconomy

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:

The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.

tags: availability, big stick, dictum, findability, google, google economy, idea, ideas, influence, search, search results, value

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.

Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy

“Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. It is more complex than search ranking, and broader than interlinked web pages, though it draws meaning from both.

The Internet and World Wide Web have emphasized the role of the citation as a means of identifying the value of a resource. The structure of the print publishing world imposes strict limits on what information is promoted and distributed, but the web imposes much lower barriers to ‘publication,’ eliminating the old-media filters that information consumers once depended on to identify worthy information. Internet Search engines were developed to help navigate the growing number of web pages, but their results could not represent the value of individual pages until Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin started to apply the concept of citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Today, Google’s PageRank weighs heavily on citation analysis among the more than 150 criteria evaluated.

The result is that the PageRank of any single web page is highly dependent on the number of web pages that link to it (and their PageRank). The highest ranked pages appear at the top of the search results page. The financial implication for commercial web sites are obvious (and often exploited), but there are serious implications for non-commercial content as well. A person doing any research on the web will find his or her results heavily influenced by PageRank-style ranking. Accurate and correct information that is poorly linked will have lower ranking than incorrect or misleading information that is better linked. Because many of the most authoritative information sources — examples: medical journals, the Oxford English Dictionary — are subscription services, their content is not available for indexing by search engines, and by extension, to those using search engines for research.

Even among free services — many library catalogs, for instance — it can be difficult to index the information because of technical obstacles like dynamic URLs that make it difficult to deep link to content or explicit prohibitions in the robots.txt. The result is that a person searching for a book is far more likely to find the Amazon.com catalog page or blog posts discussing the book long before they will find any library offering the book for loan.
As with market economies, the Google Economy is subject to uncertainties, fluctuation, and occasional manipulation. Manipulators do so, however, at serious risk, as search engines have been known to blacklist them from results pages. Further, search engine engineers continue to refine ranking criteria to deliver quality search results. In general, however, there are three rules for full participation in the Google Economy:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

External links

• Roger Sperberg on the value of availability and permanence on the web
• David Rothman on hate sites and the Google Economy
• Casey Bisson on politics and the Google Economy, one of a number of his posts about the Google Economy
• Bernard Moonreports on the Google Economy from BlogBusinessSummit 2005
• Joe Griffin on marketing a web site in the Google Economy

tags: citation analysis, dr. eugene garfield, eugene garfield, google, google economy, information consumers, larry page, link, linking, links, media filters, print publishing, search, search engines, sergey brin, value, web pages, wikipedia, world wide web

I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber:

[I]t’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.

This is news on its own, but what Farrell was really reporting was that arXiv now supports trackbacks and pingbacks. These technologies play an important role in fostering and tracking online communication, and in the Google Economy. “[T]his strikes me as a Very Big Deal indeed for academic blogging” he says, and he’s right. It’s a big flashing sign that modes of communication are changing in academia, it’s a sign that there a bunch of physicists who get it. And with all that, one has to assume that standards of promotion and tenure will change too. Is a well received pre-pub in arXive as important as for a print publication? What role does the online response, the trackbacks, the paper’s position in the Google Economy play in such evaluations?

This seems to me to be the nucleus of something like the new approach to academic publishing that John Holbo [link added --Casey] has advocated, in which blogs and bloglike tools become an integrated part of academia, creating conversation around interesting recent papers, filtering the good ones from the not-so-good ones etc etc. I can see potential problems down the line (trackback spam, attempts to game the system etc) – but the promise that this holds for physicists (and for non-physicists when we get around to creating arxiv equivalents) seems to me to be nothing short of extraordinary.

tags: pingback, academic publishing, arxiv, blogging, blogs, disseminate, google economy, journal publication, modes of communication, trackback

The Speakeasy Speed Test is an okay way to waste some time, but the most amusing thing is how easy they make it to promote them. The Speakeasy badge here looks like any web ad, but they’re not paying for it. All they did was post a link saying Add Speakeasy Speed Test to Your Site.

I guess we all ought to take this marketing tip from them: make sure your readers know how to link to you. Make linking easy, and your position in the Google Economy will grow.

tags: amusing, google economy, internet marketing, marketing, marketing tip, speakeasy, speakeasy speed test

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

tags: bias, biases, blog, bloggers, blogs, gender, gender differences, google, google economy, link, linking, rank, ranking, social life of information, technorati

While I’m anxiously working to better fit libraries into the Google Economy, a few paragraphs of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, got me thinking about its role in politics.

Glassner was telling of how a 1996 article in USA Today quoted the National Assocation of Scholars saying that Georgetown University had dumbed down its curriculum and dropped Shakespeare requirements. Of course, nothing could have been farther from the truth, a point confirmed by the Georgetown’s dean. In fact, more, not fewer Shakespeare classes were required, but this correction ran only as a letter to the editor some time after the falsehoods of the first story had taken hold in popular culture.

That’s how it came to pass that Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theater was quoted saying “most English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare can qualify as an appropriate author.” Political Correctness, was then and remains today a contentious issue on university campuses. The NAS and other groups had been so successful controlling media reportage on it throughout the 1990s that Brustein and many others could get quoted without being asked to offer evidence or qualifications for the claim. Still, University of Chicago grad student John Wilson looked into the claim.

Here again, the facts (as collected by Wilson and repeated by Glassner) contradicted the hype. The MLA data showed that 97% of English departments at four-year colleges offered at least one Shakespeare course and almost two thirds required Shakespeare courses for English majors. Further, the MLA online bibliography cited nearly 20,000 works related to Shakespeare, more than three times as many as for James Joyce, the runner up, and 36 times the number for Toni Morrison.

In short, the old bard was getting as much attention as ever, but as before, the correction never received the recognition it needed, and the falsehoods, not facts, shaped public opinion.

So the challenge to those who care about truth is to make it available and linkable online. It wasn’t so long ago that Googling “jew” returned a hate site as the top hit (I’m linking to the Wikipedia article to help correct this). Credit goes to David Rothman for pointing out this aspect of the Google economy to me, but now Google uses their sponsored link slot to link to an explanation:

If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of their faith.

This certainly isn’t the first time people have noticed that similar search terms yield very different results. During the 2004 election, it became clear that conservative news sources used full names, so searches for “George Bush” or “John Kerry” were skewed with a very conservative bias. Meanwhile, searches for just “bush” or “kerry” were more neutral. So it should be easy to understand why Googling “political correctness” reveals pages of conservative blather, but it’s impossible to find any links that suggest Shakespeare classes have actually been cancelled or requirements dropped (searching for “shakespeare classes cancelled” mostly reveals registration data that shows Shakespeare classes full and registration for them closed).

There’s no real satisfaction in those last points. Being right (but ignored), or winning the battle long after the fact have little effect on public opinion. What might help, however, is having a large collection of online linkable resources. Political arguments today include battles fought in the blogosphere, where links and Google rank are essential. Imagine the argument today: a conservative blogger complains about Georgetown, but a comment links to the English department’s program requirements and class schedule showing a full complement of Shakespeare classes. Well, that’s how it might work if conservative sites allowed comments.)

tags: bloggers, blogosphere, conservative, culture of fear, falsehood, falsehoods, georgetown, georgetown university, google, google economy, libraries, nas, national association of scholars, politics, shakespeare, william shakespeare

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.

In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.

Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls. Jenny concludes that the move might have sold an extra subscription here or there, but completely killed the online linking that made LJ’s articles so authoritative in search engines.

Roger at Electric Forest struck to the heart of this recently:

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

In this new world, value is measured by search engine rankings, which are largely a measure of the number of links pointing to a resource. Because it’s impossible to link to things behind authwalls, or to material that isn’t online at all, Google et all have turned that scarcity = value equation on its head.

Today, in order to be relevant…in order to gain value, material must be available, linkable, indexable, and usable. Over the long haul, the best way to increase your Page Rank is to create outstanding content and make it freely available to everyone.

This is (part of) what got Zach blogging and it’s exactly what make’s Google’s non-hierarchical world work. Soon to be very related: social bookmarking as made famous by del.icio.us, now Yahoo! feature.

tags: accessibility, accessible resources, authoritative, electric forest, google, google economy, information, jenny levine, new york times, oclc, scarcity, scarcity = value, search engines, the shifted librarian, value, value equation, value theory

Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

I’ve been calling this the “Google Economy,” where the value of information is directly proportional to its accessibility. This is a foreign land to libraries, where isolation and division of information is the norm (just count the number of unrelated search boxes linked on your library site), but it’s something I see a few people working to overcome. Kudos to Roger and others for a lot of great work.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, accessible resources, google, google economy, information, integration, kudos, leading the way, libraries, library, open access, search, trustworthy, wikipedia