NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference

November 18, 2005 – 10:25 am

I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today.
The conference is titled ?Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!? and there’s quite a lineup of speakers.
My presentation is on ?the social life of metadata.? My slides are online, and below is some background.
The Library Catalog…
The catalog is [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (3)



What’s In A Web Search?

November 3, 2005 – 9:31 pm

Sometimes the answer isn’t as interesting as the question. Consider this note from Yahoo Buzz:
On Sunday, the day before the nomination became official, [searches for] Alito sprang up a sudden 320%.
Did searches for Alito spike on tips White House staffers, or were White House Staffers vetting their nominee via the search engines?

tags: buzz, google, judge [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

Seattle911

November 3, 2005 – 6:44 pm

Via the ProgrammableWeb: Seattle911.com. It’s another mashup with Google Maps, but who knew anybody could get 911 data in real time? Sure, it’s only for Seattle, and only their fire/EMS servers (no police), but technology wise, it’s cool. Kudos to Seattle, I guess.
What’s my reticence? I don’t know if I should have this data…and [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Is Search Rank Group-think?

November 1, 2005 – 12:22 pm

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries

October 12, 2005 – 10:06 pm

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (2)



Must Read: Ambient Findability

September 29, 2005 – 3:19 pm

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Ambient Findability And The Google Economy

September 23, 2005 – 8:08 am

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (3)

Search, Findability, The Google Economy: How It Shapes Us

September 14, 2005 – 7:40 am

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

The Quotable John Scott

September 10, 2005 – 9:51 am

John Scott reminds the naive:
?Don’t believe everything you find in Google.?

tags: believe, don’t believe, google, john scott, quote, saying

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Photoblog, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (1)

37signals Tells Google A Thing Or Two

September 5, 2005 – 11:39 am

37signals takes on Google and suggests some improvements.

tags: 37signals, consulting firm, design, google, google search, improvements, improving google, search, search improvements, usability consulting, web, web design, web search

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (3)

The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

August 31, 2005 – 12:11 pm

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (2)

The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry

August 29, 2005 – 7:13 am

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. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Laura Quilter Defends Google Print

August 22, 2005 – 7:21 am

With all the talk about Google scanning or not scanning copyrighted books, I was happy to see Laura Quilter talking about Google as a library.
The Internet Archive is certainly a library. [...] Libraries may be private, semi-private, public; for- or not-for-profit; paper or digital. Why is Google not a library?
More interestingly, she casts a critical [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

Linking Bias

August 10, 2005 – 7:57 am

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (3)

Politics And The Google Economy

July 31, 2005 – 3:19 am

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (3)