A caller to Clark Howard’s CNN show complains of being billed $62,000 by his cell phone provider for data usage. And Oklahoman Billie Parks has filed suit over a $5,000 bill.

Stefan Savage, speaking in a segment on March 13’s On The Media, asked:

The question I like to ask people is, what are you going to do to the highway system to reduce crime. And when you put it that way, it sounds absolutely ridiculous, because while criminals do use the highway, no rational person is suggesting that if only we could change the transportation architecture that crime would go away.

Savage was speaking on the matter of internet security, and his comment was a counterpoint to a number of commentators who suggested the only way to secure the internet would be to replace the internet. This notion that we need a smarter internet has been around for a while, but its proponents have forgotten that the basic dumbness of the internet is the foundation of its success.

Mike Neuenschwander, for one, was ecstatic that the On The Media segment didn’t “slide into a futile discussion on the merits of world peace,” and followed Savage’s point with considerable discussion about the difference between the network and the social structure of trust. (In contemplating a recent NY Times story on this subject, Computing Community Consortium also quoted Savage on this point. The Coolest part: Savage commented to explain more.)

Near the end of the piece, Jonathan Zittrain explains why attempts to impose more limitations on the internet are so dangerous to the future viability of the internet:

so much of the code we now think of as central and crucial and cool and revolutionary is code for which, when most rational people first see it, their reaction is, what’s the point?

Zittrain offers Twitter as an example, but Ray Tomlinson offers an even better one. According to the legend, the man who invented email told his friend “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on,” as he first demonstrated the application that would eventually become the internet’s first killer app.

I’m flying Virgin America from BOS to SFO, and apparently all their planes on that route offer in-flight internet via Gogo. $12.95 buys 3Mbps down and 300Kbps up (at least early on when nobody else seemed to be using it). I can get my iPhone online for only 8 bucks, but as far as I can tell, I’d have to buy two plans if I wanted to use both on this flight.

I resisted the urge to try video chat, but I’m glad Adam didn’t. The novelty was apparently enough to bring most of the team into his office to see. The results are above. Adam says my video stream was better than it appears above for most of the conversation. Still, my efforts at pointing the camera out the window were mostly futile.

Aside from the turbulence, it’s been mostly like a day in the office. I read email, I do a little bit of coding…. I somehow don’t think I’ll bother with this on the way back (though I will appreciate the power outlets that let me charge my computer while listening to the larger music collection).

You’d think the top search results on the matter would be newer than 1999, but that’s where you’ll find this NYT article and PubLaw item story, both from precambrian times. Worse, both of those articles suggest that my links to them may not be entirely kosher.

The problem is probably that US courts have not spoken clearly on such a case. A Danish court in 2006 did, but I think that no case in the US has gone far enough to actually set a precedent. Another chance at settling this issue was lost earlier this month when BlockShopper settled, rather than continue a costly defense of such a case. The EFF is confident BlockShopper could have won, but that means little when the legal bills come in.

Related at EFF: Kelly v. Arriba Soft and Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.

NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety

As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.

Note: this cross-posted item is my contribution to our Banned Books Week recognition. We’ve been pitting books against each other, hoping to illustrate that there are always (at least) two sides to every story. Most of the other books were more social or political, but I liked this pair.

Wikinomics authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams tell stories of how the the internet’s unprecedented collaboration opportunities are changing the rules of economics. IBM, in one example, estimates the value of work done by volunteer software developers on Linux, the open source computer operating system built largely by people working for free, to be about one billion dollars, annually.

But Andrew Keen, in The Cult Of The Amateur : How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, worries that collaborative technologies like Wikipedia and YouTube are unfairly cutting into established economic models and destroying record companies, television networks, and other cultural institutions.

Both books praise technology, but differ on how it should be used and who should control it. Tapscott and Williams say IBM’s decision to embrace Linux and support open source software is saving the company $900 million/annually, while Keen argues that experts should be given more control over what is published online.

Further reading:

• A debate between Andrew Keen and David Weinberger, from WSJ.com.
• Listen online as Andrew Keen, Xeni Jardin, Larry Sanger, and Clay Shirky discuss Cult of the Amateur on KCRW’s To The Point.
• NPR interview with Wikinomics co-author Don Tapscott
• Eric Raymond’s paper, The Cathedral vs The Bazaar, discussing how massive collaboration makes open source possible.

bbw2007, Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Wikinomics, Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams, The Cult Of The Amateur How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, Andrew Keen, technology, internet, web 2.0, debate, banned books week

Have You Thanked the Internet Lately? OneWebDay, our opportunity to celebrate “one web, one world, one wish” is just about a week away (though it falls on Yom Kippur). This video explains a bit and Tim Berners-Lee is planning his own video (worth mentioning: his net neutrality post).

If things work out, I’ll be posting a video too, even though I’ll likely be offline most of that day (not observing Yom Kippur, at a friend’s wedding).

onewebday2007, onewebday, internet, web, world wide web, arrival of the stupendous

I wasn’t planning on posting much about Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, but I did. And now I find myself posting about it again. Thing is, I’m a sucker for historical analogy, and Clay Shirky yesterday posted a good one that compared the disruptive effects of mechanized cloth production to today’s internet.

Yes, that’s actually the birth of the Luddite movement, or at least where it got its name. And, though I was aware of the story, Shirky’s study offered details I’d not know previously.

Most interesting was the news that the handweavers largely opposed only the mills that sold their textiles cheaper than the handweavers did. And mills that sold their products at artificially high prices and used the efficiency of the mechanized looms to earn exorbitant profits weren’t opposed by the handweavers.

Hmmm….

Now back to Keen. Keen “doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things.”

But Keen is wrong. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.

The criticism here is that Keen wants technology to be controlled, and the value enjoyed exclusively by the establishment.

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

Keen is right in understanding that this massive supply-side shock to freedom will destabilize and in some cases destroy a number of older social institutions. He is wrong in believing that there is some third way — lets deploy the internet, but not use it to increase the freedom of amateurs to do as they like.

(Emphasis added.)

web 2.0, internet, anarchy, control, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, luddite, luddism, disruptive technology

Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur; How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is getting a lot of attention from usually quiet corners of the web, and I’ve had to quell the urge to write a story under the headline “Andrew Keen Tells YouTubers to Eat Spinach.”

Keen’s argument rests on the belief that “culture” is the sole provence of established media, and falls flat as soon as you get past the bombast of the subtitle. Our consumer relationship with culture is a recent development that has done great harm to us. Culture is participatory, messy, and resilient.

And that’s pretty much exactly how it played out on KCRW’s To The Point (listen), which invited Keen along with anti-Wikipedian Larry Sanger to take up the issue with Xeni Jardin and NYU prof Clay Shirky.

Keen is right to doubt Web 2.0 proponents who suggest technology will solve the world’s problems (it never did, it’s unlikely it ever will), but Jardin and Shirky didn’t argue that. The real issue isn’t technology, it’s the growing clash of control vs. anarchy as described in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Anarchist In The Library. Well, that and the fact that the internet is still rather immature, even if it’s regularly used by a majority of Americans.

internet, web 2.0, anarchy, control, Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

This story in MIT Technology Review scares me.

Instead of letting all computers within the network communicate freely, Ethane is designed so that communication privileges within the network have to be explicitly set; that way, only those activities deemed safe are permitted. “With hindsight, it’s a very obvious thing to do,” McKeown says.

No matter how obvious it seems, it’s still a really bad idea. It’s hard to imagine a world without the internet now, which makes it especially easy to dismiss the critical features that made it possible. The internet was born and has thrived because of the very thing McKeown is trying to kill: freedom.

TCP/IP, the foundation protocol of the internet, has spurred innovation because of how open it is. Bruce Sterling’s Short History of the Internet explains how that freedom supported the network’s rapid, noting, “As long as individual machines could speak the packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were irrelevant.”

And not only did TCP/IP allow the internet usage to explode the way it did, it supported the rush of innovation that made the internet useful. Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email as we know it today, is reported to have said, “don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on,” when he introduced it to his friend.

Inventor of HTTP, HTML, the first web server, and browser, Tim Berners-Lee explains how that freedom helped make the World Wide Web possible:

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone’s permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.

Now imagine what might have happened if Ray had to ask the network administrators for permission for his new email application. How much longer would it have taken to develop? What if TimBL needed permission to play with this silly web idea?

I suppose I might take some comfort from Scott Mace, who screams“

Academics have to earn their pay somehow, and lately, a lot of them have once again been spending more time trying to reinvent the Internet than fixing our education system. I say that with a certain bitter memory from the dot-com bubble years, when so many academics (and ultimately, a short-lived boomlet of vendors) labored so long to bring ”smart“ networking to the masses. Guess what, it never happened.

But instead I see it as another example of the battle between anarchists and oligarchs as described by Siva Vaidhyanathan, and I’m afraid that, as with DRM, this conflict might tilt towards the established oligarchs, no matter how short sighted they may be.

Separately, and somewhat amusingly, Berlin and NYC want their own private internet, and Dan the Mennonite wants one too.

Nick McKeown, anarchistic, anarchists vs. oligarchs, bad idea, dumb networks, ethane, freedom, freedom vs. control, intelligent networks, internet, networks, private internet, tcp/ip

Another great comic from XKCD:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life on the internet. Let’s walk around the world.”

“Sounds good.”

[panels showing the world's great beauty, a truly grand adventure]

“And yet all I can think of is ‘this will make for a great Livejournal entry.’”

blog, blogging, blogs, information behavior, internet, journaling, life, livejournal

Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.

On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available. But then, this is a teenager, and maybe practical matters like work don’t top the list. And that’s where Not A Pretty Librarian (who are you?) asks:

Can you imagine being nineteen right now without computer access?

Indeed, when college students are spending so much time on AIM and logging into Facebook daily, is a car really as important as a computer in a teenager’s social life? When 89 percent of students start their research in a search engine, isn’t the computer more important than a car to get to the library?

car, computer, computer use, importance, internet, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, not a pretty librarian, teen, teenagers, value, web

It can be hard for library folk to imagine that the web development world might be as divided about the meaning and value of “Web 2.0” as the library world is about “Library 2.0,” but we/they are. Take Jeffrey Zeldman’s anti-Web 2.0, anti-AJAX post, for instance. Zeldman’s a smart guy, and he’s not entirely off-base, but let’s not confuse his argument. What you don’t see him suggesting is that we abandon the web. And he certainly hasn’t packed up shop.

What Zeldman and now Michael Calore are suggesting is that their fellow web developers use these fancy, (sort of) new technologies like tags and AJAX carefully. But where they go wrong, and it’s an apparently common mistake, is that their definition of Web 2.0 ends there. Conversely, Tim O’Reilly’s definition of the term admitted to some difficulty in bounding it. In fact, it seemed more an attempt to identify the core attributes of both a number of wild successes (think Google) and emerging stars (think Flickr).

At the center of all of this, however, was the unspoken but undeniable fact that huge numbers of people were turning to the internet for their information, news, and entertainment.

That’s why Zeldman and Calore are publishing no end of tips on how to get better search engine placement, how to design usable and accessible sites, and how to design them well. Look back at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 spiel. Right there on page one you’ll see him talk about how “the web is a platform” and a discussion of why Google is the “standard bearer” for Web 2.0. Google’s success has nothing to do with AJAX, and it’s not tags. Google’s success is in the way it delivers, for the most part, what people want when they want it.

With search engines handling over five billion searches per month, it’s pretty clear that there’s a huge number of Web 2.0 users out there. Yes, Google and other Web 2.0 technologies may be difficult to make sense of, and it might take us some time to find our place in this new world. But be wary of those who suggest they’re irrelevant, for our customers have already voted with their feet.

arguments, definition, definitions, future internet, future libraries, internet, internet usage, jeffrey zeldman, lib20, library 2.0, michael calore, tim o’reilly, web 2.0, tim o’reilly

The story here isn’t about why I’m on the Kate Spade mailing list. The story is about their new line of “paper.” It’s stationary, of course. The kind of formal paper people use to send out wedding invites and thank yous and whatever other little missives that email or AIM seem too uncouth for.

I made this point before, in a discussion of how painting evolved from trade-craft to art after the development of the camera, but I love seeing a new example.

Even as paper documents become decreasingly valuable to us — how many of us cringe when offered a printout of a web page? — formal, artistic uses of paper seem to hold on. Does this Kate Spade release affirm the overall usefulness of paper, or its boutique value as an icon of class and privilege?

My argument here isn’t against paper, and certainly not against art. My argument is that technological development changes the value and use of everyday objects. In this case, Crane, the manufacturer of the Kate Spade paper collection, used to sell through stationers in small shops throughout the country, but technology has changed that market. The bread and butter of those shops — printing letterhead stock for local businesses — has largely disappeared as those businesses shift more communications online, use on-demand printing, or go elsewhere for more complex work like full-color brochures. Crane has already missed it’s opportunity to lead the technology that’s changing it’s market, so now they’re forced to try selling their old products in lower volumes to niche markets where the Kate Spade is use to show the privilege and class of the consumer.

The internet changes everything, where will you be when you realize it?

art, craft, crane, crane paper, internet, kate spade, kate spade paper, privilege, trades, useful, useless, wealth

Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept them — and the way they connect our patrons with the books they read — without question.

The problem here is that it’s a decision we make on behalf our patrons, often without bothering to inform our patrons of the risks we take with their privacy. And the problem there is that it violates users’ expectations of transparency and self determination — some of the same expectations you’ll find in Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto.

So here’s the trick: how do we deliver targeted and customized services online, without unhinging our patrons’ privacy? The answer so far is that we allow patrons to choose, giving patrons the tools and knowledge they need to make their own decisions about how much they reveal. But that answer depends on the notion that library services must be self-contained, that the only way our patrons can manage reading lists and the like is if libraries offer those services.

One only need look at LibraryThing to see an alternative. It’s not that I think LibraryThing or Listal or any other service will make better privacy decisions than we will. My point is that our attempts to build out customized services will likely draw resources away from efforts to improve the way our existing services interoperate with the rest of the internet. Listal and LibraryThing work because Amazon built an outstanding API and made it freely available to all. If libraries offered an API like that, those services could easily integrate our holdings, and LibraryThing users could match their interests against materials available at their local libraries without revealing themselves to us. Patrons could run desktop applications like Delicious Library and (mostly) avoid revealing themselves over the network. Libraries are in the awkward position of having identifying information about their patrons, but online-only services might not need any more identification than an anonymous username and password.

But even more simply than that, it’s worth asking how easily our online services work with basic expectations of web sites. Can users bookmark an item in your catalog in their browsers? Can they send the catalog URL of their new favorite book in an email to a friend? Can Google or other search engines index your catalog and help your patrons find materials even when they don’t know to search your site specifically?

Circulation records can be subpoenaed, but getting at the reading list I’ve been keeping as bookmarks in my browser is more likely to require officials to serve me with a search warrant. Building systems that work with the internet puts users in charge of their own privacy decisions.

library, libraries, privacy, transparency, web 2.0, internet, bookmarkability, durable links, web20, web architecture, usability, privacy, privacy and libraries, future libraries

As part of a larger message to faculty returning from winter break, our CIO offered this summary of how he sees advancing internet use affecting higher education:

Are you familiar with blogs and podcasts? Google them, or look them up in Wikipedia. Some of you may already be using these new tools. Others may think these terms are the latest in a sea of techno-jargon. Regardless, your millennial students — the NetGens — are using these new technologies — along with the ubiquitous cell phone — more and more. Google is a first step in most research and you’ll be seeing more references and quotes from Wikipedia. They have more access to more technology than our generations could have ever dreamed of… and more of it is coming right to their cell phones! I’m not suggesting that you suddenly change your teaching processes, but you should be aware of how this generation gets and interacts with information. And to know them is to understand better how to work and communicate with them. Help them to be discerning with the wealth of information they have.

There are lots of studies and research written on our students today. Here are some of my own observations, as a parent and teacher.

• Students’ span of attention may be short, but their capacity to absorb more information and multitask is significant.
   
• Google is the first point in their research. Wikipedia is fast becoming a knowledge base of choice.
   
• This generation of students has vast amounts of information at their fingertips and phone, but they tend to trust too much of what they find as valid.
   
• Students tend to spend more time on their phones and text messaging than they do in email.
   
• Students walk to classes with their MP3 players in their ears. They walk out with cell phones dialed.
   
• They spend significant time online and connected, yet they know or care little about the underlying technology.
   
• They share personal information far more readily in blogs, Facebook.com and other web sites.
   
• Sales of watches are declining because young people have clocks on their cell phones.
   
• All the above are generalizations. Not all students are as ‘wired’ as we assume. We need to be mindful that some students come from homes where there is no internet, no computer and no cell phones.
   

internet, internet and education, higher education, internet and higher education, internet use, students, faculty, learning, millennials, netgen, netgens, millennial students, library, libaries

We can be forgiven for not noticing, but the world changed not long ago.

Sometime after the academics gave up complaining about the apparent commercialization of the internet, and while Wall Street was licking it’s wounds after the first internet boom went bust, the world changed.

Around the time we realized that over 200 million Americans have internet access, that 94 million Americans use the internet ?on an average day, and that 80% of them believe the internet is a reliable source of information, we looked around and found that along with doing their banking, their taxes, and booking tickets for travel and movies, those users were making about five billion web searches each month.

Now that over 62 million households (55%) have internet-connected computers at home, and 87% of youth 12-17 are active online, is it any surprise that children may learn to type before they write? Bloggers are changing the way we get news, but it’s Craigslist that’s killing newspapers’ old cash cow.

And perhaps most amazingly, the internet became not simply a market, a bazaar, it became a component of almost every facet of our lives. Facebook and MySpace were born of this simple desire to be human, with other humans, regardless of medium. A desire that drives, to greater or lesser extents, services like Flickr and 43things.

As Kevin Kelly noted in Wired:

“The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.”

It may seem as unlikely as Norman Bel Geddes realizing his Futurama, or Chesley Bonestell achieving interplanetary flight, but what was once science fiction has become a part of our daily lives. The internet age is here. It is now. We just don’t know what it means yet.

And here’s the library connection: We will all struggle with questions of relevancy in this new world. Inevitably, this will require us to examine our core values and change our services, but the results will be magical. As never before has the technology been available to so connect questions with answers, patrons with libraries.

library, libraries, future libraries, internet, internet usage, tiny marvels, stupendous, arrival, information age, science fiction, reality, social change, cultural effects, society, culture, networked information

A while ago I reported on the Pew Internet Project’s November 2005 report on increased use of search engines. Here’s what I had to say at the time:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.

Walt Crawford properly took me to task, noting:

The report that’s downloadable does show that people aren’t being asked an open-ended “what did you do on the Internet today?” question. They’re being asked to respond to a list. If “searching a library OPAC” isn’t on the list, it is absolutely guaranteed not to be in the results.

It’s taken me some time, but I’m finally following up on that point. The question seems to revolve around how the list of activities was generated, and to answer it I contacted project director Lee Rainie. Lee explained that the intent of the project and the surveys is to help us understand how people use the internet and does not consider other activities. Regarding the list of ten online activities in this survey, he noted that it was a list he chose as “an illustrative list, rather than comprehensive list.”

Lee was careful to emphasize the way he values libraries and wanted to be clear that though the Project has tracked 90 online activities in its many surveys, they haven’t yet asked internet users about their use of online library services. I don’t know if it was just because I was asking the questions, or if he’s been thinking about this for some time, but he did suggest that the project might include library-related questions in a future study.

I was putting Lee in a tough spot, as the real question we want him to answer is something along the lines of “did the survey not include questions about online library usage because it’s statistically insignificant or was it an oversight?” Lee is a smart guy, smart enough not to answer that — smart enough to avoid stepping into our internal debates — so the following is based on my continued research into the question, not my conversation with him.

As it turns out, while much of the most interesting data in the November 20 2005 report comes from the project’s phone survey, the report uses data from comScore to support those phone survey results. While Walt is right about the phone survey, the comScore data doesn’t appear subject to those limitations:

The comScore data cited in this report come from comScore Media Metrix, an internet audience measurement service that uses a massive cross-section of more than 1.5 million U.S. consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

In a comment to my previous post, KateZ expressed some concern that the comScore data was only tracking top search engines; comScore offers many reports based on their usage tracking, the qSearch report is a keyword optimization tool and doesn’t reflect the full breadth of data harvested by the company. It doesn’t answer the question on its own, but can we not assume that a company that makes is business by tracking the every online activity of its research subjects would investigate any library-related activity if such activity was significant enough to reveal trends in consumer interest or behavior?

Elsewhere, in the PIP’s August 11 2004 report on The Internet and Daily Life, we find some detailed insights on how those phone survey questions are selected:

To assemble a good list of activities, we followed insights gained from previous research and divided online activities into four categories: information seeking; communications; transactions; and entertainment. We chose several examples for each category. These examples are not meant to cover all kinds of activities, but rather to represent everyday tasks and typical recreations that Americans enjoy. We chose activities that would broadly represent what the Internet has to offer, that would resonate with a broad audience, and that would tap into our understanding of the Internet use gained from our past research. Recognizing, of course, our choice of particular activities might influence the findings, we tried to observe the specific but then draw generalizations from our observations.

And in the November 2 2005 report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers, we learn that the project uses focus groups and small surveys with open ended questions to help shape their research and larger surveys. In that case:

Four focus groups were also conducted with a total of 38 high school and middle school students.

…teens took an online survey of multiple choice, open-ended and short-answer-style questions…

Full details on page 25 of the PDF.

So, I can’t really offer the answers we all want, but my gut feeling is that if library usage was a statistically significant activity for American internet users, the Pew Internet folks would have picked up on it and asked more detailed questions.

Sadly, I’ve been so slow to followup on all this that it may not matter anymore. OCLC released their Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report in early December. The report revealed that patrons are generally happier using search engines than their libraries when asked to rate both in terms of volume, quality, speed, and overall experience.

This is scary to some, but good news to the libraries that are willing to take advantage of it. It means the tools, the access, and the information literacy are all coming together for our patrons. Now it’s just up to us to participate.

I’ll be talking about this in my ALA Midwinter presentation, see you in San Antonio.

search engines, library, libraries, library usage, online library, online libraries, online activities, pew internet project, pew internet and american life project, internet, internet usage, online behavior, lib20, library20, library 2.0, library evolution, search engine, search engine use, web searching

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.

flickr, delicious, del.icio.us, yahoo!, social software, social web, web 2.0 web20, yahoo, internet, social network, social networks

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

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

tags: 4cs, collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, internet, jenny levine, pew internet, pew internet & american life project, pew internet project, social internet, social software, social web, teenagers, teens, youth

That headline might seem a little late among the folks reading this. But we’re all geeks, and if not geeks, then at least regular computer users. Regular computer users, however, are a minority. Worldwide, only around 500 million people have internet access, and fewer than 100 million people in the US have internet access at home. With populations of over 6 billion and 300 million respectively, there’s clearly a lot of growth potential.

Truth is, computers are the poor cousins to phones and television in terms of market penetration. In the US, Nielsen estimates there are over 275 million people with TVs in their homes today, and the CTIA says there are over 180 million mobile phone users.

The market opportunity is clear, but I think our notions of what a “computer” is have to change. Yes, computers have been through a lot of changes in 20 some odd years, but they’re still very much the same. Some might say that cars are basically the same as they were 100 years ago because they all mostly run around of four wheels and be happy with it. But transportation has seen tremendous change. Computers as we know them don’t own the internet any more than cars own the road or railroad or bike trails or skies.

Email was the killer app that made people interconnect their networks, the web was the killer app that got 90+ million users online already. And those users are the critical mass that pushes the development of real web applications — applications that are starting to beat desktop apps at their own game and doing things that desktop apps can’t.

With this flowering age of web applications, the age of internet connected information devices is coming. But we need something different from the computers we’ve become accustomed to. We need a device that is designed to serve the 90 million Americans who have cell phones, but don’t appear to have their own computers or home internet access. We need a device that replaces TVs as the leading entertainment and news medium. Because the information age will have arrived when there’s a dozen kiosks in every mall hawking internet tablets and we see them lined up at Best Buy with differentiated models for the kitchen, living room, the kids rooms, and for camping.

Background: this post is grew out of some discussion at TeleRead, NoSheep, and here at MaisonBisson.

tags: access, change, change computers, computer, computing, critical mass, desktop apps, email, geek, geeks, information age, information system, internet, internet access, internet connected, killer app, market opportunity, network, paradigm shift, penetration, portable computing, web, web applications

I’m off visiting the good folks at Pepper today. I’ll update this post with photos as soon as they’re available, then look for a pair of posts about how the hardware/software works and what I’d like to do with it later.

Until then, here are some related posts: Ultra Portable Computing, Pepper Pad 2, and Portable Computing.

UPDATE: the picture above is blurry because of my poor photography skills. Better pictures can be found at the Pepper site. Look for more about the Pepper Pad in the next few days.

tags: computer, computing platform, hardware, internet, pepper, software, ultra portable, web, web computing

I don’t know why IE has never displayed my transparent PNGs correctly, but I know now that I’m not the only one with this complaint. Bob Osola (name?) shares my frustration, and better, he sat down and coded a solution, shared the code, and posted a wonderfully informative guide to the problem.

Not sure if your browser can display transparent PNGs properly? Follow that link for examples.

Technorati Tags: frustration, ie, internet, internet exploder, internet explorer, png, pngs, portable network graphic, portable network graphics, transparency, transparent