It was only after I’d taken my seat and David Weinberger began his ROFLcon keynote that I realized there was a box of t-shirts at the side of the room with a sign over them that said something along the lines of “FREE: t-shirts from worn out memes.” Thinking that the internet might be old enough now that the old memes might be resurrected in some ironic way, I almost jumped over Jessamyn to rifle through the box and claim a prize. What stopped me was the realization that with about 500 people in the room, anything left in the box must be really, really past its expiration date.

By the time I did get to look in the box, all I found were snakes on a plane t-shirts. And then all my anticipation disappeared with a sigh as I realized snakes on a plane really wasn’t worth resuscitating.

That was before I had a few drinks, remembered I had this old video, and decided to give it a go anyway.

Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson

The shift of software from the desktop to the Web will really be the making of open-source software. The Long Tail side of software will almost certainly be Web-based because the Web lowers the barriers to adoption of software. There will always be some software best delivered as packaged bits. But the big problem with packaged software–or one big problem–is the risk associated with installation. It just might not work. The Web removes that problem.

When a writer goes looking for young Turks (my words, not Scott’s), you should expect the story to include some brash quotes (writers are supposed to have a chip of ice in their hearts, after all). On the other hand, we’re librarians, so how brash can we be?

Scott Carlson’s Young Librarians, Talkin’ ‘Bout Their Generation in The Chronicle this week did it better than most articles: rather than showing how hip or geeky we are, it asks us about the future. And it asks without overly romanticizing the shelves of paper-bound books that our users so identify with us or presupposing that Google will p0wn us.

The answers are good, definitely worth a look. Though I regret that the selected quote from my long-ish interview with Scott didn’t reflect on more of the good work and great people in libraries. Especially now, as code4lib2008 planning is kicking into gear, and with the number of projects on the table — Evergreen, Koha, Blacklight, and VuFind, just to name a few.

The future of libraries is a big, wide open question, but here are two things I’m certain of: Our very notions of the nature of information need to evolve, and we need to move quickly to build libraries that are as relevant to the next hundred years as our adored Carnegie libraries were to the last.

libraries, lib20, library 2.0, information architecture, interview, Chronicle of Higher Education, future

OpenSearch is a common way of querying a database for content and returning the results. The idea is that it brings sanity to the proliferation of search APIs, but a realistic view would have to admit that we’ve been trying to do that since before the development of z39.50 in libraries decades ago, and the hundreds of APIs that have followed have all well intentioned and purposeful.

So what makes makes OpenSearch something more than an also ran in a crowded herd? Part of it is in what it doesn’t do. “Rather than reinventing the wheel, it uses the simple and very popular syndication formats RSS and Atom, along with a document describing the search engine.”

DeWitt Clinton helped create the OpenSearch protocol while working at Amazon’s A9.com. DeWitt is currently at Google, but he’s continuing his work on OpenSearch as an open, Creative Common’s licensed specification, and I caught up with him there to talk about what it takes to develop an open format.

My first questions were about where OpenSearch came from.

DeWitt Clinton: Amazon launched a wholly owned subsidiary called A9. This was in late 2003, and revealed the first beta site in early 2004. A9’s mission was to explore search and to see where search could be done better.

One of the first things that we launched was the A9 front-end search interface, including search results from Google and handful of other partners. We integrated the different search results and displayed them to users, which was, I think, relatively novel for the time. It was a multiple column display where you could do one search query and see search results. They weren’t necessarily interleaved, but they were aggregated on screen.

We worked with Google’s search API, Answers.com’s search API, we worked with a few other search APIs and we started talking to additional partners about getting their searches into A9. There were a number of companies that had search engines, but far more often than not, they also had proprietary search APIs.

Basically, if you were a search company — if you were Answers.com or something like that — you would say, “OK, I can accept search requests and I’ll going to give you search results back, maybe I’ll use this XML format, maybe it’s going to be SOAP, maybe it’s going to be something else.”

So we worked with a couple more of these proprietary APIs and said, “You know, this is getting silly. We’re doing all this work on our end to integrate search results, maybe there is an easier way.” We looked around to see if there was a standard for search, and didn’t really surface anything specifically for web-based, web-type search. There were formats for more structured search, but web search is at best very loosely structured.

So we started to pick it apart, looking to propose a search format that our partners could use. But what would go into a search format? What are the common traits of search? What are the things that all web-search engines accept as parameters on the request and what are the type of things that they send back?

We started looking at the existing protocols — those that Yahoo!, Google, and even the smaller, more niche search engines had exposed — and asking ourselves what they were doing. We took the common elements from those formats until we found the subset that we could tell, just empirically, was going to cover at least the 80% case of what other people are already doing.

Then there was this moment when we realized we were inventing yet another proprietary format. You know, essentially a closed format. Fortunately, having done a lot of work with RSS in the past, we realized, “You know, search results are just a list. And the whole world is using RSS as a way of syndicating lists. So what if we — instead of trying to invent something completely new — what if we leveraged an existing protocol?”

RSS was already out there, already open, already extremely well-adopted, and had tons of client and server libraries available. Combining RSS-based responses, the extra search result metadata, and our new format for describing search interfaces gave us the common subset, the 80% case we needed for syndicated search. And that became OpenSearch 1.0.

There were three “lightbulb moments” in designing OpenSearch. The first was extracting the common features of web search. The second was leveraging existing formats, such as RSS. The third “lightbulb” was in asking the question: “who benefits if this is a proprietary A9/Amazon solution? Is the world a better place, is even our business better off if this is closed and proprietary?” And the answer, very clearly, was “no.” With that the decision was clear, “You know what, let’s open this protocol. Let’s use the Creative Commons as a way of opening the text of the format of the protocol.”

DeWitt Clinton, OpenSearch, interview, open formats, protocols, search, search syndication, RSS

I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made it a smart discussion.

I approached the conversation with the notion that what we were really talking about was whether libraries should give their patrons the opportunity to organize the resources they value in ways that make sense to them. For some time one of our patrons here has been telling us he wants all the books that he’s interested on one shelf, and for years the standard retort has been a chuckle. But, why, he might today ask, can’t our library systems make this possible in some virtual way now?

Tags — specifically user contributed tags — are a big element in this larger question. Though they bring up all manner of concerns from authority to vocabulary control, they’ve shown great value outside libraries and interest in them has been energized with the active discussions about how to re-imagine our library catalogs for today’s needs.

My big question is who “owns” those tags, and what motivates taggers. LibraryThing, has enjoyed some great success with tags, while Amazon has achieved little. Tim Spalding’s theory on the matter echos Josh Porter’s dissection of “The Del.icio.us Lesson,” where he notes that “personal value precedes network value.” That is, people tag for personal, perhaps even selfish reasons. People don’t tag to help the community, they tag because it helps the tagger.

I’ve been tagging my stories at MaisonBisson for some time now, and the effort has paid off by making my content more findable both internally and externally at services like Technorati. Flickr makes tagging even more valuable, as the tags are often the only searchable content for image. How else could I find my library-related photos if not from the tags?

On the other hand, my own experiment in user contributed tags seems to have fallen flat, as I’ve received very few useful tags despite the high number of readers who I’d expect to be familiar with tagging. Meanwhile, del.icio.us tells me that there are 133 tagged bookmarks to MaisonBisson in their database. This leaves me wondering if I should invest more effort in working on user contributed tag system that lives in my blog (or or a library catalog, or other discrete system), or should I instead focus on making those systems support outside tagging systems like del.icio.us? This is easy for my blog, where all the pages are already URL addressable, but bibliographic systems are a bigger challenge.

update: hey, Abby’s talking about this over at Thingology and her headline is way better than mine. Darn. Still, the point remains: we need to leverage our systems to make it easy for our patrons organize the things they like wherever and however they wish. Then, we should look for ways to find value in the aggregate. That’s the del.icio.us lesson.

folksonomies, folksonomy, interview, l2, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalogs, library systems, opacs, podcast, tagging, tags, talis, talking with talis

On NPR’s Weekend Edition today: an interview with Michael Segel, author of The Devil’s Horn, subtitled “The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool.”

Adolph Sax’s instrument seems to have been controversial from the start. Other manufacturers tried to assassinate him, the Pope declared the church’s opposition to the instrument, Ladies Home Journal explained that it “rendered listeners unable to distinguish right and wrong.”

tags: adolph sax, devil horn, devil’s horn, horn, history, interview, king of cool, ladies home journal, micheal segel, noisy novelty, npr, npr weekend edition sunday, radio, saxophone, weekend edition

Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss answered questions for On The Media’s Brooke Gladstone. Amoss and his staff have been covering the catastrophe in New Orleans as only locals can.

Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on this has come from the Times-Picayune, and I was quite amazed when I discovered the electronic edition Wednesday. Despite the damage, they appear to have start releasing a print version again and are distributing it in the city and in communities where refugees have fled. For so many displaced people, and in areas where power prevents other communications, I can imagine how valuable this thread is.

tags: catastrophe, electronic edition, exile, hurrican katrina, hurricane, interview, jim amoss, katrina, locals, louisiana, new orleans, newspaper in exile, newspaper, on the media, refugees, times picayune, times-picayune, timespicayune