twittervision and twittermap show new tweets wherever they appear on the map, TwitterWhere let’s you follow tweets at a specific location, and Ask500People has nothing to do with Twitter but does show you global opinion. Live. While you watch (so they say, anyway).

The New York Times has struggled with TimesSelect, now they’re killing it. But the news here isn’t that a media giant is giving up on a much hyped online venture. The news is that a media giant is endorsing what we now call web 2.0:

Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion — as well as share it, link to it and comment on it. [Emphasis added.]

If only they’re realized it back when they started it.

web 2.0, web20, NYT, New York Times, TimesSelect, linking, open access

Right there are the beginning of Esther Dyson’s ten-year-old book, Release 2.1, she alerts us to the Web 2.0 challenge we’re we’re now beginning to understand:

The challenge for us all is to build a critical mass of healthy communities on the Net and to design good basic rules for its public spaces so that larger systems do self-organize and work effectively. Rule-making is not the job of legislatures and governments alone. You can make your own rules by designing an online service — or by setting up procedures in your workplace. Anyone you offers a service or product, anyone who votes in a PTA or discusses corporate policy with her boss, is a rule-maker. What will make this world a better place for you and your children (or friends) to live in? It’s up to you to figure it out and to make it happen.

That is, the communities are real, and they’re self organizing and policing, but do we yet understand them?

I’m surely not the only one who smiles kindly and feels bad for those who look for some authority to “fix” Wikipedia, but take a look at the arguments about what is or is not offensive in Flickr and we find it: that’s a community struggling with the Dyson’s challenge. That’s the struggle that makes Flickr’s status as a community undeniable.

challenge, communities, community, esther dyson, release 2.0, release 2.1, web 2.0, web20

I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library.

The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation will focus on how we’re fixing up our catalogs, with a big emphasis on how APIs can be used to continuously reinvent the way we look at — and thus understand and use — the information we have. The big idea here is that as we separate the systems that store and manage our data from the applications that display and manipulate it, we open the door to faster, cheaper development — and make room for a bunch of new ideas along the way.

Because it’s a short program, I’ll only be able to gloss over some of the discussion of what’s wrong with our catalogs and how we’re fixing them, and while there’s a lot to say about WPopac, I’ll have to leave it to Jenny Levine to explain most of it.

My slides are online. As usual, all the underlined text is hotlinked along with all the screenshots, so click them for more information and detail.

AALL, AALL2006, American Association of Law Libraries, api, conference, law libraries, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, opensearch, presentation, rss, web 2.0, web20, xml

When I heard news that Google was to release a spreadsheet companion to their freshly bought Writely web-based word processing app, I got excited about all the things they could do to make it more than just a copy of Numsum. Let’s face it, Google’s the Gorilla in the room here and they’re gonna squash Numsum, but wouldn’t it be cool if…

Well, Dmitry Nekrasovski get’s credit for planting the notion of URL-addressable rows, columns, and cells in my mind with this commentary from months ago:

I just came across this ITWorld article that suggests a simple yet intriguing idea for making online spreadsheet applications like Numsum more than Excel wannabes: make cells and cell ranges addressable with URL’s, and use a standard XML variant to encode them. To the author’s credit, he does not use a buzzword for this idea, but, for ease of meme-peddling, I will refer to it as Spreadsheet 2.0. You heard it here first.

The implications of Spreadsheet 2.0 at the user experience level for a public site could be pretty neat: feeding into a live stream of, say, stock market data could be as easy as copying and pasting a spreadsheet cell. But it could be most valuable in an enterprise environment. Anyone who has worked in a large organization will testify to the pervasiveness of the “spreadsheet mentality” and the difficulty of managing and reusing data once it is buried in a spreadsheet. Could this be a legitimate way for Web 2.0 apps to find their way to large-scale enterprise deployment?

Now, go one step beyond read-only URL-addressability and think about writing to cells with an HTTP post URL. Imagine the way cool apps we could build based on that.

Thanks go to Jessamyn for inviting me.

google, google spreadsheets, office application, office software, spreadsheet, spreadsheet 2.0, url-addressable, web 2.0, web application, web20, webapp

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

In recognition of the divisive and increasingly meaningless nature of x.0 monikers — think library 2.0 and the web 2.0 that inspired it — I’m doing away with them.

When Jeffrey Zeldman speaks with disdain about the AJAX happy nouveaux web application designers and the second internet bubble (and he’s not entirely off-base) and starts claiming he’s moving to Web 3.0, then it’s a pretty clear sign that we should give up on trying to version all this.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s something big going on, but it doesn’t respect version numbers and it isn’t about AJAX or social software. And as much as designers and developers want to take credit, we cant. I’m not the first to say it, but let me repeat it without the baggage of these x.0 monikers: people are making the internet a part of their daily lives and in doing so it is changing us. With or without a label, that’s what we need to talk about.

web 2.0, web20, lib20, library 2.0, library20, moniker, monikers, divisive, conflict, label, change, internet usage, internet use, massive social change

I feel a little misrepresented by a post from Talis’ Richard Wallis claiming you don’t need technology for Library 2.0 – but it helps, but the company blog doesn’t allow embedded URLs, so I’m posting my comment here:

Richard, please don’t misunderstand me. Technology is the essential infrastructure for Library 2.0. My point was that technology alone doesn’t make a library. It would be better to read my post in the context of Meredith Farkas‘ and Jenny Levine’s recent posts crying out for more programmers in libraries.

Meredith and Jenny are right, libraries need more technology help, but people like John Blyberg and me (and there are quite a few of us) need their help to demand better products from vendors. I say that because I think we can agree on this point: programmers at the customer end of the equation can’t win in the long-run against vendors who continue to deliver poorly designed products.

So while I advocate for change within our libraries, my challenge to vendors is clear: deliver flexible, extensible products that leverage working standards, not just “library standards.” There are many examples outside the library space showing the success of such efforts, use those examples, build on them. And the true lesson of Web 2.0 for you is that the vendor who opens up their product wins against others who impose barriers to remixing.

library, libraries, ils, vendor, talis, web 2.0, web20, lib20, library 2.0, library20, future, vision, open systems

Rochelle worries that all this Library 2.0 talk is lost on her library. Ross tells us why he hates the Library 2.0 meme and Dan reminds us it’s not about buzzwords. But Michael is getting closest to a point that’s been troubling me for a while: Library 2.0 isn’t about software, it’s about libraries. It’s about the evolution of all of our services to meet the needs of our users.

Let me step back a bit.

Before the development of the camera, illustrative painting and portraiture was a trade on par with carpentry and masonry. But as photography became a reality, painters found themselves in a quandary. Many said that those early black and white photos were inferior to large and colorful portraits on canvas, but the photos were quicker, cheaper, and offered a scientific representation of reality that suited the times. And so painting, having lost its relevancy as a form of documentary reality, became art. As art, it exploded with new non-representational forms and styles (plot the timeline of the impressionists against a timeline of photography), and became collectable.

Our perspective prevents us from seeing the turmoil of those times, but let me try apply that lesson to libraries today.

We have two choices. We can continue to operate by the old rules and hope that we find wealthy patrons to support us as symbols of the wealth and refinement of our communities. But, if we look hard, I think we’ll find that we can apply the core values of librarianship to new current technologies and new service models, and rather than becoming a sort of art, we will be valued for serving the needs of our communities.

library, libraries, library 2.0, library20, art, challenge, photography, web 2.0, web20, future

No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0.

Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably linked to the technology that stored that set of data. As we started to fill our data repositories, we found it usefull to import (and export) the data so that we could benefit from the work others had done and share our contributions with others. These processes were manual, or at least actively managed, and they depended on the notion that we had to have that information in our servers to be used by and displayed for our users.

Then technology evolved. Many applications now separate the components that store and manage the information from the components that display and manipulate it, and a few applications open up their data stores to the public via web services-based APIs. This is the concept that makes HousingMaps, ChicagoCrime, and Flickr Colr Pickr, among so many others, work.

Think about this for a moment: Our ILSs are inventory management systems, but our OPACs are (supposed to be) search and retrieval systems. The difference is obvious from here, but our vendors continue to operate as though you can’t have one without the other.

It might be easier to illustrate this point with an example or two.

Amazon Light is one of hundreds of applications based on Amazon’s web services. It connects Amazon’s inventory system with a custom built search and retrieval system, and it works. The Amazon Lite developers at Kokogiak didn’t need to build the inventory system, they only needed to think about ways to make the Amazon inventory more useful to you. Try it out, you might like the ability to search your local library (via some real hacks) or bookmark things via del.icio.us.

Or, you might not. Because Amazon allows anybody to access their catalog data, everybody has the opportunity to build a better, more usable catalog — or any other application that can benefit from the bibliographic details in it.

Take LibraryThing for example. It’s hard to explain what it is about people who read books that makes them want to list the books they own or have read or are interested in reading, but LibraryThing doesn’t worry about the why. It just answers the need. And because listing books, at least making a detailed list of books, can be time consuming, LibraryThing makes it easier by fetching the full details and book jacket from Amazon’s catalog. LibraryThing doesn’t need to “own” that info, it just needs access to it.

And what’s interesting is that LibraryThing is only one of a number of similar applications. Take a look at AllConsuming, Technorati’s popular books, and listal. These services connect Amazon’s catalog data with other data gathered from users or from web crawls, then they share the results. Here’s Ryan Eby’s lists of owned and wanted books, and here they are in RSS. Why RSS? Take a look at how he’s using the listal feed for his current reading list in his blog (lower-right column).

These are not technology demos. These are real applications. They are examples of how the world changes when you open up access to your catalog data. It’s what happens when we realize that the tools that store and manage our information are separate from the tools that display and manipulate that information.

Obviously, I’m about to make the (now-old) argument that we need to open our OPACs like this, but we also need take the lesson that easy and loose is winning over detailed and difficult — even in XML representations of our catalog data. And after looking at all that’s been done so far, I want to ask: why not adopt Amazon’s web services XML schema?

Is it so bad that it was invented elsewhere? Is it a bad thing that there are perhaps hundreds of applications that are already using data in that format?

Maybe the answer to those questions is yes, but here’s where technology can serve us again: we don’t have to choose. We don’t need to bet on one technology while we watch others progress faster. Our systems can output the same catalog data in any number of different ways. RSS, OpenSearch, MARC-XML, ATOM, EAD, or DC are all possible, easy in fact — if the inventory server architecture is open enough to allow it.

What do I really mean when I say library web services should be like Amazon web services? I mean they should be that accessible, that usable, that hackable. I mean libraries will benefit when people we’ve never met are spending their evenings building new applications to use our data. People are wondering how to get more programmers in libraries (example one, two), but I’m wondering how to make library systems more programmer friendly.

Fired up? Read more with my library catalogs should be like WordPress post, John Blyberg’s ILS customer bill of rights, and Ryan Eby’s open vs. turnkey discussion.

tags: amazon, amazon api, amazon web services, api, dublin core, ead, libraries, library, library catalog, marc, marc-xml, opac data, opensearch, web 2.0, web service, web services, web20, webservice, webservices, xml, xml server

Via Information Nation, I found SwarmSketch. Here’s the description:

SwarmSketch: Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.

SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. (Due to increased traffic sketches are currently being updated after about 1000 lines)
Each user can contribute a small amount of line per visit, then they are given the opportunity to vote on the opacity of lines submitted by other users. By voting, users moderate the input of other users, judging the quality of each line. The darkness of each line is the average of all its previous votes.

SwarmSketch was developed by Peter Edmunds as part of an honours project at the University of Canberra.

That SwarmSketch works at all is quite amazing. No contributor can draw more than a couple hundred contiguous pixels, so establishing even the basic shape of the drawing is a test of our common understanding of the subject. Fortunately, contributors can vote on the opacity of other lines once they’ve drawn theirs. Yes, it has the effect of erasing — community moderation — another’s line, but also allows grayscale elements to be inserted in what would otherwise be line-art.

Go make a mark, or view the gallery of previous works. My favorites are “World Record Catfish,” “Python Eating Alligator,” and “Mr. Olympia.” Above is “Aardvark.” Your awe for the project will increase if you watch the history animation of a picture forming (click the clock icon by the lower-left corner of any picture).

tags: aardvark, catfish, collective consciousness, grayscale, line art, line opacity, mr. olympia, peter edmunds, python eating alligator, sketches, sketching, social software, university of canberra, web20, world record catfish

The Flock preview is out and I love it. The good folks at WordPress.com are saying “it’s like Firefox with goodies.” I’m saying it’s a browser built for Web 2.0.

tags: web2.0, browser, firefox, flock, goodies, web 2.0, web 20, web browser, web20

Ross Mayfield says Web 2.0 is “made of people.” Tim O’Reilly tells us it’s about participation. And to Marc Canter, it’s the connectivity.

More to come…

tags: connectivity, marc canter, participation, people, ross mayfield, social networking, tim o’reilly, tim oreilly, web 2.0, web 20, web20