Twittering the Digu Way

If you dont' know by now, Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets -- text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them. It's being used by everyone, from the British Airways to Barack Obama. But we must remember that Twitter is mainly for English-users - a large population of this world don't converse or even use English in their everyday lingua franca.

While Twitter is often regarded as an information network for distributing and exchanging information, in China, users rarely surf the net for information. The Web in China is not a Tool for people’s daily life, but rather a venue for entertainment and relaxation. Not surprisingly, blogging is also viewed in such a way.

Digu is such an example of how microblogging works in China. Digo, a microblogging service from Shenzhen is designed in such a way that it is deliberately entertainment-centric. It's even got a Celebrities’ Digu channel where users can follow 62 Chinese celebrities. What does this mean for us out here in the West? Nothing, we just twitter along. But we must be aware that despite the global Web 2.0 phenomenon, we are still geographically silos in language and culture. We might be information-rich, but we are not pluralistic in knowledge as we may think. Information professionals beware!

World Digital Library Coming to a Computer Near You!

This is what the future of libraries will be like. I'm excited at the unveiling of the new World Digital Library. An Internet library aimed to be accessible to surfers around the world is now on line, with its formal inauguration in Paris on Tuesday. The latest in increasing international efforts to digitize cultural heritage, the World Digital Library is combination of contributions from libraries around the world.. Developed by the Library of Congress in Washington, with the help of the Alexandria Library in Egypt, the Library was launched at the Paris headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

The Library not only offers an array of books, maps, manuscripts and films from around the world, in seven different languages, it ultimately aims to bridge a cultural divide not only by offering people in poorer countries the same access to knowledge as those in richer ones - but also by making available the cultural heritage of Asian, Africa, Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures.

The Waves of Cellphones Use

I recently attended a fascinating talk, which proposed the idea that Web 2.0 is a commodification of knowledge. What a thought! As information professionals, we play with information, we search information, we ultimately depend on information. But at what point do we realize the overload and the technology might be harmful. This video from Dailymotion is hitting the webosphere, and is gathering storm. It might be fun and games for now. But do we need to sit back and think more clearly about the harmful implications of technology?

Michael Stephens in Vancouver, BC

Michael Stephens is one of my favourite librarians. One of the most enjoyable things is the memories of how libraries affect a person's memories and shape a person's life. This is a very honest, intimate discussion of Stephens' love of libraries. He's coming to Vancouver for the upcoming British Columbia Library Association 2009 conference. I'm looking forward to it.

A Time To Be An Information Professional

An apothecary is a historical name for a medical professional who formulated and dispensed medicine to physicians, surgeons and patients. They were what we call the modern day pharmacist. The health profession is in hot demand, and pharmaceutical sciences is one of the most sought-after professions of college graduates.

But it wasn't always this way. Industrialization had an impact on every aspect of the activity of the apothecary. Because new advances in technology in medicine lead to the creation of new drugs, drugs that the individual pharmacist’s own resources could not produce, many drugs that the individual pharmacist was able to produce could be manufactured more economically, and in superior quality.

Not only did proprietary medicines result in the taking over the role that apothecaries were responsible for, they forced the pharmacist to become a vendor of questionable merchandise. This ultimately opened the way to much broader competition from merchants, grocers and pitchmen than the pharmacist had previously encountered, thus marginalizing the profession. Eventually, the "art of compounding" gave way to the new pharmacist's increasingly important role of being health care provider, in which the science of pharmacy turned to specializing in tailoring patients' medications to specifically meet their needs. The remaining pharmacists that do continue compounding do so for the love of the science and interest in their patients well- being. And just like the changing nature of the librarian's work, the essential love for our users and art of searching will not change.

Librarians aren't going anywhere, and they never will, even though the name might. Librarians will adapt, change, and modify - just like the apothecary. But it won't disappear. Librarians are undergoing a change in its profession, and nowhere is this most apparent than the Special Libraries Association, which is celebrating its centennial year. The SLA is a reflection of the profession, as it has often had to question its place in the profession. In 2003, the SLA came to a standstill, and almost became the Information Professionals International, but decided otherwise as SLA represents a century-old tradition and brand name that is too cherished to change.

And thus is the profession of librarianship. Perhaps we will be known by another title, another name, as some of us already are known as metadata managers, taxonomists, information architects, and knowledge managers. Library schools have evolved into I-Schools. Who knows, LIS might evolve the point where it not longer is recognizable to us -- as the apothecary is no longer recognizable to the pharmacist. But the art of searching, sharing knowledge, collecting, organizing, and disseminating information in whatever shape and form they may be, will never change. And hence, whatever we may become, we will never change.

The Search Continues . . . .

New Approach to Search is a must read for those interested in search technology. Joe Weinman goes into the nitty-gritty of search algorithms, but boils it down into easily understandable (and fun) analogies for the laymen. As Weinman argues,

Search algorithms today are largely based on a common paradigm: link
analysis. But they've ignored a mother lode of data: The network.

Nicely said. Although there are a multitude of variations of search algorithms, architectures and tweaks, search technology has been based largely on three canonical approaches. In a nutshell, here they are:

1) Human-powered directories - Hierarchically organized into taxonomies (e.g. Yahoo!)

2) Crawler-based index - Generates results largely prioritized by link analysis. (e.g. Google)

3) Collaborative tagging - Users tag pages with keywords so that future searchers can find

those pages by entering those tags (e.g. Technorati and Del.icio.us)

However, these three options still fail to prevent click fraud and also content unreacheable in the Deep Web. Weinman proposes the Network Service Providers as a fourth option, which uses data and metadata associated with the actual network transport of Web content—including HTML pages, documents, spreadsheets, almost anything —to replace and/or augment traditional Web crawlers, improve the relevance and currency of search results ranking, and reduce click fraud. A network service provider could better determine aggregate surfing behavior and hold times at sites or pages, in a way sensitive to the peculiarities of browser preferences and regardless of whether a search engine is used.

Weinman's proposal is an interesting deviation to the thoughts of Semantic Web enthusiasts. It does throw a quirk into the speculation of the future of Web search technology. And so the search continues . . .

Searching Search Like a Yandex

Let me introduce Yandex. It's an interesting search engine because it precedes Google. In fact, Yandex was founded in the late 1980s, before the advent of the Web. What is interesting is that Yandex is a classic case study that Google is not the end all and be all of search. Google may be good in English, but how does it fare in multilingual searching. (Remember: English is only a fraction of the Internet's languages).

What is interesting is that Yandex's search algorithm is rooted in the highly inflected and very peculiar Russian language. Words can take on some 20 different endings to indicate their relationship to one another. Like the many other non-English languages, this inflection makes the language of Russian precise, but makes search extremely difficult. Google fetches the exact word combination you enter into the search bar, leaving out the slightly different forms that mean similar things. However, Yandex is unique in that it does catch the inflection. Fortune has written an interesting article on Yandex, and my favourite part is its examination into the unique features of this Russian search giant:

While some of its services are similar to offerings available in the U.S. (blog rankings, online banking), it also has developed some applications that only Russians can enjoy, such as an image search engine that eliminates repeated images, a portrait filter that ferrets out faces in an image search, and a real-time traffic report that taps into users' roving cellphone signals to monitor how quickly people are moving through crowded roads in more than a dozen Russian cities.

BBC's Semantic Web

BBC gets it.   In the latest issue of Nodalities magazine (one of my favourite reads), BBC reveals how it is applying the bottom-up approach to its contribution in realizing the SemWeb.   To make this happen, web programmers broke with BBC tradition by designing from the domain modelup rather than the interface down.  The domain model provided us with a set of objects (brands, series, episodes, versions, ondemands, broadcasts, etc) and their sometimes tangled interrelationships.

This is exciting stuff.  Without ever explicitly talking RDF we’d built a site that complied with Tim Berners-Lee’s four principles for Linked Data:

(1)  Use URIs as names for things. 

(2)  Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. - 

(3)  When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information

(4)  Include links to other URIs

In fact, as the BBC web developers argue, 

considering how best to build websites we’d recommend you throw out the Photoshop and embrace Domain Driven Design and the Linked Data approach every time. Even if you never intend to publish RDF it just works.   The longer term aim of this work is to not only expose BBC data but to ensure that it is contextually linked to the wider web.  

The idea is to free web of data.

BBC Gets It.

Shame on You Wall Street Journal

It is regrettable indeed.   I was deeply saddened and somewhat enraged by the Wall Street Journal's closing of its library.   In our information age, that depends so much on knowledge workers, Wall Street has decided that it could cut back taking away a vital piece of information news gathering, organizing, and dissemination of up-to-minute information.   Can news reporters expect to do all the work themselves?  Can they properly search for relevant and pertinent information? Is that even their jobs?  

Could we inset librarians and information professionals into the jobs of news journalists?   Of course not.  Wall Street - give your head a shake.   A knowledge centre, particularly in a top-notch industrial media giant such as Wall Street, requires expert searchers.    When asked, a spokesperson responds,

It is regrettable. Our reporters do have access to multiple databases including Factiva and this migration to digital databases as you has been happening for many years.

Sure.  Good luck with having your reporters spend up to ten times the amount of time it would take to find information a trained information professional could obtain for you in a fraction of the time.  A librarian is like the glue that holds the house together.  You can only go so far and so long without a librarian's information retrieval skills before the infrastructure cracks and crumbles.   Particularly in our emergine Web 2.0 world of social media and open access resources, can a company survive alone without expert information and knowledge management?  Best of luck Wall Street Journal.  

Video Sharing for Librarians

I recently presented at TOTS. What is video sharing Whyshould we care? How can be of use for information professionals? What are some issues for us to consider? Let's take a look together.

Who Video Shares? Barack Obama Does!

Who uses Web 2.0 to its fullest capacity? Barack Obama does. The President posts regularly to Vimeo. Vimeo is different in that it offers High-definition content. On October 17, 2007, Vimeo announced support for High Definition playback in 1280x720 (720p), becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD.

Mashups at PSP 2009

View more presentations from Allan Cho.

I had recently given a presentation as part of a panel at the Association of American Publisher's Professional Scholarly Publishing (PSP) 2009 joint-pre-conference with the National Library of Medicine, titled "MashUp at the Library Managing Colliding User Needs, Technologies, and the Ability to Deliver."    Here are the slides I had used - any comments most appreciated.

Is Youtube The New Search?

Information professionals everywhere take note: Google is uncomfortably sliding. Gone are the days that we 'google' for information. And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. Interesting that Google owns YouTube, isn't it? In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore. Here is what one 9 year old reveals about his information search behaviour in a New York Times article:

I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again. . .

“When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google."

What does this mean? Are Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter going to take down the venerable goliath Google? Not really. I argued in an article that this is the phenomenon of social search. Are things finally catching up?

Ushahidi as a Mashup

Ushahidi at NetSquared (loop)

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: conference ushahidi)

I'm going to be talking soon about mashups. (And getting nervous about it, too). One mashup that I will be discussing is Ushahidi. It's an excellent example of how Web 2.0 is saving lives. Using technology to harness peace. More to come. Here is an excellent slide show of Ushahidi.

Nova on the Future of the Web

I heart Nova Spivak.  The grandson of management professor Peter Drucker, Spivak is an intellectual in his own right.  Not only is he a semantic web pioneer and technology visionary, he's also founded Twine, one of the first semantic web services out there.   I think he's one of the brightest minds today regarding ideas about the future of the Web. He's a visionary.   Here's a synopsis of Spivak's treatise Future of the Desktop.

1) The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service

(2) The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

(3) The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

(4) Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders

(5) The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

(6) The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

(7) Interactive shared spaces will replace folders

(8) The Portable Desktop

(9) The Smart Desktop

(10) Federated, open policies and permissions

(11) The personal cloud

(12) The WebOS (Web operating system)

(13) Who is most likely to own the future desktop?