Furtive Librarian

Forrester Research observators

2011-06-14T14:20:00.000-04:00

I keep seeing references to the Forrester Research report A Global Update of Social Technographics by Jacqueline Anderson, Josh Bernoff with Reineke Reitsma and Erica Sorenson. On Forrester's website, the report costs $499.

Fortunately, SLA's Information Outlook (v. 14, no. 10 (Oct.-Nov.2010)) has provided a summary, listing these categories of web users:

Creators develop social content by blogging, uploading music or videos and so on.
Conversationalists voice their opinions to other consumers using vehicles such as SNS and Twitter.
Critics respond to content from others--they post reviews, comment on blogs, and edit wikis.
Collectors organize content for themselves or others using RSS feeds, tags, and voting sites such as Digg.
Joiners connect in social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.
Spectators consume social content.
Inactives neither create nor consume content.

The New York Times tries something new: Annotated text via prostitution

2011-01-27T22:45:00.000-05:00

The New York Times of January 27, 2011 has a blog entry: A Guide to Houses No Gentleman Would Dare to Frequent by Alison Leigh Cowan. It's an examination of a little known guidebook from 1870 which reviews 150 brothels existing in the city at that time. The copy that Cowan found is located in the New-York Historical Society.

What interests me about the article is that the Times has gone a step further than usual, and has reproduced a digital copy of the entire book. This was my first encounter with http://documents.nytimes.com, apparently a new place that allows the Times to store large amounts of text (51 pages of school complaints about Jared Loughner, 26 pages of poll results, etc.) to supplement articles in the newspaper. Most of the documents have not undergone OCR, but the guide to prostitution has (unfortunately rather poorly - it would have easy to correct a 32-page book).

What really got my attention was that they have added annotations by Cowan to the digital book, using excepts from her blog post to explain portions of the text.

Whoa! This is a way to go. There have been so many attempts to create a web tool for annotating web pages and documents. But to be able to do it and share it with others is part of the key.

Of course I wish libraries could lead the troops in doing this. I know there are so many wanted texts that people want to pour over and dissect, like a page of Talmud. Why aren't the tools out there, and why aren't libraries (even academic libraries) at the forefront of this opportunity? I can forsee Wikimedia setting up a WikiTexts website to deal with public domain texts and the desire to study, analyze, and elucidate them among a community.

Some thoughts on the Delicious fiasco

2010-12-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

News about Yahoo's decision to "sunset" Delicious is nearly a week old, so I might as well add my own thoughts.

First, financial. In the current economic climate, Yahoo has been forced to identify their core services where it can realize profit (a process many companies - profit and non-profit - have been going through). Many may not remember that at one time (prior to 1998), Yahoo was a web search engine. By not anticipating and preparing for competitors (like Google), they proved themselves unable to adapt to the constantly changing nature of the web.

I don't see much difference in the nature of the company today. They gather content, but seem are unable to adapt to the current circumstances of the web. They are like survivors on a life raft, trying to weather through a storm.

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault

Maybe they tried to imitate AOL in overloading their homepage with so many ads that everyone knew to avoid that page at all costs. There was so much on there you couldn't find anything. (Even today, it's a dreadful page to look at, although it's easier to find your content.)

Those of us who have used Delicious for a while barely noticed Yahoo as the owner. At one point early in the relationship I noticed greater speed in processing bookmarks, but no interfering ads. One wonders how Yahoo was planning to monetize their investment. Perhaps they would derive it from aggregating/analyzing which bookmarks were hot, but other than the front page, I saw no evidence that they used the information strategically.

I know a number of us Delicious users wanted to stay with the company if only because it is simple to use (and who wants to move hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks to a new platform?). But it was also obvious that practically all other bookmarking tools were better, many taking advantages of Web 2.0 design techniques. Why wasn't Delicious catching up? Because, from the outset, I believe Yahoo bought Delicious purely as an investment. They probably thought it would gain value just by holding on to it (assuming increasing numbers of users), and then they'd sell it to the company anxious to drop a few million.

The result of their waiting is that the product value (as software) has steadily decreased so that it is approaching worthlessness. Today, I feel the only worth inherent in Delicious is its user community. By now that user community has jumped ship, migrating to other bookmark tools. (Large notes on Diigo give detailed instructions on how to move one's booksmarks there and asks for patience, as they've had a large influx of users -- more in the past week than they've had all year.)

Second, let me speak on the nature of bookmarking. The term has become obsolete: bookmarking suggests a placeholder - a site to which you want to return. But bookmarking has become much more than that. In today's world where "curation" has become the current buzzword, having bookmarks suggests much more than placeholders, but a means to crafting a profile or multiple points of views on numerous topics, and sharing that view or information in general. It is particularly that last feature which has been beneficial to so many. It is a feature (often invisible) of sites such as newspapers, where they gauge the popularity of articles. In this way, much valuable information can be obtained from observing bookmarking activities.

I wonder why Google didn't think of of a bookmarking tool. For a web search that can reveal hundreds of desirable links, wouldn't it have been great to have a bookmark tool to save interesting links as you browse through your list of tens or hundreds of search results?
Ever note that in a Google search, sometimes the same search reveals different results on successive days? That link you glanced by on one day might be missing the next day. How good it would have been to have Google produce its own bookmarking tool. (I generally prefer to see a list of at least 100 results rather than anything smaller, so I would like such a tool.)

Now that the story is basically over, there is much to be learned from the Delicious fiasco:

Always have a backup plan
Don't reveal your plan until you are ready to implement it
Assume your secrets will eventually make it to the web sooner than you want
If you don't intend to modify your software for a year, it will be overtaken by products which are better, reducing your products' value
Don't buy products as investments; buy them because they are in sync with your vision and mission, and because you are willing to commit resources to them to make them better

And the Web 2.0 world keeps on shifting.

Web 2.0 Expo: Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

2010-10-08T00:06:00.000-04:00

Among the three best talks on Tuesday morning was Andy Budd's "Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!" His slide presentation is embeded below; my summary below that can be read along with it.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

View more presentations from Andy Budd.

Think of the design of a slot machine: its flashing lights give you positive reinforce (and makes you stick with the game, despite knowledge of odds and better judgement). Or the Wheel of Fortune: its design makes you feel as if you are incrementally succeeding, and encourages you to carry on. The idea of these games is about maximizing your participation and keeping your money in the game. Part of what does this is the feeling of little wins the user receives along the way. What is the design psychology for these games?

Design is all about making decisions (and often about increasing money spent). The use of color, placement, hierarchy are devoted to psychologically guide the user. They are all designed based on human behavior.

Architects attempt to dissuade and restrict negative behavior. Politicians persuade us to vote for them. Design is a way of getting people to respond in particular ways.

Advertisers try to influence our purchasing decisions. We can be bombarded with them: Times Square is a cacophony of persuasion. On an average day, we can receive as many as 5,000 messages a day that use persuasive design.

Brands use their understanding of human behavior to increase consumption. Example: Alka Seltzer. Normal dose is just one tablet, but all their marketing (even the jingle "Pop, Pop. Fizz, Fizz") always suggested using two. The result is that they increased consumption of the product through persuasive design.

Supermarkets are designed to increase consumption: It's almost impossible to come out of one and not want to get other items. Sometimes the thing you need is located in the very back of the store. This can be called an anchor point - a central point for getting necessary items. But the the consumer must pass through many aisles to get to the cash register, with numerous temptations to purchase other items. The logic is that the more surface area a consumer covers, the more likely it is they'll want to purchase more.

It covers the senses. Music: Ambient music can be used to increase consumers' heart rate, or to slow them down - both in the aid of making them spend more time purchasing. Sound levels at bars show that if you increase the volume, people drink more (since it's too loud to hold conversations, people drink instead).

Smells. Stores push smells out to increase desires, since smells can increase purchases. (Think of Ikea and their heavy use of cinammon as you select your furniture and approach the cash register.) Studies have shown that the use of lavender in restaurants increases spending.

Some people worry that these techniques are manipulative. But they can also be used for positive gain. Persuasion techniques can be used on people to decrease their use of energy. Budd showed a view of a stairway that had been painted like a piano keyboard. It resulted in more people using that stairway. Also redesign of a garbage can: it made people use it more rather than litter.

Sometimes people have too many options - design can help make choices manageable, helps uses overcome "the paradox of choice." Marketers create shortcuts. There are a variety of different techniques for "choice architecture" or "design with intent" that can have even an minute effect on users.

It's good to know how these designs influence behavior - understanding the cognitive biases that drive decision making. One has to recognize the target behavior and then design for it.

Authority and trust play major roles in design, since they have a big effect on users. If someone is wearing a doctor's clothes, people will regard that person as an authority and look up to them. Don't underestimate the use of clothing: ties, jackets, etc.

Authority and trust are used in design, and can be manipulated to create a beautiful design - the halo effect. Examples of trust indicators: pictures of staff, pictures of customer interactions, etc. The use of badges also affect users.

Layout and positioning. We make decision based on context. We compare things. Stores tend to put the most expensive items in the front of the store. If the first thing you see is something that costs $10,000, then go to the back of the store and see something for $1,000, you'll think that item is cheap. It's making users do comparisons.

The art of menu design. Daily specials sell because people have difficulty deciding among many choices. Also prices: Removing the dollar sign converts people's thinking away money to "credits." Also, sometimes on a menu they put in very high priced items to make you believe the less expensive stuff is a bargain.

Defaults play a massive role in our decision making. We're all lazy, and tend to pick the path of least resistance. Defaults also are a way to limit choices: people tend to select the first or last thing in a list. This has tremendous implications for voting for political leaders.

Designers can use "desire lines" to focus people on calls to action. you can lay out a design to make users flow through an area in a certain way.

A funny example: To cut down on poor aim in toilets, they place a plastic fly in a toilet. The result: people aim better, reducing spillage by 80%.

This is "social proof." We are hugely influenced by the behavior of others - like a form of peer pressure. We look to our tribe, to the people around us to determine the social norms. Think of restaurants. When looking through the storefront window, people tend to go to restaurants that filled, not the ones with empty seats.

But social proofs can trick us. Think of overly long ATM lines.

How to use these techniques on the web? Social proofs can be an indication of popularity. Think of all the web sites that have ratings and comments. We want to go with the selection that has the most positive customer testimonials, the best ratings. Amazon is a master of the social proof. People learn what's acceptable by following the lead of others. Firefox lists its add-ons by the number of people who've downloaded them, rankings, etc.

These are social proof indicators. People don't like to take risks, so they look to others for reviews and ratings. But ratings and reviews can be deceptive: do they really reflect your particular taste?

One concern is developing an online community mood. With Huffington Post, most of the comments are a bitch-fest. With Flickr, the social community manager welcomed people in, showed them the rules and guided them. So now Flickr reflects positive behavior.

Web sites use positive behavior on people. Think of badges. It motivates people to get deep into a site in order to get badges or other rewards (Foursquare is an example.) Social proof is always on Facebook: People download apps based on their friends' behavior. Public comments encourage others to respond. The public views the discussion, and suddenly it's easy for everyone to be social.

Loss aversion. We overvalue the things we possess. A classic study: people were given free mugs at the beginning of a day. At the end of the day, they would only give back the mugs if they were given $30. Similarly, most startups overvalue their product, while outsiders undervalue the product. How to increase value? Limiting supply can drive demand. The idea of loss can be a powerful motivator. Airlines limit the number of seats in order to sell more.

TV shopping turns commerce into a MMO (massively multiplayer online) game. One ad said that if you phone and we're busy, call back later. That plants a seed in the viewer's mind that they must be busy from all the phone calls they're receiving. Ad copy: "Better act fast!" No one wants to miss out on a good deal.

More loss aversion. Big conferences. Woot.com: If you tell people that your product will sell out, it creates the urgency to buy, and people will buy it. For people it's an opportunity to prevent the feeling of regret at not having purchased items.

Likability and gifting. Tom Hanks is rated as one of the most likable actors in motion picture history. If he endorses something, you are going to want to get it.

Win friends and influence people. This concept is used by interrogators to understand the psychology of prisoners. Prisoners then bond with the interrogators.

Take the example of Innocent fruit juice. There's a joke at the bottom of the cartons where it reads: "Stop looking at my bottom." Such mild humor makes a big impression, developing into an emotional bond with people.

Reciprocity and gifting. People love free giveaways. Company use them because they help create an emotional bond with the users. For example: Flickr. They have a welcome message in every language imaginable. Also: Etsy. What these websites do is foster a positive character, thereby creating an emotional bond between users and them.

On Amazon you get free delivery! But only if you pay above a certain amount on certain items. But the notion of "free" makes people want to buy more - in order to get something free (an ironic paradox).

For further reading:

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

Design With Intent by Daniel J.G. Lockton, David J. Harrison, and Neville A. Stanton

I'm not the only one who felt this was one of the best talks of the Web 2.0 Expo. Budd has plenty of nice example and didn't linger to long on any one of them. Although the many topics must be typical for those in advertisement, many were new to the audience. You could here many "oohs" and "ahs" when he revealed the psychology behind a design strategy.

His design strategy worked on me: now I have to read one of these books on the psychology of design.

Web 2.0 Expo: Miscellaneous sessions

2010-10-03T10:50:00.000-04:00

New at this year's Expo were 20-minute sessions after lunch.

A talk entitled "The Mobile Browser Landscape" disappointed many because it turned out to be just a shill for Windows 7 Phone.

"What To Expect From Browsers in the Next Five Years" was a panel represented many of the major web browsers. Even though the four representatives seemed to know each other's plans and strategies, there were no representatives for Internet Explorer or Safari, which made the panel feel a little lopsided. Nevertheless their initial utterance was that IE 9 would support new standards and would be much improved over version 8, even though it could be further improved (it will not be compatible with WindowsXP). The feeling was that it is being brought out as a response to Chrome.

Firefox is working on Firefox Sync which will synchronize all usernames and passwords.

The Opera browser had a presence at the Web Expo; its representative stated that they are enhancing the implementation of javascript. Their new goal is to integrate with phone apps.

It was admitted that all browsers leak, which is a danger to privacy. Some lamented that the development of HTML5 did not attack these privacy issues.

All browsers try to go for speed, but each member of the panel pointed it that browser wars are like horse races - each one of them gets ahead for a while, only to be overtaken by another. This is the nature of the business, and no browser will ever be definitive, as they all keep on being developed.

(The unofficial buzz was that this browser session had more attendees than the live interview with Katie Couric.)

Deanna Zandt's talk "The Free-for-All Web and the Secret Tyrants We All Are" is available on her website as PowerPoint with audio track. It's a nice little talk (although I did get impatient with numerous metaphors). One of her main points was that, in speaking about control over the web, when you remove hierarchical structures, you develop implicit structures - people's biases then take over. (I've seen a number of groups where, once the leader departs, someone from the group suddenly steps in, self-annointed, and takes over.) She warned us to guard against these dangers and the danger of restructuring without a plan for equity.

Hers was a nice little talk. Had it been shorter it would have made a nice Ignite presentation.

Web 2.0 Expo: Augmented Reality

2010-10-03T10:45:00.001-04:00

Augmented Reality for Marketers: Mapping the Future of Consumer Interactions by Lynne D. Johnson and John Havens woke me (and probably others) up to the recognition of how much augmented reality already exists in our lives and to how it will increase in the future.

Augmented Reality for Marketers - Lynne d Johnson and John C. Havens talk from Web 2.0 Expo 2010

View more presentations from johnchavens.

The speakers acknowledged that GPS (global positioning systems) was the biggest recent technological innovation because it is predictive technology. This is the basis of Augmented Reality (hereafter AR).

"If it's useful, it will be adopted by the masses."

Current new possibilities: An ad for Chase shows you can "Point. Shoot. Deposit." i.e., deposit a check by taking a picture of it. This is augmented reality. It makes people's lives simpler.

Take QR Codes. They extend the capability of barcodes, can be scanned faster, and can be made to initiate commands, such as download an app, etc. An extension is Zoo Records. Recording artists were concerned they weren't getting playtime. They refashioned the QR Codes to appear as animals, so that when takes a pic of it with one's phone, the phone plays the encoded collection of songs. Barcodes and SMS messaging are beginning to use images as shortcuts to access company information. An example is Joss Stone whose graphic logo is in fact made from code.

AR at Boeing: they developed a technology where air pilots could see added flight information (i.e. altitude, air pressure, distances, etc.) in their visors instead of having to check the dashboard.

The lesson learned so far:

Utility + Ease of use = Rapid adoption

Already there are numerous businesses that allow you to use your phone to identify their locations relative to where you are standing: Quiznos, Subway, etc.. Lynne noted how in Japan, with a cellphone the subway directions appear in English. Similarly with Yelp - it can make recommendations as you watch your phone.

More: A case study was done at IBM with Seer [?], where holding up your phone will identify locations of bathrooms, food courts, etc. As you wait for a game at Wimbledon, hold up your phone to see historical information. If you temporarily wander away from your seat, you can still see what's happening through live video feeds. Think of all the new possibilities with training: they mentioned an example of a BMW car mechanic who is shown the part to be replaced, the location of where it should go, what tools to use, etc. A boon for training situations of all kinds.

Numerous examples: Tissot - issued an ad in magazines: cut out the (paper) watch and wear it to see what it would look like. Acer 3D campaign, Dabs.com. For Hotels.com, their virtual vacation led to a 36% increase in bookings.

For IBM, this can lead to increased ROI and brand awareness.

The key to all of these examples is that it's fun and engaging for the consumer - even if it is a little gimmicky. It gives people a new experience that is fun.

AR already exists as a social network: "Tagwhat is a free network where you can create-and-share location based messages and content on-line or in mobile augmented reality."

User-created tags are building up the Outernet - the word for people are tagging nearly everything in the world around them. Examples: Locamoda brings FourSquare to Las Vegas. Miso puts people's video viewing habits into social media context. Also Thrilllist - which rolls in FourSquare. Similarly with HBO and GetGlue (social networking for entertainment).

Now, with many stores, you can check into a product, take a pic of the barcode and you gain points - just like a game - in real life. MyTown - people can check into a store, "own" it, and then have others "pay rent." Placecast: "location-based digital advertising company that provides ShopAlerts" via cellphones. The virtual dressing room is part of Seventeen.com and J.C. Penny (jcpteen.com): See how you look in the clothes before purchasing them.

The latest is that you can now check into people, thanks to facial recognition technology. With AR glasses you can see all sorts of information. Someday you might be able to see who's home and who's not - a danger. Clearly the AR industry has lots of privacy issues to deal with.

This humorous iScreener cartoon shows the dangers:

What about virtual advertising rights? Advertisers will post virtual ads when you view a scene through various phone apps. Already Bings' AR maps charges advertises to pay for virtual advertising rights.

Think of the advantages: a AR windshield will be able to tell you the location of parking spots, or where there is congestion. Already with RFID tags, there "smart parking." The future holds an Internet of things: Machines talking to machines, such as EZ Pass. [This is a prediction for what Web 3.0 is to be.]

Thus the lesson becomes:

Utility + Ease of use + Privacy/Marketing awareness = Transformation

This talk provided a very good introduction to the world of augmented reality. It was well-delivered, and I'm not the only one who thought it was one of the better presentations of the Web 2.0 Expo.

Web 2.0 Expo: Transforming Your Company To Embrace Empowered Employees and Customers

2010-09-28T22:56:00.006-04:00

My first session on Tuesday: Transforming Your Company To Embrace Empowered Employees and Customers - by Josh Bernhoff and Ted Schadler (both of Forrester Research).

Much of the talk could probably be found in their book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business.

They are into empowering individuals through technology. They showed a diagram of the "ladder of participation" - from passive web watchers to activist participants:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/470424239/)

There are 4 technologies that empower consumers:

Mobile devices
Social technology
Pervasive video
Cloud computing services

The authors took us through a brief history of the web illustrating the change in business-to-personal relationships. Empowerment is the next part of the story.

Social computing is the new customer service. This is all where's it at for the future. In this new environment, the company can NOT lock you out! Instead, companies need to respond holistically to the era of the empowered customer. How to achieve it? It's very hard.

Existence of empowered customers make it took easy to spread negative images about your company through viral techniques such as Twitter, Youtube, etc.

Instead, a company should cultivate HEROs: Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives. These are the people who will like your product so much they will function as goodwill ambassadors, and spread recommendations, nice stories, and other good words about your product and company. Clearly, a customer transaction no longer concludes with the purchase of an item. Now, it's ideal if the customer develops an ongoing relationship to the product and company. (Raises the participation and stake of the company.)

How to get there? There are 4 steps to build customer influence:

Identify the mass influencers
Deliver excellent customer service
Empowerment through mobile devices
Amplify your fans

(This ties up with previous Web 2.0 talks which spoke about how word-of-mouth from fans is probably among the best advertising you can receive.) No. 1: Who are these consumer influencers? In the US alone, people create circa 500 billion impressions of things. According to Nielson, the number is just under two trillion!!! People really want to let others what they think of things. Peer influence is highly concentrated: only 6.3% of adults create 80% of the influence impressions. (Reminds me of email paradigm: 10% of participants make 90% of the content.)

No. 2. It is these groups on which you need to focus. Deliver a groundswell of customer service. Good example: Best Buy.

No. 3. Empowering people using their cellphones. Example: AutoTrader.co.uk. They allow you to take a pic of a car and the software will automatically identify it for you!

No. 4. Amplify your fan activity. Good example: Marty Collins. Also: Microsot had a video conference of what do you do with your pc. It was a big success and enabled Microsoft to aggregate fan activity.

But here's the challenge for companies: Only empowered workers can serve empowered customers. Increasingly, customers are assuming the duties once owned by IT specialists. Companies should regard the consumerization of IT as not a problem but an opportunity. To know what's happening "out there," to remain engaged with the world of the customers, you need to empower the employees.

IT staff is accustomed to having sole responsibility for software. But now we're seeing that employees are using applications not sanctioned by IT - why? To get the job done better. If the employer throws up barriers, the workers will still find ways to get around them. So employers need to approach things differently.

Companies need a new contract - a new way of letting works increase their work productivity by any means they can, any software they can. Some examples: A worker within Black & Decker created instructional videos using YouTube. Black & Decker then created their own YouTube channel to support these efforts. At IBM, Gina Poole made collaborations possible using their Intranet.

How does the employwer support the empowered employee? With a HERO contract. Employees can create, but must know the company's mission, and the boundaries must be carefully spelled out. Bosses need to think differently about technology: Works need mobile apps, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. Business manager need to recognize that technology is now part of the landscape that they can't ignore. IT has to stop being a barrier and let workers create and flourish in the work environment.

Not surprisingly, all these ideas were anticipated in The ClueTrain Manifesto some 15 years ago. Examples: Thesis #12: The networked market knows more than companies about their products.

There are 3 models for efficient groundswell among customers:

Build a service team
Integrate service and marketing
Make service a core value

Also ClueTrain Thesis #42: People talk to each other directly inside the company. This results in 5 ways to maximize collaboration:

Extend existing tools
Create value
Dedicate people to project
[lost the rest, but it's in the book]

It was a very nice talk. Unlike previous talks I've seen, this one really tried to wrestle with the notion that employees must be up to the energy of the consumers. They must be "on call" to explore whatever software, sites that consumers are using which could add value to the product.

Closer to the library world, the only place I've really seen this work is at the Smithsonian, where they have their own social network. Of course, most community libraries probably don't have the staff or resources to create and maintain these networks. There's no reason to think they'll be static, or will stay on one platform or one site. So being an empowered employee will require a great deal of committment and work. It's not going to be a job "extra responsibility" but will soon be an essential responsibility of every job.

For me it was one of the best talks on Tuesday, well presented. It elaborated on themes presented in the earlier Web 2.0 Expos - namely that there is so much more one can do if one harnesses the energy of customers - letting them create, and giving them a space (e.g. a company social network) in which to create.

Preparing for Web 2.0 Expo NY

2010-09-26T23:24:00.005-04:00

I've had a fairly busy summer working extra hours voluntarily to get things done. But I've still been observing various aspects about Library 2.0, Web 2.0, and similar issues.

The biggest issue has been the economic downturn and its effect. To my eyes, this has resulted in the abandonment of the sense of experimentation and discovery. So many of the ideas of just a few years ago - experimentation, trial and error (no inhibitions at being wrong), and thinking of new possibilities - seem to be replaced with a focused effort to use several tools as extensions of existing modes of communication. All the bigger ideas suggested and articulated by people such as Michael Casey and Michael Stephens - all the implications for flattening management, of blurring the boundaries of work hierarchy, of empowering people from various parts of the organization - appear to be forgotten, with organizations sometimes resorting to management methods that should have been extinct in the 1950s.

It will be interesting to see if there is still the air of spontaneity, discovery and of fun at tomorrow night's Ignite. And it will be interesting to see who shows up for the Web 2.0 Expo. The first year in New York it appeared to be comprised of a combination of business types, geek types, and people just wanting to learn. Last year I believe there were fewer people and most seemed to be specifically into marketing, programming, web development, and similar areas. To be sure the high price assures limited variety of those in attendance. Note to O'Reilly: Thanks for non-profit discounts.

Time prevented me from a full write up of blog posts (I still have the notes from last year). Hopefully I'll do better this year, as I attempt to commit most of my notes to Twitter.

Requiem for Library 2.0

2010-02-23T12:16:00.008-05:00

Update: Administration of the Library 2.0 network has been handed over to Steve Hargadon. Never underestimate the power of the Internet to influence!

This requiem is not for Library 2.0 in general, but for the Ning network, Library 2.0. This week, its founder, Bill Drew, let us know that due to inactivity, he was closing down the site and looking for ways of archiving it.

The Library 2.0 Ning group is not old - I joined in Spring 2007 when there were several hundred members. When news of the network first spread (mostly by email), membership soon hit 1,000, then 2,000, and continued to grow. Currently there are over 4,000 members of the network. It caught on at a time when many wanted to learn about Library 2.0, but there was no obvious email list or web destination.

The excitement the group generated encouraged us to go out into the Web 2.0 world and actively engage, experiment, think of ways of harnessing Web 2.0 to create Library 2.0 concepts. It made us realize that the world is now going to be different, shifting from a stable environment to one that is ever-changing. No longer would there be one way to do things: we encouraged each other to try multiple ways, and maintain using the ones that worked while discarding those less useful, while keeping an eye open for whatever new tools or ideas may be on the horizon.

I see the Library 2.0 Ning network is a victim of its own success. We are now discarding the less useful: the Ning group was a good starting point, but it had (as Ning still has in all its groups) a number of inherent obstacles that prevent easy communication. Emailing through Ning is slower than molasses as is messaging. The entire site always felt lugubrious to me, so that once I became adept at RSS, I simply followed the feeds and avoided the site.

But its advantages were many. I met so many people through the Ning group (both virtual and face-to-face) who I have continued to keep up with, or who know me so that when the occasion arises, I feel comfortable in communicating with them.

Most importantly for me, through the group I came to recognize that Library 2.0 was not just about using cool new tools. The bigger issues were what the effect these tools had on all of us and the way we interact with the world. These issues gave rise to crowdsourcing, fostering a flatter world where one should question ownership of information, questioning traditional modes of management, advertising, publicity...in short, nearly everything we do, whether on a social or individual basis. Library 2.0 (and of course Web 2.0) will continue to change the way we look and do things for the coming years as more and more people begin to recognize how to integrate the Internet into their lives.

It still is a pity that the Library 2.0 Ning group should go. I would love to see at least an email incarnation of our community -- even though I know email is not a favored method of communication for the current generation of college-age people and younger. Twitter is too limited for substantive discussions.

Whatever its future or demise may be, I would hope that all librarians throughout the world continue to maintain the group's excitement which led us to discover each other and new ways of thinking and engaging with the world.

Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Visually: The Value of Geting Visual in Social Business by David Armano

2009-12-03T22:43:00.001-05:00

The third talk I attended on Tuesday November 17 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City was David Armano’s “Thinking Visually: The Value of Geting Visual In Social Business.” (Armano is the principal of the Dachis Group http://dachisgroup.com, consultants in social networking.)

Here are his slides - they're necessary to refer to for my summary, since his point is that visuals can greatly assist putting ideas across:

http://www.slideshare.net/darmano/the-value-of-visual-thinking-in-social-business-2287291

http://bit.ly/4Nbwm4

I saw Armano's presentation at last year's Expo:

http://furtivelibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/10/web-20-expo-micro-interactions-in-20.html

In my summaries last year I think I did a disservice to both David Armano and Brian Solis (who spoke last year, and whom Armano mentioned). It's difficult to convey certain ideas in words when what you're trying to convey is the usefulness of imagery. I think a number of us chuckled this year during Armano's talk when he told us that visual design was really simple - he made is sound like all you have to do is make a couple of strokes and voila! An image.

But people like Armano and Solis don't realize that they're visually talented. (I consider myself musically gifted and know few people understand music the way musicians do. I believe this is true also with those devoted to graphic arts.) So Armano (and Solis) tend to underplay the effort involved in creating images, and, perhaps, sometimes don't have the full vocabulary to convey in words the power of visuals (their mode of communication is visual). Despite their facility at creating images, the uninitiated should never think that it is simple - it isn't, and I feel most of us would do well to not bother with learning design, but leave to people who have a life-long need to express themselves visually (i.e. graphic artists).

So on to the summary. Armano warned that his talk was not specifically about social media but that is overlaps with it.

He started with a Chinese proverb, which could stand in part for what Web 2.0 is about:

Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember;
involve me and I’ll understand.

Involving users is more than just showing things. Armano showed a visualization of the effect of social networks, first shown on his blog: darmano.typepad.com

Small and large ripples are visualized, spreading out to reach and overlap one another.

Gets to the issue of the visualization of paid digital media vs. earned digital media

The attention of consumers is shifted to networks and streams.

Image of the “wheel of marketing misfortune” very nice

He cited the book Made To Stick (by Dan Heath and Chip Heath) which is about ideas that can are retained in the mind. Most people find visuals a valuable complementary aid to understanding abstract ideas. Think for moment: Which of your five senses would you fear losing most? A majority of people respond with their sight.

He then showed us several minutes of a video he liked very much: History of the Internet, which uses PICOL (PIctorial COmmunication Language) icons to convey history with an elegant simplicity:

What it takes to get visual with the 4 Ms:

Metaphor - finding a convincing correspondence between word and image
Model - (for developing experiences) (one can combine: metaphor and model)
Mindmap - to get all ideas mapped out
Manifest - take something complex and make it simple

Six steps for getting visual:

1. Empathize: see the world as a child, asking fundamental questions: observe - ask - explore

2. Memorize: commit thoughts to memory - putting anything on paper is a path to memorization

3. Analyze: take a step back

4. Synthesize: filter the signal from noise

5: Visualize: see it, then do it

6: Materialize: make it tangible, make it stick

Combing that with the four Cs of community: Content, Contest, Connectivity, Continuity.

Two examples/case studies:

1. How to visualize a "dynamic signal"? What does a signal look like? Sample images taken from Google. Then making it stick: keep the image simple. [slides 34-39]

2. What about "hiveminded"? What does the word suggest? A collective consciousness - a swarm of bees. What makes a hive? Bees...hive...honeycombs - these ideas suggest a hexagonal design - reducing a hive to one honeycomb. The end result visualizes a swarm of signals on a hive. [slides 40-47 ]

Armano went on to remind us that however creative, these visuals are for the purpose of social marketing. He suggested a checklist for making your coentent more visual and said that you need to use your brain and eye in thinking about web content.

Why is visual content useful?

It gets peoples' attention quickly
It helps us to learn faster and more effectively
It lets people do their own thinking
It helps us tell stories

Here is some reading to help you get started:

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

Selling to the VP of NO by Dave Gray

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (no. 1 of user experience books)

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

Web 2.0 Expo: Kristina Halvorson: Content First

2009-11-30T09:57:00.001-05:00

Kristina Halvorson [Picture taken from Flickr - not from Web 2.0 Expo]

The first talk I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo was “Content First: Why Content Strategy Will Save the Web” by Kristina Halvorson, of http://www.braintraffic.com/. She is author of Content Strategy For The Web. Her presentation strongly underscored her belief that content is the major part of the web and that people involved with the web need to have conversation on content strategy (i.e. to recognize its primacy).

Her slide presentation (which can be read alongside my summary) is here:

http://www.slideshare.net/khalvorson/content-first-web-20-expo-nyc

[It should be remembered that the words that follow should not be taken literally as Halvorson's words, but my transcription of her talk, which may not accurately reflect its content.]

She began with a quote from Walter Landor (the “grandfather” of branding) who defined a brand:

“A brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

A brand tells its audience they will be satisfied. Examples: the Gerber baby: it gives you a sense of safety and security. Another quote (from The Brand Bubble By John Gerzema and Ed Lebar):

“Brands are now used more than they are preferred...Functional benefits and relevance now outweigh the intangible and emotional allure of a brand.”

In other words, customers own the brand. For example, Babycenter.com equals “safety and security.” We’re not going to see it in a product, but rather on websites. We consume content offline. When we're relaxed and focused it is easier for us to take in information.

When consumers are online, they’re engaged but also distracted by numerous activities. Online, we don't just see or read about brands, we USE them.

So why is our online content generally bad? Why can't we create content that is meaningful and enjoyable?

Ultimately, content matters. According to Jesse James Garrett in his book The Elements of User Experience:

“The single most important thing most web sites can offer to their users is content that those users will find valuable.”

But we marginalize content. Content is often last thing to be considered or delivered when creating websites. This is affirmed by blog entry “The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome” by Pepi Ronalds, appearing on website “A List Apart” <http://www.alistapart.com/>.

Skllset.org is a website designed to help understand careers and opportunities. They provide an ideal of web office structure. Ten years ago there was no content manager as part of the web design team. Neither was there a SEO (search engine optimization) specialist or a usability specialist.

Back then, web teams spoke about general things but not about web content. It used to be that the copywriter was brought in towards the mid or later stages of web site design. But copywriting is based too much on the old model of writer, editor, proof reader, reviser, etc. How did we get there?

Richard Saul Wurman (the founder of the idiom Information Architecture) wrote:

“I thought the explosion of data needed architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it.”

Influential books: Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information; and Jesse James Garrett, Elements of User Experience. He lays out the problem of content within the user experience.

Content is not a feature. It's messy and complex -- an ever-evolving thing that can turn into a monster. In their book Web Redesign 2.0, Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler say the way to deal with web content is to “accept it, plan for it, charge for it.” Halvorson disagrees.

Halvorson’s idea: you need to have a content strategy - something which plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful usable content.

Content can be: text, data, video, audio. But the major hurdle of all of these is text (including text that you see and that which you don’t see [i.e. metadata]). Strategy is a plan for obtaining a specific goal or result.

Content strategy helps us understand context of content – what, why, how, for whom, by whom, with what, when, where, how often, what next, etc.

A negative example: website of Quicken: designed not for or about the user, but is about selling Quicken. Compare that to:

Mint.com -- a personal finance site. Note the emblazoned banner: “the best (free) way to manage your money.” This website is not about Mint.com, but about the user. It is a website whose design is based on user's fears and desires. We didn't come to this website to learn about Mint. We came to fix our financial life. Secondary to that is using Mint.

If you fail to consider user goals in seeking your business objectives, you won’t deliver useful content. If you can align user goals with your business objectives you’ll strike the right balance.

Three examples of companies that deliver useful content and do it well:

1. REI (cold weather clothing and gear): They provide a library of articles (texts and videos) that help all levels of visitors. There are 100-200 original articles by staff members (not aggregated from other sources) targeted to specific activities. They've invested in an in-house editorial team.

2. Room & Board : On their website they don’t just tell you about the furniture, but have interview with their artisans. They let you behind the scenes to show you how these artisans have created the furniture. (This helps the user to establish a connection with the products.)

3. Ford Models . Their YouTube channel brings users “backstage” where they have interviews with models and designers. Studio artists and models deliver real-world tips and tricks about makeup, hair, and taking care of oneself. So it brings people not just backstage but delivers useful information to users (and potential models and Ford candidates). They simply asked: “What do girls want?” to determine how they should model their website.

So...

How does content strategy work? There are four parts:

Plan. Create. Deliver. Govern.

Plan:

Process:

What do we have?
What are we trying to do?
What do our content ecosystems look like? (all factors that have impact on living thing of content)
What are our opportunities, risks, and success metrics? (SEO) - How are you going to measure success? (fixing content is not a measure of success – you must measure how success is made)

Your content is organized by a content inventory. This inventory only identifies content and a few notes. It is a quantitative audit by which you obtain:

measurable project outcomes.
content recommendations for your project:
What do our content ecosystems look like?
What are our opportunities, risks, and success metrics? Consider external and internal factors.
The Plan:

Your plan should form a continuous circle of learning / creation / examination, or Create, Deliver, Govern.

This is the mantra of social media: you must be ready to stay engaged. No longer can you create content and then leave it to dry out, age, and spoil.

What do you get? Multiple benefits: better user experience, great brand consistency, new operational efficiencies, better risk management, improved SEO, and more effective personalization and targeting.

How can you start?

Currently we think of content as the responsibility of a writer. But it requires more functions. We need to recognize content as a complex thing and the responsibility of many. Marketing tasks in all their variety are activities which can be considered content. We must have processes in place that recognize the web as an eco system.

In closing Halvorson admonished us:

You are a publisher - treat your content as a critical business asset.

No matter how you get your content onto the web – by email, Twitter, IM, etc. – you are publishing content to the web. Recognize yourself as a publisher.

Web 2.0 Expo: Some thoughts

2009-11-25T07:21:00.008-05:00

I enjoyed this year's Web 2.0 Expo more than I thought I would. I was concerned that it might be a repetition of last year’s. Fortunately I was wrong. Some of the speakers were the same, but (from what I could see) they offered new views on a variety of issues.

Before I provide summaries of the individuals sessions I attended, I’ll offer some general comments about the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.

Last year, overhearing talk in between sessions, it seemed that one of the most pressing concerns was how to monetize the Internet and social media, and determining ROI (return on investment). This year, though ROI was still on people’s minds, its concern seemed to be much more muted (based on my sense that there were fewer hard business types present). Rather, I sensed that the geeks who had entered the business world had come to the expo to reinvigorate their love and fascination of computers and the Internet. They came to explore new ideas and keep track of what they could bring back to the office or file away for later use.

The keynotes last year seemed to me rather perfunctory, whereas this year many were a highlight of the event. I first saw Baratunde Thurston portray @the_swine_flu back at IgniteNYC on June 1, 2009. Even then he had the audience howling with laughter. This time he spoke on hashtags in Twitter, but I was amazed at the way he delivered his speech. It wasn’t a speech: it was a dialogue with the audience. As an occasional stand-up comedian (and an editor for The Onion), he knew he had to get the audience right away. He succeeded, making his presentation among the most memorable presentation of the entire Expo. It is a model for all future presentations.

The sleeper for me was Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer For Open Government at the White House. Noveck spent over about 35 minutes in conversation with Tim O’Reilly, discussing the President’s Open Government Initiative. She described a direction for openness in the White House that would foster greater participation (and therefore activism) in political life. One of the first advantages of openness was making sure that no lobbyists would enter those who advise the president – and having the list of official visitors made public was a step to making sure no lobbyists would appear. She also singled out Manor, Texas, a town of 5,800 people, for the superlative efforts they’re doing to create a transparent government on a town level. You could feel the audience breathing “wow!” as she held them in attention, describing what they hope to achieve, including influencing other branches of government to be as open.

Much has already been written about – and by - Danah Boyd, her keynote speech, and the phenomenon of “tweckling” (an amalgam of Twitter and heckling). In brief, saddled with an unexpected and difficult situation for presenting her paper, Boyd was unaware that the Twitter feed being projected behind her began to comment negatively on her presentation, even to becoming derogatory. To be sure, even if the audience was correct in suggesting that she was reading her paper too fast, the nastiness was uncalled for and not constructive.

As ugly as it was, the situation suggested that the typical academic talk – of standing and delivering your totally prepared paper – is now a thing of the past. Today we're at Presentation 2.0: You must establish a relationship with and engage your audience. Do not depend on content alone to do that for you. Of course, attendees were spoiled by Thurston’s presentation – he spent a good five minutes warming us up, getting our attention, and establishing a memorable exchange with us even before he began sharing content. [Side note: When Michael Stephens (instructor at the Graduate School of Library Information Science at Dominican University) addressed staff at the New York Public Library, he began at the back of the auditorium, slowly making his way to the front, while asking short questions and getting answers. He was working the crowd.] This kind of Presentation 2.0 – which is as much performance as presentation – is now going to be necessary when conveying information to an audience, particularly if there are distractions such as slides, or simultaneous Twitter feeds (even if they are not projected, many conferences now have a backchannel, so it's not going to go away).

Despite the many good sessions I attended (summaries of which I hope to post soon), what I felt missing from the Expo were more opportunities for networking. In this day and age where the Internet enables quick and usually free dissemination, there has been much talk questioning the need for traditional conferences, when presenters could simply post their talks online.

Therefore attendance at a conference needs to emphasize the attributes beyond the papers, and that is usually networking. There is a need for more social interaction. There were a few opporunities: lunch time (often less than an hour), and pre-meeting coffee and tea in he lounge area:

Last year (which I sensed had significantly more attendees), one lunch allowed people to group themselves based on interest. I reported on sitting at a table labeled Museum 2.1 and discovering interesting people. It would have been a good idea to have this option available for all lunches. Instead, we were left to seek out others with similar interests on Twitter - not an efficient method of networking when you're with hundreds of people.

I was happy to have suggested and created an archive of tweets for the Expo - many thanks to Twapper Keeper. Even a staff member of O'Reilly thanked me. Access the archive here (Over 12,000 tweets as of the morning of November 25.)

Art Encourages an Enthusiam for Learning

2009-08-23T11:05:00.005-04:00

I don't often quote people without adding something original. But a two-year-old article from the newsletter of the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island has stayed with me which I'd like to reproduce - if only for my own use. The original is here on page 9: http://bit.ly/yUQRB
or:
http://www.statenislandarts.org/newslettr-downloads/Newsletter_Sept-Oct-07.pdf

The author, Carolyn Corbo of Public School 50 directs this (apparently) towards parents of young children. But I feel there's much to be learned even for adults in these 10 maxims. For librarians - or advertisers, or anyone for that matter - the key is getting the individual engaged. This is more possible in a non-judgmental environment where art is exercised ("arts" is not restricted to graphic arts).

It also challenges what I feel is a very American notion (and erroneous one): that "arts" or "entertainment" are an add-on that can easily be jettisoned or placed on a very low priority in times of economic or other difficulties. If arts lead to all the things Corbo suggests, then they are as important as any other subject or occupation for psychological health and communication.

Here is Carolyn Corbo's:

Art Encourages an Enthusiasm for Learning
The Importance of Art Education for Every Child

Art develops fine motor skills when we use a scissor or thread a needle.
Art develops organizational skills, the 'how to', step-by-step in making a weaving, building an armature or painting.
Art making promotes critical thinking--your children look closely at great works of art, analyze and make inference about what they see. We learn about people from distant lands, different cultures and traditions.
Art making promotes independent thinking. Your children make decisions about what colors to make, shapes to cut, how to change their work.
Art reaches children of all learning styles--it levels the playing field.
Art making promotes focus and attention to detail. Even the most active children are engaged when painting a picture or making a sculpture.
Art nutures the spirit and stimulates the imagination.
Art builds self-esteem.
Art making provides our children an opportunity to express their feelings and ideas about their world.
Art making is process oriented where children explore different art mediums. Children are encourages to take risks, think for themselves and become problem solvers.

Michael Tushman's SLA talk on change management

2009-06-15T23:52:00.000-04:00

On March 23, 2009, the New York Chapter of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) hosted Michael L. Tushman, professor at the Harvard Business School, in a talk on "How Should We Manage Change in the 21st Century?" Held in the JP Morgan Chase Conference Center (top floor), the setting offered some stunning views from downtown Manhattan (Liberty Island to the left, Ellis Island to the right):
Tushman's area of research is on technology, innovation, teams, change. He hoped to dwell on the role of the library and information in innovation and change. His PowerPoint is on the SLA NY Chapter website.

He started with a list of private and public firms, small and large and asked: what's the unifying theme among them? (Slides 2-3 of his PowerPoint.)

Some responses: they were firms that dealt with technology and technological change, and most had issues of growth. Many are great organizations that died; some came back. Changes occurred in markets and customer requirements.

Other commonalities: most companies had a near monopoly. They used technology for either growth or rebirth. It's a pattern for successful firms. Tushman mentioned that he'd been looking at such firms for a while, to help understand and build ideas on how and why organizations evolve over time. Then he helps companies to understand those ideas.

Why is it that great organizations almost always fail when the world shifts? (And right now we're in the middle of one of these "world shifts.") Why in such situations do leaders become losers?

Response: they don't see what's happening in front of them. Example: Wang Laboratories didn't believe the personal computer would be a threat. Incumbents - almost always - don't believe in the change. Why is that?

Emotions, fear of loss, - what do they fear loosing? Power? Money? Status? It's arrogance, and an inability to see objectively. It can happen when change is too rapid, and when one is too complacent.

Who's responsible for this kind of failure? The CEO? The board? Top management team? Organizational culture?

Let's take the story of the Swiss watch industry. (PowerPoint slide 4.) There was a pattern of continual decline of numbers of companies and number of watches being made, gradually being overtaken by Japanese watchmakers.

Then Tushman introduced the concepts: Incremental change, architectural change, and radical change (or discontinuous change).

In 1970 the Swiss were no. 1 watchmakers. But quartz watch movement represented for Swiss a discontinuous change. Who would be a customer of a mechanical Swiss watch in 1970? The high-end customer. But a quartz watch is for everyone - it's inexpensive and accurate. Swiss makers actually made quartz movement, but the heads of Swiss companies ignored that information until 1980 when they were practically bankrupt. So they developed Swatch in 1981 as a response to the new forces. They had the technology in 1970, but ignored it until they went bankrupt. (Usually firms wait until they're broke before they take drastic steps to innovate.) Also a similar thing happened with the American tire industry: demand for belted tires sunk while radial increased. (PowerPoint slide 5.)

Slide 6 shows the evolution of the Disk Drive industry: 146 firms founded; 125 were failures. As disc drives get physically smaller (an architectural innovation - going from larger sizes to 8 inch, 5.25 inch, 3.5 inch, etc.) different customers shop for different companies. Firms which lead in one format generally don't lead in the next.

What it takes to exploit your existing business gets in the way of exploration. What we're (at Harvard) trying to do is build businesses that can both exploit what they do (and are good at) and explore for the future.

The problem is that the more you exploit today, the less good you are at exploring tomorrow. Tushman tries to help organizations to do that, but the problem is that they're contradictory forces.

We have a wonderful executive program at the Harvard Business School. Eight weeks, full room and board (and of course 6 superb faculty members) for which we charge $60,000. We hold it twice a year. We're enormously proud of it.

What are the technological challenges that business schools face? What is threatening our world? The answer: online distributed executive education. Who is the leader? University of Phoenix. HBS's way is based on face-to-face interactions. Online courses is an entirely different way of distributing content through the web. Instead of $60,000 a year, they charge just several hundred dollars. So what are schools thinking? They're thinking: "Such online programs wouldn't attract our customers." But over the course of time, such programs are going to get better and will gradually siphon off students from Ivy-league schools.

Look at the Sears building. The company built (what was then) the tallest building in the world. That says something about how they perceived themselves. They're in Chicago. Look at the horizon in Bentonville, Arkansas (beginning of Walmart, Inc.). At first Sears had cornered the city market, and Walmart had the rural areas. By distributing so many catalogs, Sears didn't encourage the country folks to visit the city. All of a sudden, Walmart opens in Chicago - and that spells the end of Sears.

This pathology is deep. The better you are in the short-term, the worse off you'll be in the long-term. It strikes the best people in the top rooms. This issue of cultural lock-in, blindness -- leaders don't see the changing world - this imbalance between the short term and the long term. These are brilliant executives who catch a disease: they're believe their great (an invincible). When they start to fail, they almost always need an outside agent to come in and "lead a revolution" in the corporation. (examples: IBM.)

A happy story: The Ball Corporation (slide 13). They've continuously followed both paths of exploit and explore simultaneously, and have been able to grow and change with the times. When asked what is the company's identity, the CEO responded: we're a container corporation. That "vision" has enabled them to pursue various avenues for development while maintaining their identity.

Note that this is not just incremental change, but incremental change and incremental revolution. What doesn't change is their identity: who they are.

That's one of the key ideas resulting from the research we've done: an over-arching frame (or vision), innovation streams, punctuated change, and an organizational design that permits exploration.

Punctuating change: the only way to get the future - revolutions, incremental change, and revolutions again. Revolution: when the whole organization is turned upside down. Strategy, structure, people, processes all shift at the same time.

Culture of an organization: values, norms, the climate. The social structure. Who is responsible for this organization - who makes it go? People not with formal power but with informal power. They are the nodes of the social network. The coalition of power brokers.

Tushman recalls a client who had formal power, but not social power. Whenever you try to implement change, you need a coaltion from the leader, his team, and those within the social network. You need that if you want to move into the future.

The architecture to exploit people, processes, and structure is different from the architecture needed to explore. Tushman used the word ambidexterity: an organization that can have completely different cultures, completely different competencies, completely different structures, completely different processes.

The challenge: to build an organization that both lives in the past and lives in the future simultaneously. It's a contradiction; Tushman asks senior leaders to host that contradiction: to honor the past while at the same time create a new culture. That is a managerial feat: to live in both worlds.

Imagine you're in Rochester, NY in the 1970s, and you hear of digital imaging. What would be the reaction? As it happened, a librarian in the audience was there at the time and she described the reaction to digital imaging as: arrogance, indignation, and fear.

To conclude, Tushman cites the company Toyota as profiled in the book "Extreme Toyota." His summary: They live in "a state of disequalibrium where radical contradictions coexist, propelling Toyota away from its comfort zone and creating healthy tension and instability within the organization." They are a world of internal paradox - a state of equilibrium and disequilibrium simultaneously.

He then showed this image:
He concluded by noting that the role of leaders is to build organization that can go "there" (where the signpost above points). When someone pointed out to him that the image sends a mixed message, Tushman responded "Yes! Exactly right! Exploit and explore." It requires two completely different organizations, a contradiction that the leadership team must embrace. You want the punctuated change in the exploratory culture, and incremental change in the exploitative culture.

That's his idea: this notion of end capabilities, streams of innovation, the role of the senior team exploiting and exploring, and building multiple and inconsistent cultures that are held together by this notion of identity.

The event broke up as evening settled on Manhattan:

Personal websites - forever?

2009-05-17T07:00:00.003-04:00

I had known Dan Kliman a number of years. I never met him, but knew him from an email list, Facebook, and perhaps some other social networking sites.

Then I heard the terrible news: Dan died mysteriously in November 2008. He was 38.

I waited for Facebook to remove his page. But of course they didn't: No one told them he was gone, and even if they had, Facebook would probably not remove it unless the owner told them. (Yahoo had a similar policy: Even if you were accidentally locked out of logging in to your profile, the profile would remain, although I suspect Yahoo's recent change to personal profiles might have eliminated many of those orphan profiles.)

So at least on Facebook, Dan "lives" on.

Since genealogy is one of my hobbies. I was struck by the similarity of gravestones to web pages. A gravestone functions not only as the marker for a decedent, but as a brief opportunity for them or their family to provide a few words of identity ("Susan Smith, born...died..."), of relationships ("Beloved mother, sister..."), and the occasional summary phrase ("She was a friend to animals and men" was what I recently saw on a gravestone).

Does the web have a corollary to a gravestone - a permanent marker to an individual?

The vestiges we see on Facebook have no guarantee of permanency. Presumably, in a few years' time, Facebook (like Yahoo has apparently done) will decide it needs to clear up some of the space alloted to profiles not logged in recently, and clear them out.

I don't think there is a permanent online graveyard. Like cemeteries, the owners of such a site would need to montetize the investment (many older cemeteries in New York City have cleared away gardening and now use the land for interments, in part to raise their assets). And their mission statement would need to guarantee that successive owners/investors maintain the site in perpetuity.

Perpetuity. In the web's fast-moving and fast-developing world, that seems almost like an imposssibiliy. So it'll be interesting to see if anyone comes up with a graveyard for the web.

IgniteNYC, February 23, 2009

2009-03-05T21:29:00.002-05:00

The latest Ignite NYC was held on February 23rd at the Santos Party House a few blocks south of Canal Street (the center of New York City's Chinatown). Santos Party House is a small disco-like space, much smaller and less comfortable than Webster Hall (the site of a previous meeting).

There were only a few chairs available, and since the bar was in the same space, the rumbling of conversation was loud and intruded upon what came from the stage.

The first item was scheduled for 7:30 but began 10 minutes late. It was "Know Your Meme" a simulation of a TV game show which, in 20 questions to contestants on stage, was supposed to provide a history of Internet technology. It went on for an hour and it was terrible! It was not well rehearsed, not well delivered (they seemed to be talking to themselves and had no interest in being heard by the audience nor capturing the audience's attention), and it was amazingly stupid. Seeing it as a colossal waste of time, a number of people left. Memo to IgniteNYC and O'Reilly folks: NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!!

The main part of the program was scheduled for 8:30 but didn't going until after 9 PM, no explanations or anything. It made me and the audience somewhat irritable. Finally they began.

The format of Ignite is based on Pecha Kucha - 5 minute talks with PowerPoint presentations. Based on presenters' experience, there are two kinds of talks. Some are just a single idea, fleshed out with details. It's like a topic sentence followed by details. Those tend to be less interesting than those that try to give a cause-and-effect presentation (problem --> solution) which for me presents more immediacy. There was a mixture of both.

Michael Galbart's "Images On the Internets Seem Realer Than They Are" fell into the first group: a one-point talk about the frequency of altered images found on the Internet. His point was that Internet images seem more real than they are due to the ubiquity of Photoshop and similar programs that facilitate altering images. It's a good assumption that the majority of images you see on the net (even from news organizations) are altered, even if only slightly. The problem is that some images become fixed in the mind whether truthful or not, e.g. the photo of Sarah Palin's head grafted on to a swimmer wearing a US flag bikini and carrying a gun - apparently an image that has been seen by many as being "real."

These cloning techniques have now become part of main and popular culture. The photograph released by Iran showing 4 missles being launched simultaneously was a fake - it was really only one with the others being replicated. The image of President Bush's talk to the army - where you saw a sea of faces in the audience. Really they were just duplications of the same group of faces. (One clue for revealing crowd is to look carefully at the eyes - to see if they are all facing the same or different directions.) All magazine covers are Photoshoped.

What do we learn? That all images on the net are fake (e.g. Godzilla being attacked by a house cat). It becomes a lesson in trust - we begin to suspect everything.

So beware of fake images!

Next up was Jaki Levy's "How to Screw up Your Reputation Or the Reputation of Your Company Online." He spoke about PR mistakes and their resultant nightmares. Motrin: a bad TV commercial led mothers to protest. The company didn't respond to criticism (or praise). Their unresponsiveness was the path to ruining their reputation. Another road to ruin: Ask a question to which you already know the answer -- people will lambaste you. Wal-Mart: They want to show how college students should arrange their dorms. But students weren't interested - they already know how they want their dorms arranged. Another point: If you ask, you have to be prepared for all kinds of responses. When you ask dumb questions, expect dumb answer. Another way: call yourself a social media expert. Experts are deadly. Lying is deadly. Don't underestimate audience: they're smarter than you think. Be clear about your motives.

Karen Sandler's "Unchain My Heart" had no PowerPoint presentation on purpose. She went with OpenOffice, the open-source software. She confessed that she has an enlarged heart, meaning that she can die suddenly. So she has defibrilator, which she said was "like fairy godmother in heart looking after you." Being a geek, she asked for code to this medical device, but the company refused, telling her it was proprietary. So here she is with software that could potentially save or destroy her life - and it can't be studied by anyone. That lack of transparency makes it unsafe. Fortunately she came across a group that hacked the device, and found that it's data was not encrypted. In fact, the defibrilator could cause shocks which could be life-threatening. Fortunately, being a lawyer enabled her to confront the company on some of these issues - particular concerning transparency.

But the message is that doctors have to think about the devices they prescribe and whether they're really safe. They need to not ever take things for granted and need to know what these devices are about. We need to insist that people are safe on all levels. We need a free and open code.

Dennis Crowley presented "The Crowley Family vs. Family Feud: How You Too Can Win Fame and Fortune in LA." Dennis is the co-founder of Four Square - a redesigned Family Feud. His talk was how to get on a TV quiz show. How do you train? You become obsessive. You Tivo all shows and study them. Get a quiz book. Get into the mindset. Set up family tournaments for each other. Watch episodes on YouTube. You'll note: The best answers are the most obvious. Round numbers are your friends. Never pass. When they talk about "random people," what they really mean is "random people in L.A." His episode will be aired March 4.

Alex Bisceglie presented "DataVisualization: Muppet Fur Coats." It's about visualization (whether it's called data visualization or informaiton visualization) - translating data into comprehendible images. Without it, what can one make of the information that bombards us every day? Visualization helps us to navigate life. Visualization is how we help vet our presidential candidates (think of the various graphs and pie charts during the election season). It's how we encounter our social networks. It helps us understand the net. The main guideline is to keep visuals simple, otherwise they won't provide content.

Alex then showed various samples of visualization. A kindergardener's visualization: vampire electronics.

Then some bad examples. They take away from content because they're too busy. Keep it simple! He can't repeat this adage enough. Trends in data visualization come and go within a single year.

Information visualization is not art. You can't get data out of art, which tends to be much more complex. Again: Keep it simple.

Jonathan Kahan's "Cutting Edge Technology: The Samurai Sword" picked up on the previous talk's adage to "keep it simple" by using the metaphor of a katana (a samurai sword). Originally having a straight shaft, the katana was later modified to be slightly curved, which increased the sword's efficiency in being able to cut through most anything. (His PowerPoint presentation had numerous film stills featuring Toshiro Mifune and few with Tom Cruise.)

Jooyoung Oh spoke about "Unemployment 101." She left her job of 5 years. Updating her Facebook status was like breaking up with a boyfriend. At first you don't want to tell your parents, and you buy drinks for your friends. Cute, amusing, not to much to say, and a message that everyone feared but fear wanted to hear.

Similar was Naveen Selvadurai's "In Case of Fire, Break Glass." He spoke about his unfortunate experience of having a fire in his building and gave many tips on what to avoid and to be aware of in case there is a fire. Somewhat humorous.

Britta Riley spoke about "R&D-I-Y" or research and develop it yourself. I forget the details but it had to do with filtration of urine into drinking water. Rather than do all the work, her project enabled people to do it themselves. When people heard of this project they wanted to get involved. But they felt they needed to ask permission. Britta and her colleagues realized that crowdsourcing was how the project got going. It has to be a real sharing of ideas - wikis and instructables are not enough. One has to build the continuum of work already started.

Scott Rafer spoke about "An Overnight Success in Just 15 Years." He seemed to have great ideas but introduced them too early, such as the camera phone in 1997, and blogsearch. His goal was to find that one-hit-wonder. All it takes is once. Be late, then, you'll be boring. There are zillions of things to do and find out - just look at directories of hot spots in NYC. There are always crazy startups - why not you? The secret is to hit that one thing, and then you'll be invulnerable.

Noah B. Zerkin spoke on "Near Future Augmented Reality Systems." It was hard to understand and was about the fusion of virtual and physical worlds. (I think he made a pun on his name "Noah Zark - sounds like Noah's Ark.)

[By this time my patience and attention to the proceedings were dropping off, so I just too notes on snippets. Apologies for the more discursive narrative.]

Cory Forsyth spoke on using telephony in unique ways, or "How to Piss Off the FCC."

Ed Purver's "A Show of Hands" humorously demonstrated that direction in life is not always good.

Andrew Hoppin's talk "NASA 2.0" was actually good. He mused on the possibility of Web 2.0 techniques being applied to the space agency. For background, he pointed out that NASA was at its best when it had a specific goal of getting a man on the moon. After that achievement, having a lack of clear goals, they seem to have been less stellar.

Hoppin proposed new leadership for the agency. They should ask what works outside the fence? Perhaps "open-space events" attended by many people from which they could achieve crowdsourcing of ideas and possibly research and resources. It would be a participatory exploration. But they must change their culture and infrastructure to one that welcomes collaboration and increases participation.

Hoppin then riffed on various ideas. NASA could mix reality events and cultivate remote participation. "Open space" events. They should participate in outside communities, such as the monthly Hackathon in Silicon Valley. They could support existing communities. As a result of being open, they would receive accolades. It might be more of a challenge to provide ROI (return on investment), and to face internal challenges. But ultimately it could result in a change of culture within the organization, and result in community building, outreach, and awareness.

Space exploration would become less "owned" by NASA and would be shared with people.

Jen Bekman spoke on "Overcrowded." Deceptively, she appeared to begin with a negative attitude: How crowdsourcing is ruining everything. Look at the poor reputation of Wikipedia. Look at the multitude of sunset photographs on Flickr. What's the point of so much?

As it turned out, she was building up to a plug: She has an art gallery that has displayed art using the prodigious images of sunsets from Flickr. So go visit. http://www.jenbekman.com/

David Steele Overholt's talk was named after his website, Fail Often. There are so many constraints that we face every day: lack of time, goals, and contracts. The point is produce consistently, to do something everyday and not be afraid to fail. He suggested adding a single picture to your Flickr collection. There would be no wrong or right way. Just do it.

Rob Seward, the final speaker, seemed to be well-known among the crowd. His talk, "The Collective Unconscious of 1980s Florida," spoke about word association test at a Florida university. When he was age 9 he would look up dirty words in the dictionary. He'd find them, but the dictionary would never tell why the words are dirty. Presumably this was intended to explain that he's long had an interest in words and what people mak of them.

He presented a metaphor of an iceberg: there's a little at the top but the bulk is submerged, going to the bottom. That was a way to introduce his interest in words that give rise to unusual associations among people at the University of Florida. (i.e. analogies, for example: cheeleader :: whore, and democrate :: asshole).

I'm so late in posting this blog entry that I don't recall the details of the talk, but the research results is all at his website: http://robseward.com/blog/2009/02/23/word-association-apps/. He actually looks like a creative person and I'm sorry this didn't come out during his talk.

All together it was a mixed bag. For my taste, there was too much that was amusing without providing much substance, and there were too many talks that were more like navel-gazing. But it was good to hear the beat of Sillicon Alley even if it was soaked in beer.

[All my pics from the event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8539228@N04/sets/72157614785598995/ ]

Hooray for the Geek Squad!

2009-02-20T09:31:00.004-05:00

It happens to many of us: Our computer fails in a way that we can't fix it ourselves.

Mine wouldn't boot at all. I called Dell, ran through diagnostics, and they said they couldn't repair it and that it wasn't covered by their warranty (which otherwise covers me until 2011), so I should call Geek Squad. (Hmph - so much for Dell's warranty.)

Fortunately there' s a Geek Squad as part of the Best Buy store just a few blocks away from me. I took my pc in.

1.5 weeks later I have it back, the operating system reinstalled, and all my data (nearly 500 GB) rescued and successfully backed up on an external 1 T drive. It's gonna be a pain to reinstall all the programs, but at least all my work is there.

What was the problem? I occasionally leave my computer on all night to enable processing of files and to help clean up and to automatically download updates. Microsoft pushed down an update, but it was incompatible with a sound driver (I use high quality sound software from M Audio). That incompatibility led to corruption of one of the Vista startup files.

Definitely another bad mark for Microsoft. From now on, I do all my updates manually.

Kudos to Geek Squad! Thank you very much!

Josh Greenberg visits the Brooklyn Public Library

2009-01-15T09:13:00.004-05:00

Josh Greenberg, NYPL's Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship (colloquially known as the digital guru), was invited to the Brooklyn Public Library's Staff Development Day to give a talk. Nate Hill (formerly of Catch and Release blog) has reported on it on the this entry of the PLA Blog.

[Sorry I've been so quiet - been working on too many projects - will try to get back on track soon.]

Life magazine photos on Google: is it good?

2008-11-22T18:42:00.004-05:00

I'm sure most people now know about Google's digitization of the Life magazine photo archives:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/life-photo-archive-available-on-google.html

It may be thrilling but what does it mean? How are you supposed to find anything? I remember reading in 1964 or 1965 an article in Life analyzing the Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination (the 45th anniversary of which is today). (As I remember it, the accompanying article indirectly expressed amazement that such a document existed at all. That may seem hard to believe today where cellphones capture and transact images of everything.)

I also remember an article from 1965 about the Russian conjoined twins Masha and Dasha. I tried searching for these things in the Life photo archive but with no luck.

Assuming that they've not yet digitized these yet, how is one supposed to search photographs? It's a question everyone's asking: how do you search a photograph for content? What if you're looking for a photograph of something whose content is not your main interest, but rather an association?

We have many hundreds of years to understand the classification and cataloging of book and book-like material - material that has text. But as far as I know, we don't have any standardized manner of cataloging photographs. To my knowledge, there are no efforts underway to try to come up with system that could be used beyond the domain of those who invent it (perhaps the Getty Center is working on something)?

Librarians, museum specialists, academics, or people from related fields should start an effort. The risk is that this will be another project Google or another for-profit institution) will undertake - and rob it from those whose thinking has greater historical, intellectual and sociological depth. (Interestingly, motion pictures have been around few years than plain photographs, but their nature has led to a greater cataloging history.)

So where's the effort to come up with standards for describing the content of photographs?

Initiative and leadership

2008-11-18T09:47:00.000-05:00

"Churchill also understood, better than his own generals and admirals, the vital important of taking the offensive. As he told his generals in 1940, "the completely defensive habit of mind, which has ruined the French, must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative."

[Winston Churchill, as quoted in Carlo D'Este's Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 187-1945, reviewed by Robert Kagan in The New York Times Book Review (November 9, 2008), 48.]

I used to think that once you pass a certain point in your career, then you can take on leadership roles. While that might be true for some situations, my current feeling (based on current books and articles) is that you have to take such leadership steps from the outset of whatever you do. You have to be active and show that your leadership qualities are an integral part of your personality, of who you are. You can not be passive; you must be active.

What would I learn from this?

2008-11-05T11:29:00.002-05:00

Several months ago I was informally interviewing a someone for a position. I emphasized archival collections and mentioned some famous names that would be recognized. After acknowledging these collections, the prospective interviewee's response took me off guard:

"What would I learn from this?"

I was so flabbergasted I repeated the question in case I had misunderstood it. Here we were, a world-famous library, and a college student was asking what could be learned from working in it. In retrospect, the interview was over at that moment, and I should have told the prospective intern directly and sent them on their way. (If a person can not understand that working with people's personal documents has tremendous value, then there's no point in going on.) But I was nice and continued on for a few minutes.

I still feel justified in wanting to end the interview, but now I see the question is a useful one. Here was a typical college student who had very limited experience using a library. It was an potential opportunity to expand the mind of someone that was clearly limited. (Having worked on an elevator speech several months ago, I supplied what I felt was an appropriate response.)

How many countless other college students are like this? Students who've had all that they need or wanted in their textbooks, and never had to research anything that wasn't already known in their personal libraries or space.

I guess I'm spoiled in that I've always been curious about the world around me and have gone sometimes to great lengths to find out more about it. So maybe we have to get rid of the notion that a library is for "books" and start remaking and marketing ourselves as places to obtain knowledge, a space where one can not only relax but let one's mind expand - and that this is a healthy and necessary endeavor for life. Experienced researchers know how to do this. It's those who don't know and don't care that we must reach and move.

The end of print media is coming

2008-10-28T14:20:00.004-04:00

“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years.”

-- John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, on their discontinuation of their print publication (from the New York Times, 10/29/08)

If one belongs to a smaller (especially non-profit) journals, one has seen this coming. Most newsletters and smaller print publications have already (or are in the process) of discontinuing their paper editions and moving to an online-only format. Many magazines have either folded or have limited the number of issues they print in a year.

This represents a huge change: in less than 5 years, I predict most average-budgeted periodicals will move to an online-only system. Any publisher that's a non-profit or that works with a low budget will similarly feel impelled to give up on print since it is too expensive.

Leadership

2008-10-28T10:40:00.000-04:00

"Almost every study of performing arts institutions in the United States reports that dynamic artistic leadership is the most crucial factor in energizing companies and attracting new audiences."

- Anthony Tommasini, At City Opera, Concern Over a Visionary Whose Eye Seems to Wander (Oct. 4, 2008)

I may want to believe otherwise, but clearly personality is a (the?) driving force behind institutional management. Some leaders may prefer to be quiet, but those people who are extroverts will probably be able to do more (certainly in areas usually seen by external forces, such as fundraising).

Web 2.0 Expo: Museum 2.1

2008-10-12T13:06:00.009-04:00

Now that I've finished summarizing the sessions I attended, I'll mention one social/networking aspect of the Web 2.0 Expo. There were plenty of opportunities for networking and socializing, from the various lunch venues and the waiting areas in the Javits Center that allowed one to plug in and charge one's batteries (literally - if your laptop was dying).

One of the lunches was a bit more scripted - and it was much better than just an open-ended meal. Tables were labeled based on mutual interest and one could sit down at the table of one's interest. In cases of excess interest, additional tables were created. I could have gone to the big choices (marketing, media, programming), but instead found something more in tune with my work: "Museums 2.1" as they called themselves.

It turned out to be a great lunch - not for the food, but for the interesting conversation. Most were staff of a variety of museums, as well as a staff member of Apple and 2 representatives of commercial firm (whose name and function I forgot, but who were interested in talking about what museum folks were doing).

Unfortunately the majority of what I remember was how we were all lamenting how difficult it was to get coworkers and bosses "on board" with recognizing the importance of the Web 2.0 world. I think all of the museum staff at the lunch table were greatly impressed and inspired by the Web 2.0 Expo. The problem most faced was communicating our interest in the value of Web 2.0 it to others at our institutions.

The people from commercial firms asked several interesting questions about how we deal with information/metadata about our materials. I remember we mentioned TMS - The Museum System as a way that many museums deal with their holdings. I remember seeing that some of the commercial firm people were surprised at the amount of metadata we had to use to create records of our holdings, and we tried to give reasons on why so much was needed (e.g. to distinguish between slightly different samples or manifestations of objects).

At the conclusion one of the participants collected everyone's name and email address and send us all a message so that we could keep in contact.

It was a very nice lunch experience. I wish more conferences and meetings would do this. It would be a great way to enhance networking among participants.

Web 2.0 Expo: Tying It All Together: Implementing the Open Web by Joseph Smarr

2008-10-12T04:14:00.000-04:00

The final talk I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City was appropriately titled Tying It All Together: Implementing the Open Web given by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo. [See also his blog and his Plaxo page.]. His PowerPoint presentation is here.

Being on the staff of Plaxo, one would think he'd promulgate Plaxo as the answer to everything - but he didn't (and that was welcome). Although Plaxo was clearly present in some of his slides, his goal of achieving a broader topic was what made his talk very good. He really believes that we are close to wiring the web to become the social web, so that information people have filled out on social websites can be easily transported to others. As usual, I take any responsibility for any faulty transcription of his talk.
--------------------------------
There is an important fundamental change going on the web: The entire web is going social and the social is going open. Here are some of the open Social Web building blocks: OpenId, Open Social, Jabber, microformats.

How does it all fit together? What will new Social Web look like?

Today the Social Web is broken: we have to register anew for each site. We must re-establish our relationship, our profile, etc. It's a pain (and disuades one from trying out new sites). Current social applications have limited options. At least more and more people have the same info somewhere on the web (in various sites).

But we know how to make things better. The new building blocks of social apps can establish important identification of people and their relationships. Here's how. There are thee significant ways to define yourself in relation to the Social Web:

Who I am
Who I know
What's going on

1. Who I Am. You create create a lasting, portable, durable online identity. For example, OpenID allows you to link profile data between sites.

Then consolidate your online identify with me-links: rel=me (XFN)
You can use Google Social Graph API to see what your users said about themselves.
In Plaxo it's called the Pulse Stream - a stream of all your contacts and what they're doing on the web.

2. Who I know.

You build and maintain real relationships. Sometimes it's just a way to keep in touch with already known people. Traditional ways of friending people can now give way to these techniques:

Contact APIs (ex. find people from your address book), and leverage previously established relationships (learned from address books)
OAuth - share private data between trusted sites.
Friends-list portability - to create continuous discovery across multiple sites. (Most robots just scrape just once.)

Some examples: Flickr and Gmail - allows one to import your address books to set up network of existing friends. Dopplr also has a unique way of doing this.

3. What's Going On

Staying up-to-date with people you know. OpenSocial -- You can build apps that can run anywhere. Aggregates activities all over the web - brings all feeds together. Examples: Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, Myspace.

RSS/Atom -- open standard for aggregating open events. one can syndicate activity with others.

Jabber - XMPP - real-time update stream between sites.

Imagine a picture of how it might be: You want to interact with many different websites. So there's an emerging service layer between you and the sites.

The Social Web Ecosystem:

Who I am: Identity providers
Who I know: Social Graph providers
What I know: Content aggregators

Social Graph (i.e. Network) Providers will be emerging.

The virtual cycle of social discovery: John checks out a new site, finds people he knows there (using his address book/friends list), then creates some content and shares it on the site; his friend Joe then discovers that content and site and continues the cycle.

There are hurdles to overcome:
* How does friends list portability work?
* Tell the site your Social Graph Provider: XRDS Simple (discovery tool) + OAuth (access - method to interact with protected data)
* Site fetches your data to find local friends (no standards way to do this yet)
* Site lets you connect to people you want - can periodically look for new matches

The missing link: Portable contacts.

Currently there are efforts underway to standardize contact schema, discovery/auth, and common operators. There's a focus on ease and speed of adoption with active involvement from large and small players

For more info see http://portablecontacts.net (one of Smarr's projects)

Picture of how it will work:
* User signs on with OpenID
* Site tries to get contacts with API - no go
* Site sends user through OAuth flow to grant access
* Users now access users' contacts data via API+

The future of the Social Web will really be where all interconnections will work smoothly.

Web 2.0 Expo: Enhancing Engagement and User-Experience Beyond the TV Screen: Some Lessons Learned from a Transition to web 2.0

2008-10-08T00:14:00.007-04:00

Enhancing Engagement and User-Experience Beyond the TV screen: Some Lessons Learned from a Transition to web 2.0 by Tony Carbone of VH1.

His PowerPoint presentation is available for download in this zip file.

This presentation was good, but somewhat disappointing compared to most others. Most speakers understood that they had to look beyond their specific corporation and look to the abstract ideas that are behind Web 2.0 and make them extend their reach. While this talk did include some of that, most of it was focused on VH1 - to its detriment. But the speaker was good.

Tony Carbone began by talking about viral video brainstorming games. Then asked: What were the two or three most memorable viral videos that you recall seeing in the last 6-12 months?

The lesson is that viral videos increase metrics.

Wikipedia definition of web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies…Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.”

Tim O'Reilly has said:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry cause by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

"Groundswell: a social trend in which people use technologies to get things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations."
- from Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li

So, 2.0 means for:

Everyone: more creativity, more collaboration, and better access to information and entertainment
Users and consumers: Less reliance on traditional institutions
Traditional institutions: They have a lot of stuff to figure out...

The key is to define your attack plan, define your measurable objectives:

Increase user engagement, and increase brand and product awareness -- and figure out how to measure them
Increase revenue and leverage community (members' activities, talents, and ideas)

Lessons learned: You must be able to measure it

Define measurable objectives - recognize and realize the value of social media and social platforms
Don't cut corners on reporting functionality
Reporting and data should influence your technology decisions
Don't over report
Research and data are how you assess and meet needs of your customsers
If you can't measure it, you're only guessing.

Carbone then gave an example of a disparity between search data (for the star Lil' Wayne) and result of highest result of artists.
The fact is that Lil' Wayne went to become as iconic as any pop star or recording artist. So VH1 reached out to Lil' Wayne on advice on stuff.

You can do it: Effective user (activity) assessment = success.
Build your ideas around natural (quantifiable) activities.
Pay attention to the rules of social media and to what's been successful for others.

Embrace it!:

Sharing, syndication and ubiquity are good, measurable, and monetize-able things
Use research and data to prove or disprove hunches
Assess your audience, define your objectives, and execute.

Case study: VH1's Superpoke!Fest - a campaign whose idea is to send it to friends on Facebook and MySpace. Result: 2.500 branded Superpokes were sent resulting in 1,500 new fans for VH1.

Nobody owns the Internet.

In Web 2.0 everyone can participate
Communicate and enforce best practices
Integrate systems and technology

Invest in success (e.g. VH1 blog, Scandalist.com, optimized by posting items to Twitter and iPhone)

Is it working? Your objectives:

Increase engagement
Increase brand and product awareness
Increase revenue
Leverage the community
Recognized the value of social media and platforms

Carbone concluded by showing figures illustrating VH1's successful move into the Web 2.0 world.

Web 2.0 Expo: What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolution Their Thinking

2008-10-06T15:41:00.005-04:00

The second session of the Web 2.0 Expo in New York that I attended on Friday, Sept. 19 was "What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolution Their Thinking," a panel discussion led by Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine.com), with John Byrne (executive editor of Business Week and editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com), Steve Adler (also of Business Week). Jarvis was the center of the show. My guess was that his points were taken from What would Google Do? his forthcoming book on lessons intuited from Google, taken to business world to see how these lessons work. He was a passionate and dynamic speaker, speaking to-the-point with these axioms below.

Google's rules:

Give the people control and they will use it
Dell hell [lessons learned from Jarvis's own experience with Dell]
Your worst customer is your best friend
Your best customer is your partner

We have a new architecture:

A link changes everything
Do what you do best and link to the rest
Join a network / be a platform
Think distributed

Additionally there is a new publicness:

If you're not searchable, you won't be found
Everybody needs a little SEO (search engine optimization)
Life is public, so is business
Your customers are your ad agency

We live in a new society: You don't start communities, they exist already. So the question is: How do you harness them? ou give them: "Elegant organization" - Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook)

Small is the new big
Maintain audience
Join open source - it's a gift economy
The mass market

Welcome to the new business reality:

Atoms are a drag
Middlemen are doomed
Free is a business model
Decide what business you're in

New attitude

There is a inverse relationship between control and trust - David Weinberger (author of Cluetrain Manifesto)
Trust the people
Listen

Google creates new ways of listening to people - us.
There are ten signficant things in our lives [this is evidently a pun on Google's corporate philosophy. Sorry, I didn't catch them all because he went way too fast].

Make mistakes well
Life is a beta
Be honest
Be transparent
Collaborate
Don't be evil

Michael Dell (co-creator of computer company) has these aphorisms:

New speed
Answers are instantaneous
Life is live
Mobs form in a flash
Be transparent

From this we derive new imperatives:

Beware of the cash cow in the coal mine (i.e. can blind us to strategic necessities)
Encourage enable and protect innovation
Simplify, simplify
Get out of the way

Once Jarvis was finished, the talk part of the program switched to how Business Week has embraced the Web 2.0 world and aesthetic. Byrne and Adler's Powerpoint presentation is here although it appears kind of cryptic. [I apologize for the brevity of my notes, and how they trail off at the end.]

How has Businessweek opened up? Through simplifying URLs, tagging stories, staff training sessions, more SEO-friendly headlines.
Now Google refers 38% of search traffic to Businessweek.com

They've create their Business Exchange: a place to relate to others - a user community optimized for search. It's "a more sophisticated digg.com" and helps people find what they want. User profiles can link to their profiles on Linkedin.
They've made a widget for bloggers so that readers can see what they're doing at that moment.

Today, content is no longer king; rather, context is king. Journalism is no longer a product but a process. questioning what are the rights of users.

In comparing the print audience to the one online, Businessweek found their online audience about ten year younger, smarter, more women, more global.

Web 2.0 Expo: Micro-Interactions In a 2.0 World by David Armano

2008-10-06T01:43:00.006-04:00

(I'm still trying to catch up from the Web 2.0 Expo, but I'm sure my memory of these events are receding. Apologies if these are not as detailed as previous ones.)

The first session Friday morning was "Micro Interactions In a 2.0 World" given by David Armano, vice-president of Criticalmass.com. Read his blog at: http://darmano.typepad.com.

(David's Powerpoint presentation is here.) While many of the ideas we had heard in other talks, David's presentation of them was direct, and among the most forceful and powerful.

David recalled Randy Pausch's story. He went to Disney World and purchased salt and pepper shakers with Mickey Mouse ears. He broke them (and fully acknowledged so), and brought them back to the store. Unexpectedly, the Disney representative gave him new ones. Pausch estimated money he spent on his family trip was $100,000 – but his story explains customer loyalty to Disney. Was it a design issue? It was one tiny interaction.

So he asked the execs at Disney: "If I sent a child into one of your stores with a broken salt and pepper shaker today, would your policies allow your workers to be kind enough to replace it?" The execs confessed: probably not. This illustrates a new paradigm in the marketing world.

The idea of the marketing funnel - that is, where all consumer interest heads into one doorway - no longer exists. Consumer behavior is changing from passive consumption to active participation.

Social networking is now bigger than porn. This makes us more complex to understand. Companies have to understand us in our complexity. We are: users, consumers, communities, participants, producers, customers. The old marketing tactics don't work anymore.

Technology has changed too, from front/back ends to an endless fragmentation of services, services which can be mixed and mashed like melodies. You don't have to build from scratch, but can leverage. can create mashups.

The end result are touch points which seem infinite. The pre-digital age had finite touch points. The "digital age" had multiple connected touch points. But now, in the "post-digital 2.0" age, there are now infinite touch points.

We influence each other differently. It used to be that celebrities and public figures received all the attention, but now anyone and everyone received attention. We no longer depend on a hierarchical structure to society. We broadcast to each other all the time.

[Slide from Critical Mass - Always in Beta whose website carries the legend: We believe that creating great experiences for your customer is an open dialogue and a never-ending process. Always in Beta reflects our belief that the pursuit of excellence is an evolutionary progression that is never static.]

Lifestreams. Every time you create an online profile you create a stream of your life. People create multiple streams. Right now, we are overwhelmed by these streams. They intersect in junctions and aggregations. There are services like FriendFeed that aggregates all your feeds from acquaintances.

Why do we want to keep up with all these people? Because we trust people who are like us! Surveys indicate that consumers trust friends (like themselves) more than anyone else when recommending new products or services.

A brand is not what you say it is, it's what THEY say it is. For example: www.brandtags.net: "A collective experiment in brand perception. All tags are generated by people like you and do not reflect the opinions of the site owner or anyone else he knows. Have fun."

We are becoming more demanding about brands. We want fewer promises, and more actions. "Companies stage an experience when they engage customers in a memobrable way." It's not just the talk, it's the actions - it's what they do.

Where it's moving: to interactions which engage, interact, and empower the customers. This is rocking advertisers' world.

The 3 U's in the application economy: Usefulness, Utility, and Ubiquity

Usefulness: serves a purpose
Utility: fosters meaningful interactions
Ubiquity: effective across multiple touch points including social

Some examples: Craigslist. Nike Plus: it went from a brochure-like website to everyday experiences and interactions (Nike Plus - the jogging tracker - insures that you'll visit every day - it's a new experience). Domino's Pizza Configurator and Pizza Tracker - example of a brand that merges personality with utility. Similarly with the Vegas Planner Tool MyVegas.

Engagement [with the user] is the new sticky:

Borders: their website replicates a shelf that allows one to move things around just like a real shelf.
Fiskar's Fisk-a-teers - ordinary people made ambassadors, showing what they've done.

Your brand is the some of your interactions.

"We live in a world where the little things really do matter. Each encounter no matter how brief is a micro interaction which makes a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious. The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel about a particular product, brand or service. Little things. Feelings. They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize."

Micro-interactions are the new thing. They are fast becoming the building blocks of Brand 2.0 (and Google is leading the way).

Interactions + Feelings = Brands

Extraordinary customer experience. Google got the basics right and then perfected it.

The five pillars: Useful, Usable, Desirable, Sustainable, Social [see slide 48 in presentation.]
Built upon 3 foundations: Users (emotional wants and needs), Business (measurable goals and objectives), Brand (core values and brand objectives)

Getting the basic rights means a willingness to embrace change.
We're going from websites to web applications.

Examples of positive interactions: Netflix, Google,

Thinking about things in multiple channels.

Users can't be restricted by their browser – loads of people use cellphones – each object has its own set of rules.

The social experience is composed of millions of micro-interactions.

Old style: the brand as broadcaster.
New style: the brand as facilitator (among influencers and friends).

Example of the new style: Jeff Jarvis (who publicized about his unfortunate experiences with Dell Computers) and Dell. Now Dell acts as a facilitator of their social network of users for user support. They were desperate, they had a senior person at top who gave their decision, and overrode their lawyers. Now on Dell's blog you can find 485 comments to one post.

Faceless companies now have faces. They get you help. Social networks amplify positive and negative social interactions.

Micro-interactions become especially important when brands stumble. Starbucks is a good example. Their stock began to slip, so they are looking at their roots and going back to their core values and what made it special. Now they have a social network: My Starbucks.

Social media is evolving. Twitter good example. It was never designed for what it has ended up being: a multi-touchpoint conversation ecosystem.

Brands are moving from being canned to live and direct engagement. Positive interactions lead to trust and loyalty.

IN SIMPLE TERMS:

PUT PEOPLE FIRST!

Treat everyone like an influencer. Make every interaction count.

One of the post-presentation questions asked David to characterize the difference between mobile and fixed experiences. He said it was a matter of situational design. Understanding the context of how the device (e.g. mobile phone) is used and developing and creating right experiences with it.

Brands that don't invest in these (social) areas will never get it. But brands that do invest in them will put a lot in them. If you're doing it for the sake of public relations, you will not achieve it. And if you're going to invest in a social network, then put plenty of resources into it.

Web 2.0 Expo: The Seduction of the Interface by Chris Fahey

2008-09-28T22:55:00.004-04:00

[Chris Fahey put his Powerpoint presentation up on the Web 2.0 Expo site here. So I've reworked my summary to serve as an accompaniment to his slides, each of which I've indicated in brackets.]

The Seduction of the Interface by Chris Fahey [slides 4, 6] (blogger at http://www.graphpaper.com and works at http://www.behaviordesign.com - a web design firm) [slide 5]

Fahey began with a question: How many believe in "love at first sight"? [slide 2] Even when it happens you need to work through it -- that is the meaning of seduction. Think of the fad of mixtapes to impress an amorous venture: you had to do work of compiling the recording, which could be considerable.

Now think of the web: We need "interaction designer," or "user experience designer." They know the secrets of seductive with regards to web design.

Rethink merchandising [slide 7]: It's not about that extra click nor about market strategy but rather about web-centric design.

What is merchandising versus marketing? [slide 8] Merchandising is a subset of marketing. But forget about them. It's not about branding. [slide 9]

Marketing [slide 10] is creating business relationships with partners, and is manifest in advertising, delivering messages, retail environments, immersive advertising. [slide 11]

Merchandising [slide 12] is the strategy and implementation of how a product is presented to customers as they decide whether or not to purchase it. There are three tiers [slide 13]:

Selling context
Packaging
Products that sell themselves.

1. Selling context [slide 14]: It's the design of retail environment, the design of marketing, or a planogram. [slide 15] [slide of a shelf in the Apple retail store in New York City.) It's how we shop. The lesson to be learned: the consciousness of the psychology of shopping. [slide 16-17 - shows the deliberate planning for an Apple store]

E-commerce is about selling contexts [slide 18-19]. We're still learning how to optimize automated recommendations, wish lists, product reviews, etc. (so that accurate recommendations are revealed and tied to users' preferences).

2. Packaging [slide 20]. It's about the presentation of an object before you open it - part of the user experience (on Flickr people take and post pics of their unpacking of an object). [slide 21 - think about the success of the L'Eggs panty-hose campaign of 30 years ago.] [slide 22 - an Apple laptop about to be unpacked] Is packaging like a selling contest? [slide 23] Today the box and the store are now the same. For example: Basecamp. [slide 24] The product markets to you directly once you're in the website. [slide 25-26 - from Fahey's Behavior.com] So don't think of your product's box. [slide 27]

3. Products that sell themselves. [slide 28] The seductive qualities must be built into the product. (This subject is discussed in Henry Dreyfuss's book Designing For People.) [slide 29]
Again a definition of mechandising [slide 30]. But we must go beyond merchandising. [slide 31] It's a metaphor for designers. Marketing and design have always have bumped heads with each other. Today they are each other [slides 31-34]

In the Web 2.0 world designers are now responsible for marketing. [slide 35] Think of the product as a vehicle for continuous seduction. Today the new equation is marketing equals design, where design equals all aspects of the user experience.

Web-centric: [slide 36] the broad category of services that are on the web but can exist elsewhere. For the web-centric - the user experience must be about pleasure. [slide 37] It must appeal (if possible) to all the five senses. [slides 38-39; a joke: Homer Simpson's sensory experience] It can be achieved in other ways: through psychological pleasure, e.g. "attractive things work better." (See Don Norman's book Emotional Design [slide 41] and his website as well.) When something pleasures you it primes your mind for more creativity and effectiveness. [slides 42-44]

You don't see web services advertising web companies. On Google? nada, nothing. You don't see TV advertising for faccebook. It goes purely by word of mouth. In traditional mediums, the market has to convince the user that it's great. But in Web 2.0 [slide 45] the user experience is everything.

How the design of the Web 2.0 user experiences changes how products are marketed. [slide 46]

The conversion: [slide 47] An example from yesterday's method of seduction: Think about all that junk snail mail one received from Publishers' Clearing House [slide 48] - their campaign was about submission [slide 49] - that maybe some people would answer their packets.

But today it's not about submission. [slide 50] Seduction is about making someone fall in love with you. [slides 51-54] The conversion method is obsolete. [slide 53] Rather: today's method is connection.

Seduction. We want users to fall in love with us. [slide 55] There are three stages:

inspire their attention, interest and desire
draw them in
capture their ongoing devotion

1. Inspire their attention. [slide 56] Choose your victim. [slide 57] (Look at Robert Greene's book The Art of Seduction - website and on Amazon.) He has these methods of seduction [slide 58].

Look at Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson's book The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes [slide 59].
Think of users as distinct personalities - You can't do that if you think of them as marketing segments. That's a different way of coming up with ways to communicate and design.

Yahoo's Competitive Spectrum outlines these characteristics: caring, collaborative, cordial, competitive, combative [slide 60).
You can make up your own criteria that will help shape the design process [slide 61). Also think of "user personas" a nd personal useage guidelines [slides 62-63]. These are tools for allowing designers to generate ideas.

Techniques for seduction:

You need to make the first move!! [slide 64). Use moton, words, video. careful with audio [slide 65].
Create a sense of mystery [slide 66] (example of upcoming product with ambiguous web front - slides 67-69].
Appear desirable [slides 70-72], because nothing draws a crowd like another crowd. Present testimonials - not user media testimonials, but real user testimonials, too.
Flatter them [slide 73]. Assume that they're slightly more sophisticated than the marketing data says.
Tempt them [slide 74].

Stage Two: draw them in (lead them astray) [slide 75]. Dazzle them with wonder [slide 76]. Fahey cited Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent [slide 77; I think his point was the effectiveness of the title, since the book was devoted to the specious claim that comic books promote juvenile delinquency.]

Seduction is not just about love but also abandoning responsibilities to one's childlike desires - indulging in products like a fantasy. [slide 78: note the entrancing nature of this bookstore with an entrancing name.] [Slide 79 shows examples of types of victims from Greene.]

Have a sense of humor [slide 80]. Why not spice up the cancel button? How about this slide [slide 81] which suggests "just kidding - i remember my password now."

Be stylish [slide 82]. You can redesign based on style since don't want to be out of date.

Affordances of desire [slide 83]. You imagine a website as part of your life. Think of umbrellatoday.com. Or Dopplr [slide 84) where you can share your travel itineraries.

Distract them from their responsibilities [slide 85].
(I forget what was the point of the two slides, 86-87, showing 43 Folders and a thought about redirecting one's energy.]

Stage three: Capture their ongoing devotion [slide 88].

Continually grow [slide 89]. Create an endless cycle of continuous seduction. Fahey showed the example of how Nike has created website [slides 90-91] for runners where probes are placed in your sneaker and iPod, to allow you to create charts of running progress which you can share. Of course, there are also widgets for you to put on your blog.

The design process [slide 92]: plan it out: goals, scenarios, and paths [slides 93-94]. Remove obstacles - users know what they want [slides 95-99].

Plan for delight [slide 100]. Plan for these enjoyable user experiences.
Evaluate with psychology and emotion [slide 101].
Understand yourself [slide 102]. What kind of seducer are you? [slides 103]. Perhaps you're one of the 30-second seducers [slide 104] - from 30-Second Seduction by Andrea Gardner.

Closing thought [slide 105] seduction is: [slide 106-111]

Is about love, togetherness, enchantment and pleasure.
is user-centric. not victimization.
is a journey
is proactive
and nothing to be squeamish about!

Seduction is no longer the responsibility of the marketing people. It's a design job. So do it! [slide 112]. Thank you. [slide 113]

Web 2.0 Expo: Designing for the Internet(s) of the Future with Genevieve Bell

2008-09-25T21:26:00.013-04:00

Thursday afternoon, Sept. 18 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York had one of the best speakers: Genevieve Bell, who works for Intel. Though it might have eschewed the technical, the talk was fabulous for opening our eyes to other peoples and cultures that use the Internet. As always, my words should not be accepted as an accurate transcription of her talk and I take responsibility for any errors of transmission.

Bell introduced herself as an anthropologist. Her desire is to tell stories as a means of understanding people and their thinking and to recognize it may be different from the way we think.

She told one story of a bar in Adelaide, Australia (her home country). From this bar, the closest Internet connection was 100 kilometers away - in a McDonald's. When asked, a person inside the bar questioned his need for the internet -- he has a TV and a cellphone. "What more did he need?" So for a person like that, what kind of value does the Internet have? (Apparently he thinks he's not missing anything.) Genevieve made us question issues such as democracy, transparency, openness. Though we may be used to them where we live, they are not necessarily universal truths. They can be politically influenced. For example, if you're in a country that lacks a town hall, a virtual town hall will be meaningless.
What do we do next? We do it by calling on social behaviors that are universal.
The Internet goes feral. It has gone from domestic to wild, and is available on all sorts of different devices (not just computers, but cellphones, games, etc.). Thus the Internet is transformed by the medium on which it is delivered, e.g. TV, phones, computers.

We have to realize that this transformation of the Internet means that it may not be first encountered on a computer, and recognize that makes a qualitative difference. People don't want keyboards on the sofa. In Africa (for example), one's first encounter with Internet is on the phone. In that case it's a highly transactive medium where people are looking for specific data.

Genevieve then proceeded with the story of another person : A woman who claimed to use the Internet. Yet she's living in a house with no electricity, she's illiterate, and has no computer in the house. So how does she access the Internet? She told her son to send a message to her daughter who lives far away. The son went to cybercafe, sent a message, went away, then returned to receive the daughter's response, and then reported it to the mother. So that's how the mother uses the Internet. She didn't need to have electricity, a computer, or anything. For her, the Internet meant she can reach out to family that lives far away.

It makes a very different experience of Internet and how to design it.

Talk about language: Chinese has now exceeded English as the most prevalent language of communication. Undoubtedly the use Chinese (and other non-English languages) on the Internet will continue to increase, so that English will never again regain the dominance it had. What does this mean? Think about the rise of these languages, particularly those that use different alphabets. Each language implies a different culture and a different set of cultural practices.

For example, take Mandarin: It's idiomatic, visual, and carries subtext. So its characteristic form of communication is not about what is being said, but what is NOT being said; it's also what the words you're hearing relate to. In Chinese there are plays on words. To provide an example, Genevieve mentioned the Australian colloquial word for friend is which is "plate." While the surface meaning may be obscure, the derivation brings clarity: There use to be the phrase "China plate." This rhymes with "mate" and thus provides an understanding of why a plate can be a friend (mate).
When dealing with language issues such as these they move us beyond hypertext into metasubtext. How do you encode these things on the web? Think about the situation that exists in many countries where people read the news for what is not said as much as what is said. How can we and do we think about what is NOT said or written?

With so many languages, and so many different characteristics, there is an inevitable incompatibility. Now, multiply this issue out when you consider that each language (at least) will bring a whole different set of cultural references among the users of that language.

Some examples of unusual cultural traditions making their way on the Internet: From Beijing, there are state-sponsored online shines for one's deceased ancestors. In South Korea there is Cyworld (here is the Cyworld US version ): There has been the practice of dressing oneself in actuality based on the appearance of one's avatar.

How do we search for things when they're not in English? How do work the Internet when the reference points are profoundly different? A Chinese search site (for example) is tagged with terms filled with cultural references.

There are different models of connectivity. Video content requires more bandwidth. Different payment structures are evolving.

The Internet is about the value it has for us - whenever we need it. But different modes of satisfaction yield to different payment structures.

How can we explain the popularity of cybercafes in some countries (whereas they seem to not be popular in the US).

Think of the growing size of material that people download. No doubt we'll see an increasing numbers of caps (i.e. maximum size and rate) for downloading, and probably it will become more frequent in future. Think of the United Kingdom and how they are pondering out to fund the upgrading of their Internet connectivity.

The future: you can't expect to rely on the current structure of the Internet (without extra charges for increasing demands on service). Sometimes there is prioritization: the government of India decided that water is a higher priority than the Internet, and has put resources into getting everyone clean water.
Regulating the net: Who else is going to demand a seat a the Internet? Bell told a story of how the Maori of New Zealand have traditionally received a portion of government assets, but with the rise of the Internet, have put out a claim for that too (which the government disagrees about). This story makes a link between citizenship and a right to technology.

This is part of the social regulation side of the Internet. It magnifies social concerns. Researchers at Cornell University found that 100% of those participating in a survey lie about something. Also social "regulation" and "stalking." For the Chinese, the idea of trashing people's reputations is a very serious matter.

Imagine the Internet as not "all that is good" in society, but rather a part of our society: People can be anxious about things unnecessarily. New questions arise: What's the state of my reputation, what's my accessibility, etc. Questions of authenticity, issues about ownership, piracy, and cultural health in general. The question arises: Is the Internet destroying local culture? Bell doesn't believe so, but people still worry. The Independent (UK newspaper - see the picture above) asks: "Does the Internet know too much about you?"

We need more info about ex-users or non-users of the Internet. We need information about those who never used it or stopped using it. Some of this issue is money, but what about other issues?
There are people who want to buy their way out of technology. Vacation destination where it's not possible to connect to the Internet are becoming very popular with people who want to "get away." What is the future of net: We possibly might find those who want to be connected, and those don't and finding how they achieve that.

At the conclusion of her talked, I asked about her position - clearly that of a cultural anthropologist, yet working for Intel. She responded that Intel felt it a necessity to be connected to the rest of the world now and see what's happening in it.

As I look back on the Expo, Genevieve Bell's talk was the best because it stretched our thinking and forced us to look beyond ourselves. Brava, Genevieve!

See also her blog entry: The revolution will be televised and then switched off (April 10, 2007; Blogs@Intel)

Web 2.0 Expo New York: Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0 by Andrew Turner and Mikel Maron

2008-09-22T14:46:00.003-04:00

Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0 presented by Andrew Turner and Mikel Maron.

[At this point in the Expo, nothing looked interesting to me, so I went to this presentation. So much of the information was new that I wasn't quite up on it, but it was a fascinating session anyway, jam-packed with lots of interesting information. Since GPS and mapping is not at all my area of expertise (or knowledge), many of my notes are just transcriptions of their slides. Use them together to come up with explanations. At least you can follow the links to see what kinds of programs they're talking about.]

They've been nice enough to post their presentation promptly:

Trends And Technologies In Where2.0 - Web2 Expo New York

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: lbs location)

Part 1: The state of the geospatial web - presented by Andrew Turner.

Trends in the geoweb - what's really going on locative media and technology. web aligned - KML, etc.

Open data what's building the geoweb. People can gather data on their own. Asides from infrastructure data, every web service is adding geography, even on Flickr - namely Geocodr. It's continually being created [many cellphones and camera include geotagging].

How do you gather all this data together? Mapufacture - mapucommons. Finder.

The speakers felt that user-generated geospatial content is a key to more creation. They noted example of submissions for Hurricaine Katrina.

Another trend: mobile devices have GPS tagging.
Socialight - placemarking with cellphones or other mobile GPS data.
Resulting devices thanks to Google's Android Developers Challenge innovations: Wertago, Life360

Software such as Omnifocus for the Mac, iPhone app: ambient location info can tell you what needs to be done near byou

Urbanspoon can provide you with nearby restaurant recommendations. They hope to understand users more by soliciting reviews.
Mapvertising - geolocation advertising (ways to monetize this new info).
Geomods - urban mapping.

Privacy issues -- geoprivacy? On Flickr - there is casual privacy, and ways to control it to an extent.

Some other developments in geography and the web:
Yahoo's Fire Eagle Platform (here's a press release from PC mag ) - a "trusted location broker," an arbiter of trusted locations.

NeoCartography - company that develops mapping applications.
Everyblock.com - focusing on data on top of street, rather than the street.
Opencycleroute.org - render maps for bicycles, car, etc. seeking accurate depictions of roads
Geocommons maker - project (to launch soon) to help you design your own map.
GeoAnalysis - environmental database management.

Part 2: Technologies - presented by Mikel Maron.

Case study: mapping the 2008 Burning Man event which is "a blank canvas on which to dream and create anything." A single week long social experiment.
They thought it was a good test of Where 2.0: open, collaborative, amateur, cheap, iterative.

Tools for amateur remote sensing:
pictearth.com, diydrones.ning.com, openaerialmap.org

GeoDjango - platform city layout (django is a platforM)
MapWarper - for rectifying online maps
Mapserver - open source tool kit for map making [site was a little buggy when I tried it]
OpenLayers - allows to put a dynamic map on any web page.

In the future:

Pinax for networking [probably means PinaxProject ]
BRC media artifacts are socvial objects
city layout and camp planning tool

GPS mapping and people tracking
mkgmap: osm to garmin maps or cGPSMapper

vehicle tracking

OpenStreetMap
OpenViewProject
Gigapan

..."our new tools will allow us the leverage to pull ourselves up from the ashes and build ourselves anew."

Web 2.0 Expo: Man Versus Machine: The New Conundrum of Web 2.0 Advertising Automation

2008-09-21T11:50:00.002-04:00

Man Versus Machine: The New Conundrum of Web 2.0 Advertising Automation

A panel discussion by David Kidder, of Clickable.com, Max Kalehoff of Clickable.com, Jim Barnett of Turn.com, Mike Kelly of Clearmeadow Partners, Tim Hanlon of Denuo

The first session on Thursday, Sept. 18 of the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York was this session on automation. [i.e. It's recognized that automation is needed to capture information about people's behavior when interacting with the web; the question asks how it should be done.] Since it was a panel discussion there were plenty of digressions which made it difficult to follow the train of thought. These are just my notes and should not be taken as a totally accurate transcription of the session. I'm not sure it makes a coherent picture, but that also would be a reflection of the session.

In the world of Advertising 2.0, what does automation mean? Automation is looking for different criteria that changes advertiser to advertiser - media planning. The media company is looking for yield, which is difficult to forecast accurately.

How to improve inventory without conflicts and how to automate it?

A new industry is built on top of this -- necessary due to its complexity.

Are machines replacing people? Complexity is in the nature of companies. It's time to question these traditional models of advertising. And it's impossible to use traditional methods of planning and assessment. One needs to augment staff with MIT programmers. It's not a replacement but enhancement.

How to go about moving into a 2.0 world? Automation is about performance and response. We're overwhelmed by the volume and diversity of content. How do you manage thousands of sites? One company focuses on search [and others on other specific aspects]. This makes it simpler and drives efficiency.

Where is the greatest friction in the market? Too many factors can defeat you. Marketplace = incumbencies. Additional hurdle: compounding. user experience. behavior.
Bringing simplicity to where the frictions lie. We're on a march toward transparency. The environment becomes clear to seller and buyer whether a marketing technique works or not. Up to now,agency business has been traditionally opaque.

Media publishers now have no control over their inventory (because it's dictated by consumers). They're not sure what's going on. What transparency does to the old way of buying and selling: Transparency can mean different things to different people. Traditionally, supply leads demand. But in the current digital media: demand leads supply. Charging for scarcity of return.
talking about massive amount of non-premium inventory.
If you can find potential return of investment (roi) of inventory all way to impression level.

Transparency: customers want to be able to see performance in real time. You must be able to prove performance. [predicting in advance doesn't really make sense - can be unpredictable.]

What do I do to change my business to be responsive?

Automation. It's a new type of creativity.

Niche marketing is the prevailing view nowadays. You need to create multiple messages for multiple audiences.

Advertisers are no longer are satisfied with just TV reporting because they now see how the web is measured, and it makes TV report look crude. So we have to come up with new ways to measure TV.

We're on the doorstep of a new wave of creativity in understanding how to use the new medium.

Automation - how does it change personal relationships? It doesn't really. There's a diversity of content and variability of performance. To think that automation will take over everything is nonsense. Automation will take over tactical ideas, but not great ideas.

Relationships are still important.

Restructuring of relationships: less people, but smarter and more strategically used people. The down economic market will exacerbate and accelerate this. Classic media companies are disproportionally staffed up. We need fewer people and more systems (and intelligent ways to use them).

Ability to invest in digital assets. What kinds of investments will we see?

*cross-platform - more important.
*advertiser desktop solution - no integrated software that's good.
*display problem
*need investment in new talent models - leave old traditional models
*figuring out connection with agency and performance
*solve friction of finding all enterprise software - giving what client needs, saving time, allows them to do their job well.

Web 2.0 Expo: Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a "2.0" World by Avinash Kaushik

2008-09-21T04:59:00.000-04:00

One of the highlights of the entire Web 2.0 Expo in New York City was Avinash Kaushik's talk (given on the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 17): "Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a '2.0' World." Filled with confidence (i.e. with loads of chutzpah), Avinash, a consultant currently engaged by Google, explained the idea behind web analytics. Again, what follows is my summary of his points which were flying too fast to be captured accurately. Do not take them as the absolute summary of his talk. I assume they are distilled in his book (free copies of which were distributed at the end of his talk.

In the traditional world, there was always a struggle to obtain more data. Today, there is more than enough data on user habits - in fact, so much, that we may not always know what to do with it. There is clickstream (i.e. recording the number of clicks on a web page) but this data does not give much insight into behavior. Why not? Because we don't have all the infomration we need from the interweb. Thus the birth of Web Analytics 2.0.

The aim of Web Analytics 2.0 is to measure more and different things from websites. All the current data is telling you what happened. But these tools are bad at measuring "how much"? Some explanations:

The what: clickstream
The how much: multiple outcomes analysis
the why: experimentation and testing, the voice of the customer (missing from the web today!)
the what else: competitive intelligence and insights

It's about competitive intelligence. If you're not using competitive intelligence data, it's as if you're driving in a car with opaque windows. At Google we use bounce rate. Search engines determine where you are going to enter a website. If you look at your top 20 pages you'll see which ones are the poor ones. It's a question of "sacrificing usability at the alter of sexiness." With Google Analytics you can understand what sends the top ten users and why lower traffic comes to a website. Traditional analytics are about collecting information whereas Google Analytics are about analyzing data and deriving meaning from it.

For example, take a comparison between the web and television: on television you can't track things. But on the web, a viewer's actions can be entirely measured. Indeed, this is how movie studios are producing movies - by seeing how people watch them on the web (as a product of web behavior, which is entirely measurable).

Let's talk about conversion rates. There is macro conversion rates (the transactions of an entire website) and micro conversion (transactions needed to create a action). These are ways to quantify value.

A website must have multiple goals and in analytics, must have many different goals. But you must track your goals. What about the metric of recency? Are you encouraging return visits? You can ask: Why do you exist? If you can say what yo uare trying to do with your website, there's no reason not to be able to measure it.

This gives you a way to understand "the why." It gives customers a real voice. The primitive way of doing this was with surveys - all of which had three questions: Why are you here, were you able to complete your task, and if not, why not? The goal was finding segments of discontent.

[At this point my notes are less focused - Avinash was going a mile a minute and it was hard to keep up with him, especially since I wasn't totally familiar with his terms.]

Avinash collaborated with iPerceptions to create a questionnaire.

Scalable listening. Experimentation and testing. Axiom: Hippos create bad websites. (Hippo = high paid person's opinion.)

Learn to be wrong. Or prove others wrong, fast.

It's irrelevant what web creators want. Let the customers tell you what works through use of analytics. Don't guess or impose - partner with them. Competitive intelligence will enable you to benchmark expertise. Instead of "ready, aim, fire!" you'll be able to say: "research, target, fire!"

Learn your targeted keywords. Study Google Insights For Search. But you need a holistic view to understand all of people's behavior with regard to a website. We're still far away from it.

Web 2.0 Expo: Web 2.0 and the Reinvention of Marketing and PR - Brian Solis

2008-09-21T04:06:00.002-04:00

Brian Solis of FutureWorks had the last morning session on Wednesday, Sept. 17 of the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York City. Here are my notes of his main points (and not necessarily a neat prose rendition). As always, these should not be taken as an exact transcription of his words.

He pointed out that Web 2.0 is more of a dialog than a broadcast medium. He dared to ask rhetorically: "When was the last time a press release worked for you?" Web 2.0 has created a new era of tools, channels, communities, and methodologies to connect with and cultivate relationships and influence. (This has resulted in a realization: public relationships people aren't the most popular people in marketing. )

Web 2.0 is the social web where anyone can facilitate conversations. It's the democratization of information with the potential to transform people. Today, markets are conversations - read about it in The Cluetrain Manifesto. You engage them through conversation; if you attempt direct control, they remove you from their radar. Markets are not conversations and are cyclical. They're driven by the voice of the people. Controlling the message is no longer a goal, because every conversation with consumers is an opportunity.

Everyone contributes to the definition of a brand. The perception of a brand is the sum of all conversations. How do you define influence? You need new metrics for a new era of public relations. How Web 2.0 redefines the landscape: through curation, content creation, forums, blogs, social networks, new influences, events, and traditional media. Public relations is no longer defined by "hits' (on a website), because Web 2.0 creates many new opportunities. Now, the "conversation index" is the new form of measurement: videos, podcasts, tweets, etc.

And they're trackable: A conversation index indicates your placement, status, ranking, perception, and participation in social media. The roadblocks are that some marketing people are perceived as "not getting it." They belong to the "sell rather than tell" school of thought. But today it's a new world of public relations and marketing. We're no longer the sole content creators, but should just be part of the community. It requires a new hybrid form of marketeer.

What are the qualifications for this new kind of marketeer? Empathy, market exposure, understanding the competitive landscape, relevant stories, benefits, true intentions, customer approach, observance of online cultures, and experience with social tools. This all sounds like common sense but should not be underestimated.

There are new rules for "breaking news." Be wary of bloggers, because they don't adhere to the same rules of traditional press. They want scoops. The rule guiding this landscape is: less is more. So identify a list of newsmakers and build relationships with them.

The Magic Middle and the Long Tail

Today we're in a world of social media, conversational marketing and word-of-mouth marketing. The key is people - they are what makes something viral. None are rooted in old-style broadcast, i.e. one-way marketing. Who's responsible for participating? Everyone -- including you.

We must become sociologists in order to become participants. How do we listen? Through the conversation prism -- everywhere where conversations are taking place.

But how does this translate into delivering value to communities? You must participate, have conversations. Humanize our story (and beware of what not to do). Conversational marking is not a campaign. It must be done every day.

New elements are introduced into public relations for measuring return of investment and success -- web analytics are useful for this.

It's about how to change the way we are perceived. The public relations/marketing world of today is about less noise, and more listening. You are the brand: respect the communities and they will respect you. Ultimately, companies get the relationships they deserve.

After the main part of the talk, an audience member, responsible for maintaining decorum in his online community, asked how do deal with constant complaints. Brian retorted with a smart answer: "How does Batman sleep at night?" One does what one can.

Be a champion of your brand. Invite others to lunch in order to proselytize . Find champions in your company.

I was particularly taken when, at one point in the talk, Brian said: "Research librarians are better than marketing directors." (Meaning that their depth of knowledge is richer.) Bravo.

Web 2.0 Expo: Viral Marketing 2.0 with Jonah Peretti

2008-09-18T23:29:00.021-04:00

The second talk I attended on Wednesday, September 17 was “Viral Marketing 2.0” by Jonah Peretti. Little did I realize he is already a well-known "star" in market research and his talk was well attended. He went extremely fast and I couldn't capture any pics of him (his hair is brown or black, not red as in the Wikipedia photograph) or of his presentation slides which whizzed by.

The core concept of his talk: the Bored At Work Network (BWN). Some facts (as seen by Peretti):

Millions are bored office workers, ready to share media, blog post and instant messaging all day
The BWN is bigger than CBS, NBC, or any traditional media network
The BWN is a decentralized network that enables media to go viral if ordinary people enjoy sharing it.

The old broadcast model is simple and reassuring – broadcaster is at the center and decides what's important and what's popular. (Examples: television, newspapers, and similar one-way media.)

The new networked world is confusing, counterintuitive: BWN decides what is popular, so it’s a more complex thing to understand. (Perhaps even irrational.)

What can make something popular on the web? The key research is: Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation by Duncan J. Watts, Peter Sheridan Dodds (Journal of Consumer Research, December 2007). There are no movers and shakers, or “special influence people” who can make something popular. Rather, the network decides what is popular.

A network structure is more important than influence. Whether or not something spreads depends mostly on network structure. If a network permits diffusion, anyone can start something and if not, no one can. Some examples of diffusion: forest fires, early Facebook apps (the platform was perfect for spreading applications), blogs, embarrassing homemade videos, etc. Compare these phenomena to viral marketing. Why videos? Because of YouTube’s existence – it’s a platform that allows the spread.

Hindsight bias. Beware of people’s recollections of what happened:

after the fact, influential people seem like the key factor (aggrandizement)
East Village hipsters wore lots of ridiculous clothes besides hush puppies
Jeff Jarvis complained about many things on his blog besides Dell

The problem with hindsight bias is that it is not repeatable in the future. If not repeatable, then it’s less interesting because it means it's something one can do with consistency.

Key research: the music lab experiment:

subjects are shown a grid with mp3s from unknown bands
they choose, listen, rate, and download favorites
behavior is tracked in several different worlds to measure social influence.

The results of this experiment shows that people don't know what they like

different songs were popular in different worlds – no consistent hits
social influence increased inequality and unpredictability
best songs never do badly and the worst never excel but all other results happened

So the big problem is radical unpredictability (sounds like Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational)

the latest research shows that we can't predict who can make something popular or what will become popular
the web is confusing, counter-intuitive and unpredictable
So: how do we succeed on the web despite this?

Solution no. 1: Contagious Media

Make something that ordinary people want to share with each other
Make it easy to understand, easy to share, and include a social imperative
Make media perfect for the BWN

Examples: The New York Times’s list of articles most shared and most blogged – shows behavioral patterns of ordinary people.
Another example: Nike sweatshop email story

Nike offers to custom-print a word on sneakers, so Peretti ordered a pair of Nikes customized with the word “sweatshop” (i.e. so that the sneaks would read “Nike Sweatshop” – unflattering to company)
After some back-and-forth, Nike rejected Peretti’s request
Peretti then forwarded the exchange to a few friends – who continued to forward it until the email led to a viral cascade – and became legendary on the Internet.

Compare these: People dedicate their life to fighting for human rights whereas Peretti did not even know much about the sweatshop issue. In the first case people deliberately try, whereas Peretti didn’t even have to try and yet got more coverage.

Another example: BlackPeopleLoveUs.com. Bogus website that nevertheless developed following of those who thought it was racist and those who didn’t.

The lessons he draws from this are:

The BWN trumps influentials
The BWN network creats its own influentials

The limits of contagious media: most things are not viral. Contagious media is usually silly, free, shocking, simple – for BWN. (For example: the Montauk Monster, or other things on BuzzFeed.com).

(See article: Viral Marketing For The Real World – by Duncan Watts And Jonah Peretti)

Solution 2: Big Seed Marketing

l small seeds lead to failure

l but subviral growth is still growth

l big seeds lead to successs

l examples; Proctor & Gamble, Oxygen,

(see article: http://cdg.columbia.edu/uploads/papers/watts2007_viralMarketing.pdf )

Tide Cold Water campaign. by making it sharable and social, it increased penetration.

World of mouth without tipping points.

Solution 3: Multi-Seed Marketing

l try lots o creative ideas- no one can predict what will be popular

l test to see what's working using real data

l big seede the stuff that is worki9ng

l more data enables more creativity

BuzzFeed.com tracks these viral feeds

Solution no. 4: Mullet Strategy – (a mullet is a haircut cropped in front but long in back)

Businesss upfront, and party in the back - use this as a webstrategy

Example: Huffington Post: real news upfront, and crazy stuff in the back.

An editor's view of huffington post: you can analyze it immediately, know how many clicks and how often people visit.

The power of mullets

l the front always looks sharp

l no need to find influentials and predic thte future, just let good stuff bubble up

l other examples: YouTube, MySpace, Digg

Solution no. 5: personality disorders

The web is ruled by fanatics like Perez Hilton, Ron Paul, Apple fans, , blog commenters, animal lovers, and other crazy people.

Examples (a catalog of personality disorders in real life that inhabit the Internet):

histrionic/narcissistic personality disorder – great for bloggers!

obsessive-compulsive persoality disorder (wikipedia, online games, del.icio.us, etc.)

and so on.

If we had more time, we could discuss other disorders such as paranoid, schizoid, antisocial, etc.

Learn advertising from this humorous example: Jews vs. Mormons

While Judaism may be a quality religion, quality has nothing to do with it. Quality is extra constraint and liability. Instead, learn from the Mormons:

l quality is not a growth strategy

l make evangelism core of your strategy

l focus on the mechanics of how an idea spreads, not the idea itself

Conclusion: This is what is Viral Marketing 2.0

Contagious Media – make media that works for the BWN

Big-Seed Marketing – do viral marketing without needing elusive tipping points

Multi-Seed Marketing – try many ideas and optimzie on the fly (think of BuzzFeed.com)

Here’s another summary of the session:

http://mashraqi.com/2008/09/viral-marketing-20.html

Web 2.0 Expo: Customer Service is the New Marketing - Lane Becker

2008-09-17T19:23:00.017-04:00

On Wednesday, September 17, I focused on the marketing thread of the Web 2.0 Expo in here New York. The first session I attended was Customer Service is the New Marketing given by Lane Becker. (Again, this is just my subjected summary and should not be taken as a literal or accurate transcription of Lane Becker's words, although the picture above is him.)

He reiterated what's been said many times in reference to Web 2.0: it's all about customer service. And he should know: he's set up the website http://getsatisfaction.com where anyone can talk about any company or any product (their motto: "People-Powered Customer Service For Absolutely Anything!").

He then proceeded to an example: the online shoe store zappos.com. From its outset this store has focused all its efforts on customer service. This is apparent at every level of the organization. At its core, it is focused on customer service. Most companies can't afford to throw everything into customer service. But at Zappos, new employees must have FOUR WEEKS of customer service training, and must spend one week in the "call center" helping customers. It doesn't matter what level of the organization you are: all employees, from bottom to the top, must have at least one week of customer service. This training when you are hired, and for at least one week every year.

Becker then brought up Maslow's Hierarchy of Customer Service:
The bottom line of this hierarchy is that one creates evangelism through meeting unrecognized needs. In other words, customer service = growth; customer loyalty = profits.

So - what kind of company are you?

Customer focused (like Zappos, Four Seasons, or Craigslist)?
Product-focused (e.g. Apple, Google, etc.)?
Infrastructure-focused (most telecommunications companies)?

What about the rest of us - what can we do? Becker's solution: Learn to be like a hotel concierge. Here are some of their secrets:

Put conversations at the center of your business
Reduce your sphere of control to increase sphere of influence
Smash the silos that exist between your business and the world around it

No. 1: "Markets are conversations." This is the philosophy of the Cluetrain Manifesto. But normally we keep the customers out of the organizational conversation. There are limited channels for conversing with the public, because we've not developed effective ways to have conversations with them. In most companies, when you think of customers, you think of customer avoidance. Examples of how to kill conversations: outsourcing your call center (especially overseas or to a country whose first language is not English), FAQs (are they really designed to help people, or just relieve staff of answering questions), ticket systems (when someone has encountered trouble - most systems are aimed at getting rid of tickets, rather than genuinely helping people). Even on help desk phones: the aim is to reduce staff time on phone, not to really help people.

Rather, friction-free communication is the new norm. There are many venues of communications. It's easy to talk to friends, but it's hard to talk to companies.

Examples of the reversed trend: the company Timbuk2 - a San Francisco-based company that makes bags. They embraced the web and had one person charged with figuring out ways to talk to customers. That's what her job is entirely about. She set out to discover where are customers talking. She found a Flickr group called What's In Your Bag? It was a fad that caught on in Flickr where people emptied out their bags, arranged its contents on a table, photographed it, and uploaded it to Flickr. So the Timbuk2 staff member noticed a large number of bags were from her company! Thus she identified a valuable thing for her company. In fact, they no longer focus on professional photography but use examples from Flickr to show their products.

Becker had a cute story about a potential Timbuk2 customer wanting a diaper bag (appropriate for a nursing mother). They don't make such bags, but based on what other people had done, the customer service rep was able to advise the customer on how to accessorize her bag so that it would function for a a mother nursing a baby.

These stories exemplify reaching out and talking to customers. Understand the language used by the customers - the way they see it - and translate it. This avoids pushing business jargon on them.

No. 2: "Reduce sphere of control." Engage your evangelists. Reduce your sphere of control to increase your sphere of influence. The example of Comcast was cited, particularly the culture around the website and phrase of Comcast Sucks (http://www.comcastsucks.org/). At one time they were avoiding conversations with customers.

Comcast thought: what if we took 5 people and charged them with customer engagement (giving them a name and a Twitter site: Comcast Cares). This is the work of Frank Eliason, to reach out and engage customers. He functions like the concierge. Frank can identify where traditional customer support channels are not working or where they are breaking down.

It's an opportunity to reach into the business and manage the social mood of Comcast. But it also changes ideas about the way Comcast views itself. These conversations have the potential to change the company - don't underestimate the internal impact.

No. 3: "Smash the silos." Example of a silo: the internal company response: "It's not our problem." Becker brought the example of the day on Twitter that Nokia wasn't working. An incompatibility existed between Nokia and T-Mobile, resulting in a lost of connectivity. Nokia didn't diagnose it -- it was the customers who figured out what was wrong. They flooded T-Mobile and forced them to address the problem. On its own, Twitter would not have been able to diagnose and fix the problem as fast.

Take an open approach to customers - there are more of them than you. Let them harness applications to get a sense of what works and what doesn't work.

Customer service in the form of ongoing conversations is the way the world is going. Companies have to get on board. A good example: Apple, and its stores' "Genius Bar."

And always ask yourself: What would a concierge do?

Web 2.0 Expo: what's a librarian doing there?

2008-09-17T19:21:00.000-04:00

If I may interrupt summaries of the Web 2.0 Expo briefly:

Regular readers (and colleagues) may wonder - what does all this have to do with librarianship? In my opinion this is all directly related to librarianship. We are a business like any other (the differences between non-profit and profit are disappearing fast). Everything at the Expo can be applied to us, to the way we work and relate to the people around us. Especially because I feel my employer could use more information on marketing, I chose to go to many of those sessions. Hopefully my reports will be influential to other librarians (as well as anyone browsing the web for the subjects or people I've covered).

Web 2.0 Expo: Communities That Connect and Thrive

2008-09-16T14:10:00.014-04:00

The first session I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo was

Three hours in length, their session had a mix of interactive break-out sessions and lecture sessions. After a brief intro, we broke up into groups - their method was to divide attendees by month of birth, so it was a good way to get to know people and break the ice. My group was the October, from which we informally selected Chrissie Brodigan (formerly of the Huffington Post) to faciliate and be our spokesperson. We brainstormed for characteristics of (online) social communities and came up with: sharing stories, having (social) purpose, community causes, support, dependency, community interests, effecting change, shared history, open communities, outlet, safety, belonging, collaboration, personal relationships. In the pic below, Chrissie reports on our brainstorming to the rest of those assembled. (Interestingly, not all groups identified the same characteristics; some were more aggressive in their attitude towards others.)

In learning to work with each other, Kelly & Gossieaux reminded us of Clay Shirky's comment to the effect of: "A group is its own worst enemy."

Each one of the groups summarized their characterizations of social communities. It was interesting to point out that not all saw perfect harmony among participants, and that some communities were based on an ongoing debate.) They referred us to Beeline Lab's Tribalization Report (one has to register on their website to see it).

They characterized the subject as "tribalization" and quoted Wikipedia: "Tribalism is the very first social sysmte that human beings ever lived in..." They characterized the motivations for socialization as:

People want to connect with people
People want to help and be helped
People operate in either a social framework, or market framework.

Further, they see 4 building blocks as part of the social network: content, members, member profiles, and transactions, and posited this interrelated axiom:

The more content you have, the more members you will get;
The more members you have, the more content you will get;
The better you match content and members to member profiles the more members and content you will get; and
The easier it is to do transactions the more members you will attract.

Among their top usage scenarios were "canary in a coal mine" and long-tail sales - kind of extremities of the market.

Who's in charge? was one of their questions. Most communities wind up reporting to the head of marketing. So they discussed several takeaway points:

Takeaway #1: The community delivers game changing results (example: Ebay's support communities resulted in their bringing in 50% more customers). It's getting the community involved in the processes. A community can amplify, increase effectiveness and decrease costs.

Takeaway #2: The changing role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). As example they cited Ducati which eliminated their CMO and left all marketing to be done by their online community.

Takeaway #3: The need for new management thinking. If there's a mismatch between community goals and what management invests in, things won't work. So management has to really understand what to measure. This goes against the dictum "Build it and they will come." They reject that, and suggest to start small and limited, to see how the community receives it.

The provided some case studies: first, Walmart Moms - how Walmart selected 11 mothers who epitomized use of their product. But then they spoke about Fiskars's Fisk-A-Teers - 3 "ambassadors" who serve as the generators and conduit to the rest of the community.

They spoke about the Tivo community which is entirely separate from the product Tivo, but that the product people were still listening and taking suggestings from the community about improving the product. Even Lilly in dealing (delicately) with their community chose not to refer to their drug as a cure for the disease, but rather portrayed it as a way to restore regular patterns of life while coping with the disease.

To get started use the SAM formula:

Strategize, Activate, Manage to scale

We then broke into our "monthly" groups again for about 25 minutes and each was given one of 3 projects to work on - an aerospace firm, a theater company, and a toy company. Our October group came up with the title Fundawhere - a fictional community where 8-12 year olds could share knowledge, reviews and other stuff concerning the toys their owned. It was a good exercises in trying to actualize what we just heard.

Once the lecture resumed, Lois and François discused obstacles. (I'm not sure I them but they'll be on their Powerpoint presentation on Slideshare.net.) Some additional notes are these: One should have "more McKinsey, less McCann" (referring to market specialists' philosophies). Be simple: show the data, the trends, and examples. Be frank about the challenges and readiness. Frame the values to business function of goals and aspirations.

Lois was particularly influenced by Rob Kozinets's article E-Tribalized Marketing. The five common obstacles marketers face:

What's the business value? Lack of a strategy roadmap
Appealing to all of our customers and prospects
Fear of failure
Who's job is it anyhow?
What if you build it and no one comes? and (extra):
What is the right tech platform?

They made an interesting point, that companies that seek to create social communities of their workforce are doomed to fail because: the workers are being paid to work; their not being paid to form social communities. (They referred to Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational.)

But they summed up by saying that the social and tribal behavioral movement is part of business strategy. Content matters more than technology (well, in this context). They predicted that most companies will have community groups associated with them in just a few years.

Thereafter people asked questions for nearly 30 minues. Some of them:

Q. How to deal with trolls in the community?
A. Either a strong moderator/facilitator, or let the community cleanse itself of these disruptive people.

Q. Speak more about tribalization.
A. A focus on technology will not guide your community to success (they showed examples of communities that did not "take").

I found it a valuable session. A person I chatted with found it limited, as the speakers were speaking theoretically. She wanted to see the succcess they had with clients. Indeed, they did not mention any that they had.

IgniteNYC: intro to the Web 2.0 Expo

2008-09-15T23:44:00.008-04:00

On Monday evening, Sept. 15, the reception IgniteNYC served as the kick-off for the Web 2.0 Expo. Never having been to one of these things, I wasted my time coming early and having no one to talk to. I couldn't even figure out who to talk to, because most attendees were attending the New York TV Festival -- NYTVF (you can tell from all the media sponsors's logos seen in the picture above). Part of the "social" aspect of the event was a cupcake decorating contest (you can see the "winners" in the lower left corner of the picture above).

This IgniteNYC post describes who gave talks in pecha kucha style: each person could have a maximum of 20 slides, running at 15 seconds each. Some seemed barely relevant to the theme of the expo, such as those dealing with cupcakes (come on, who can eat them, with such an overload of sugar?), magic at the Democratic National Convention (whatever my political leanings, what did this have to do with Web 2.0?).

But some of the talks were interesting. Raffi Krikorian's holmz.com facilitates self-monitoring of energy consumption, Sam Lessin gave a wake up call to how we view our privacy in today's world, and Don Carli spoke about the carbon footprint of all our computer issues (making one realize that anyone who espouses "green" attitudes and uses a computer is a hypocrite). Some were amusing: Deb Schultz's "Alley vs. Valley" was a spot-on comparison of working in New York City versus working in San Francisco, Andrew Schneider's experimental devices for performance might really have a chance - maybe not the projection of lips on someone else (it reminded me of the 1960s cartoon Space Angel), but the sneaker devices that generated rhythm, not to mention the wrist things that could produce a variety of sound effects. (Broadway: watch out! Or maybe Fringe festivals...)

I found the most interesting talks coming from Audacia Ray and Jennifer Pahlka. Ray spoke about the relationship of pornography to innovation. She pointed out that porn was in part responsible for the adoption of VCR (over Betamax), since there was more porn available in that medium (despite Betamax's better quality). Ray characterized the porn industry as one that was run by the stakeholders, but that recent developments on the Internet - namely a more socialized world - had challenged that. Now there are a number of sites where users can upload their own porn stills and videos -- so who needs the companies that produce the stuff? In fact, she said, many people prefer to watch, comment, and interact with each other's porn through these websites than the impersonal ones of big companies. In this way, they are fulfilling the web 2.0 dictum of interrelating with one another. Watch for ongoing changes in this industry.

Jennifer Pahlka's talk was humorous and more. Entitled Technology Anxiety: Jello and Web 3.0, she used the metaphor of cooking for showing the development of technology. She compared utilitarian cookbooks of the post-World War II era to beginnings in technology. She showed advertisements that tried to portray stoves and ovens as new devices where one just pushed a single button that would create a finished meal - just like promises of technology. Continuing in this vein, she showed that a little bit of cooking knowledge could create some really awful confections from those who didn't know how to cook, just as it had in the technology world among those less creative or innovative. In speaking of the threat or fear that some have of web 3.0 (which was characterized as a world that would leave us out), she made a funny metaphor to Jello sculptures, where one could put in all sorts of food within the Jello and have it magically "work" simply because of the medium of Jello. She warned us about having such illusions in the Web 2.0 world. Very nice.

It would have been nicer if the presentations were vetted a bit more and were a bit more releavant, but I guess the mood was to party with beer (served on the house) and cupcakes.

Wikipedia and the community

2008-09-06T23:31:00.005-04:00

Most people I know (including librarians) don't like Wikipedia. Some people complain about the uneven quality of articles, while others even more vociferously object to policies which they perceive as bordering on facism. There is a great deal of truth in both of these criticisms, and yet, loads of people use Wikipedia. I use it as part of work sometimes, because it's a fast and easy way to find information which I know I can supplement with more authoritative sources. (I also find there is lots not to like.)

Information Today has an article on the phenomenon, Putting the Library in Wikipedia by Lauren Pressley and Carolyn J. McCallum. The authors go further than other writings I've seen. They say we've got to embrace Wikipedia, because library websites are losing hits since no one suspects there to be much content on them. Thus we should put our content on Wikipedia - and goes on to describe an abortive attempt with a lesson.

I've been a strong voice of the same feeling, not because I feel our websites are under-visited (although I'm sure they are), but because by getting ourselves entrenched in Wikipedia, we can better direct information about our unique holdings. I've systematically put in entries for our many archival collections in the appropriate articles, and on a few occasions, have created articles so I can include mention of an important collection. (While the individuals may not necessarily be important, what is important are the links to and from other articles. That is what raises the significants of topics - just ask Google.) Some of the information I've put there are the products of research done in response to reference questions.

Oddly, when I've tried to suggest engaging Wikipedia on e-mail lists of musicologists and music theorists I get either no comment, or agreement without any follow-up. One anonymous Wikipedian began a WikiProject devoted to music theory. Even though I announced it on the list of the Society for Music Theory, SMT-TALK, which has over 1,000 people interested in music theory (including many students), not a single one of them signed up.

Why the lack of interest? I think it has less to do with the idiosyncracies of the Wikipedian community and more to do with the vacuum in which certain types of professions operate. If I may resort to armchair psychology: music people need to spend a lot of time just listening and thinking about music (not to mention practicing instruments). It is not a profession that easily welcomes external forces. So I suspect the lack of Wikipedia engagement reflects a more troubling aspect of the practitioners of the music profession.

I don't have enough experience serving the (non-music) academic population at large, but I suspect that this isolationist behavior is typical of many academic fields of study. It's easy not bothering to look up additional sources or citations. As librarians, it's in our interest to counteract this apathy and closemindedness by reaching out and populating places like Wikipedia.

RBMS and the Future: Quo Vadis

2008-08-12T00:01:00.005-04:00

Although I don't have any more detailed notes on sessions of the RBMS pre-conference, the issue of capturing the information has turned up on RBMS's email list (I've been a participant in the discussion). There are competing issues:

1. RBMS should use new technologies to extend the reach of the sessions, especially for those who can not afford to attend, and those who are not physically able to attend (e.g. web casts, pod casts, posting of slides, etc.)

However,

2. If new technologies are used, will that reduce the number of attendees at RBMS (and reduce the value of getting vendors)?

Being a relatively new member (only about 3 years, although this was my first pre-conference) while I'm concerned about attendance, the librarian in me wants to share information with everyone. There are numerous people in the world (not just librarians) who could benefit from at least seeing the PowerPoint presentations (I already argued that all of them should be made available on Slideshare). It is my belief that RBMS (and the field) will grow if the group expands its reach.

Of course, a main problem is the attitude "we've never done this before." And "we have to ask ALA for permission to change anything." (Those of you who are avid readers of Michael Stephens' Tame The Web blog will recognize the problems with these attitudes.)

Although others on the RBMS e-mail list have formulated the second issue, I think it's more complex. For the last 2 years, RBMS has capped their attendance at about 300 people. Fortunately this year they expanded to 350. Next year they plan on 400. It sounds good, yet they are worried about losing people. What they have not addressed is that when you have more people in attendance, you need bigger spaces which cost more. So as the pre-conference grows, it's still going to wind up costing more (which potentially will alienate the "younger" people, or those with out money or subventions).

But my feeling is that the RBMS pre-conference has to evolve. So many of the presentations are "unnecessary" in the sense that they are "stand-and-deliver" papers. Why not foster more interactivity, more exchange? If it's just a one-way flow of information, isn't such information more appropriate to a publication or blog? (And it's sad that the group's publication, RBM, is issued on a yearly basis. We'll be seeing these June 2008 presentations in published form around May 2009 - an unbelievably long time.)

The Ephemeral Archives blog (to which I'm an infrequent contributor) has already taken notice in a post, Old School, New School? which characterizes the conflicting forces - those who wants a more open and transparent organization, and those who feel obliged to ask permission of the parent organization, ALA, before taken one step.

Fortunately, some of the presenters have posted their PowerPoint presentation to Slideshare:

Karen Calhoun (OCLC): Metadata 2.0, Glocalization, and Being Where Their Eyes Are: What's So Special About Special Collections?

Barbara Taranto (NYPL): Selection: It's Not Just About Curators Anymore

Kathleen Burns (Yale University): Blog Boot Camp: A Primer in Blogging for Special Collections Staff

So - three small steps at opening up the RBMS pre-conference and reaching a larger audience.

RBMS Plenary Session 6: Into The Future

2008-08-09T23:00:00.004-04:00

[Although I had my computer with me, it was extremely difficult taking notes on the first talk by Peter B. Kaufman, because he spoke like a television montage: tons of references cascading in a montage of things and ideas that get you all excited and make you forget the issue at hand. Nevertheless, what follows is what I could transcribe - it reads more like notes or a bullet list rather than prose.]

These words should not to be taken as an exact transcriptions of what was said. I take responsibility for any errors of transmission.

Friday, June 27

1. Peter B. Kaufman, president and CEO of Intelligent Television.
[See also his article Video, education, and open content: Notes toward a new research and action agenda which includes many of the points mentioned in his talk below.]

Libraries are critical to the health of the country as a liberal democracy.
The fourth estate [i.e. journalism and the commercial press] is bankrupt; [commercial] media has succumbed to trends that imperil freedom and democracy.

But public media is online and truth is available. While everything you do is based on a variety of decisions, ultimately what you do is based on your own freedom and that of our society. In this context, digitization is a moral imperative.

Libraries are producers. See Archibald MacLeish article from 1939, on libraries and culture. [probably: Libraries in the Contemporary Crisis, 1939]

Libraries are becoming involved with their communities. Columbia University is getting involved with its community, witness its interest in the Apollo Theater. [? I couldn't find any connection between Columbia and the Apollo. Maybe Kaufman just meant part of Harlem, which is a faulty point since Columbia is claiming eminent domain because it wants to build in that area; many residents are antagonistic to the idea.]

Libraries are spending more money than television on making their video available.

See The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority by Michael Jenson (Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2008) for a list of new trends.

Growth of mobile devices: mobile phone are poised to replace the computer as main route to get online.

I encourage you to engage video. Video is where the action is. Growth of video recording occurs across the board. There is growing online demand for moving images. Cisco Systems predicts growth of 30% of downloads in 2008 to 50% by 2010.

Video is the new vernacular. See: On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt.

When you make your videos, engage a tv and film production crew, because they have the know-how of video techniques - they know what works.

Librarians are needed because they have to explain how to render material searchable.

In this context I recommend you re-read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

2. Jackie Dooley, Head of Special Collections and University Archives, University of California-Irvine.

Is there a moral imperative to digitize? Focus on value of the objects. Here is a list of 10 things to consider in digitization.

The Ten Commandments of Digitization:

1. Embrace the technological continuum of the book
2. Find yourself - why you love your work and what you bring to do it, and how it translates into the digital world
3. Digitize with abandon. Think wholesale vs. retail - not digitizing pages from a book, but the entire book. We need to stop doing the scholars' work
4. Educate yourself about the born digital
5. Make your work economically sustainable. (Forget item level description)
6. Follow the archivists' lead: Are there rare book parallels to "more product, less process?"
7. Make your data promiscuous: expose metadata and digital content
8. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
9. Revere the knowledge and opinions of the young
10. Pro-actively define our collective future

It's our [special collections libraries] time to join the centrality of the digital experience.
Should we think about shared rare book collections? You need to give priority to preserving some things, and not others.

Digital will not go away; on the contrary it will become central to what we do.

Think of Star Trek metaphor: the computer that told them whatever they want. That's what we want, the full knowledge of human experience.

Among the respondents of Merrilee Proffitt of OCLC (RLG Programs) who encouraged everyone to "digitize wildly and beat out Maury Povich and junk tv."

RBMS Plenary Session 5: If We Build It, Will They Come?

2008-08-08T13:07:00.004-04:00

Before the fifth plenary session, there were some words concerning next year's RBMS pre-conference: It'll be a RBMS 50th anniversary conference celebration with a program devoted to nostalgia: "Seas of change: navigating cultural and institutional contexts of special collections." It'll be a critical look at where we have been, where we are, and where we are going, combined with self-examination. RBMS hopes to have new and emerging voices at the pre-conference, including new librarians, those with career changes, and underrepresented librarians.

As in my previous posts, the words following are not to be taken as an exact transcription of the speakers' presentations. There's no guarantee that I captured their words and at times, I was only able to get notes. I take responsibility for any errors.

RBMS Plenary Session 5: If We Build It, Will They Come?
Friday, June 27

Before proceeding with the 2 speakers, the session began with an introductory quote from Albert Manguel's A History of Reading:

It is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is out essential function...reading is at the beginning of the social contract.

1. Medieval Manuscripts and Digital Approaches - Matthew Fisher, Department of English, UCLA.
Let's take a trip down digital memory lane. In the early history of the web, medieval stuff was more elusive. An example of one page left from early digitization efforts in 1993: A brief description, and an isolated image - that's it.

The idea of a library exhibition is very interesting, but requires lots of time and resources, but presents a disconnect.

Catalogs are by no means are complete; they're not crowd pleasers. Medieval manuscripts are also elusive in catalogs, which often depend on titles, dates, and authors -- exactly those identifying traits that many medieval manuscripts lack. In the British Library catalog not all manuscripts come up when one knows that institution has them (e.g. BL and Piers Ploughman). Also consider the difficulty of locating them in a catalog because earlier English has letters that are not translatable to today's language. (He showed examples.)

Today we have things such as the Digital Scriptorum (a consortium project), an image database of images of medieval manuscripts. In a questionnaire showing user needs, the results showed that people seek specific manuscripts, and are looking for information in the script, although the site is for images. In the digital environment, text = digital text, i.e. that which can be searched. We're accepting the limitation of OCR of early medieval prints (which look like handwriting). The expectations of what can be done limits what scholars can do with them.

But most digital projects involving medieval manuscripts are like tearing leaves from books: the text is struck through and you're left with a catchword (which admittedly can be a fascinating study). But what about scholars whose interest is in alterations of the text? How does one encode such emendations and corrections in the digital environment? It leads to the question: What is the subject: the text, or the corrections?

As a pedagogical resource, these digital images are a godsend. The access they give is also a good thing. Is digital access to selections of a manuscript just a precursor to physical object? If so, why are we engaging in these objects?

The [name of unidentified project] is a catalog of digitized medieval manuscripts, a project of UCLA and Fisher. [See UCLA's Center For Medieval and Rennaissance Studies project page for more projects.]

Who knows what scholar is doing at any time? This is important information to find out, and scholars can't find it out. Just trying to provide access points to medieval manuscripts out there is a problem in itself (official library access points versus the access point needed and desired by the scholarly community). On this [unnamed project] there is no federated search, because Fisher prefers not.

CERL Portal - contains manuscripts and dearly printed material, but has logged in only 2,000 visitors. It requires catalogs to be in an OAI format (to communicate with other websites and portals).

What about research using digital collections? People can do what they want with them, despite what metadata a library provides. There's an issue of imposing limitations on what can be done. Why not have manuscripts in OAI? Why not allow users to provide links, tags, search on their own [user-generated] terms. Why not allow mash-ups, e.g. as the way people use Google maps [i.e. combining Google maps with other applications]. He wants to see mashups of medieval manuscripts. It's a way to foster dialog between patrons and keepers.

2. Strategies for teaching and research - Stephen Davison (Head, UCLA Digital Program):
He spoke about the Digital Library Program at UCLA. Their aims include:

creating digital collections
looking for synergies with research, teaching, ahd learning
digital preservation
development of access and use tools standards
fostering cooperative projects: campus, statewide, national, international

What are we building within digital projects? Some? All? The "important" parts? Should we digitize complete objects or logical groupings? Should we produce a mirror of a physical collection or some other artificial grouping?

Whatever they may be, digital objects (whether items or fragments) are an important aspect of collection development.

What about the finding aid - should we tie to it, or provide another means of access? Some examples are: OAC (Online Archive of California), and CALISPHERE
(These sites provide different windows for different audiences of a single digital collection.)

Who are the collections for? The saying goes "will they come?" But who are they? (Concerning the Sheet Music Consortium, we've made assumptions of who uses it, but we're not sure; we are trying to design methods to discover who is using it.

There are methods where we can obtain feedback on our digital collections:

digitization requests
offers of metadata
personal communications
legal communications
statistics

Digitization vs. digital projects. Providing access vs. providing service layers. [The new standard for OAI - protocol for digital exchange).

Currently we offer conventional access to digital files, usually through library catalogs. But we need to start thinking about web 2.0 features - using users to provide more information, more features, e.g. making guides more wiki-like, ability to tag, annotate, recombine, and do mash-ups. This upload of digital content by users will lead to the creation of new knowledge and understanding.

Popular culture is now a big focus of web 2.0 ideas - e.g. Frontera Collection of Mexican-American music (sound recordings).
(Topics related to American Orientalism - i.e. diverse populations in the US - are also popular.)

What about mass digitization of special collections? Some issues:

a matter of time and money
there should be careful digitization on a grand scale
there are parallels to microfilm; but
digitization is for broad access; it's not yet considered a mode of preservation

Aspects of digital library services:

digitization occurs on demand
provides access to details available in the master image not available to unaided eye
feature web 2.0 attributes
makes metadata harvestable
encourages the "resue and exchange" of information

Proactive digitization (UCLA plans)

Digitization can foster scholarly collaborations. Some examples:

There are some digitization issues here. A good example: Cuneiform tablets are not just text, but are three dimensional objects, making their digitization problematic. It's an issue that's being wrestled in the digital worlds of libraries versus museums.

With the Hypercities project (and others), Stephen foresees the growth of cooperative digitization and metadata harvesting among various institutions.

Elements of the virtual research environment:

web 2.0 tools
collaboration, or not, as needed (small working groups classes, open to public)
gathering and sharing of metadata and/or digital objects
publishing

In the question and answer period following the talks, Terry Belanger spoke briefly, and reminded all of the hullabaloo that greeted microfilming. In refererence to microfilm's passing, he said: "Digitization is the next thing; it too shall pass." Of course he got a big laugh, but many erupted into applause.

Another person's question was left unanswered: whether the scholarly use of digitized information has the same status as the actual study of objects.