The Life of a Sentient Search Engine

Check out this article in the NYTimes. As a matter of fact, read it and then save it in some way so you can always get to it. Use it as reminder should you ever have the hubris to feel that you’re the first to do something. This will bring you down a peg in no time.

Well my dear brother, the computer scientist, has posted something on his blog that shows that I continue to have no influence on him whatsoever. His thesis is that Web 2.0 phenomena like social networking sites etc. make traditional search like Google obsolete.

(sigh)

He indicated that personal content made possible is now the future of information acquisition (even though we’re begining to see the pendulum moving back the other way).

(You can’t see me but I’m shaking my head in both amusement and dismay…)

Folks, in his defence his field is computers, so he doesn’t have to live in the real world. Nevertheless, his attitude is troubling. I don’t want to seem like I’m beating up on him, I just see all to many people who are computer experts and very obviously not usability experts making these kind of assertions.

He talks about how he uses the links list for a wikipedia page on a topic to find links to more information. You could also use services like Del.icio.us for this as well. This has some legitimate basis, and I’ll be the first to admit that. These methods are a great way to find “vetted” sites. However, this method assumes that there will be useful links in said Wikipedia article or del.icio.us page, which my brother graciously half admits might not be the case.

Another problem comes when defining “vetted”. There are numerous sites I’ve seen used as sources and useful links in Wikipedia and in Del.icio.us lists that would never pass inspection with a real information professional (librarian). The fact is that there’s no accountability when it comes to this sort of publicly edited content. The links provided may be good, but, on the other hand, they’re more likely to be total crap.

If we’re supposed to find information on the web using prepreared lists, how are we supposed to find new stuff that might be more current or useful. If we become a society of surfers insead of searchers, the majority of us are almost certain to miss out on stuff that lies hidden because it remains undiscovered. If we stick to well worn paths it occurs to be that we might be risking a little intellectual stagnation.

The discussion of hidden brings up another interesting issue. This method of information retrieval does nothing to address the greatest flaw of Google: most of the best stuff is not on the open web (Gasp). Instead its in the subscription databases that you can access through a library’s website or by paying big bucks. Wikipedia and Del.icio.us are just as impotent at providing access to this material as Google.

My brother also make the rather amusing assertion that “categorizing information is no longer difficult, either (Not a solved problem, but one that there are available solutions for.)”

(heavy sigh)

Where do I begin? Matt, catagorizing information is no easier today than it was 50 years ago. If anything, its more complex on the web than anything else. Folksonomies are nice. They provide a valuable service and make the process of finding more intuitive at times. However, they are not the solution. Indeed, sometimes they are part of the problem.

Getting anyone to agree on what to call something is like trying to avoid Chinese-made products, you can’t. After all, one man’s “evangelical christian” is another man’s “fundamentalist nutcase”. Therefore, the idea that socially constructed folksonomies are going to allow users to easily find all the material on a topic is laughable. Spelling vaiations can cause a lot of problems (after all, we’re such great spellerz these days right?) as do “regionalisms” (pop vs soda vs “coke”), and homonym (bear [animal] vs bear [carry]) and homophone (to, two, and too) confusion.

Despite its flaws, a controlled vocabulary is the surest way to do a precise and reliable search. The terminology isn’t always cutting edge (the Library of Congress Subject Headings’ continued use of the term “cookery” springs to mind), but it nonetheless gets the job done more precisely in most cases for a serious search.

Truthfully, the best role for tagging is browsing. Tags excel at this as they let the user jump from one association to another and explore information. If you are actualy wanting to find something specific, you need to use a more traditional search method.

I know I’m coming off as a cranky old librarian here, but the fact it that searching fo information is what I do and I feel that while Web 2.0 makes for many interesting possibilities, it can’t possibly come to replace the more traditional methods of information retrieval. Now a better designed search engine…

Update 7/3/08 It is incumbent on me to admit that I may have mistook his meaning somewhat, but I stand by what I said nonetheless (don’t worry, were still talking I’ll be his best man when he gets married this December).

This has nothing to do with libraries or gaming so I guess I’m cashing in on the “whatever strikes my fancy” thing in the subtitle.

Its just that I’m a geek and this is so cool! Check out the links (the first is a video, the second is a product page).

http://www.nikkoamerica.com/nhe/dvd_projector_video.html

http://shop.starwars.com/catalog/product.xml?product_id=1218818

So I’ve been blogging for over a year now, and I’ve been reading blogs for even longer than that, so I thought I would share some of my knowledge (such as it is) with the rest of you. Here are 10 potentially helpful tips.

1. Make sure your blog is “about” something and that you are aware of what that is. All too often I see blogs that are so all over the place that one gets tired of reading them. Unless the quality of your writing is sufficient to stand on its own merits, you need to be consistent to keep the attention of your readers.
2. The topic of your blog should be as specific as you can maintain. You don’t want the topic to be so specific that you can’t write about it on a regular basis. However you don’t want the topic to be so general that the blog has no focus (see #1). If you find you’re having difficulty keeping up your blog, try increasing its scope, especially if you’re new to blogging. I used to have two blogs, WebraryLinks and CoolQueries. The first was a collection of web site reviews and the second was a listing of interesting reference questions I answered at work. Separately these blogs were hard to keep up at a reasonable level, so I merged them and added gaming and general library stuff to the mix and lo and behold it became easier to keep up.
3. Make sure you’re actually interested in the topic you’re writing about. You be surprised how often this is not the case. I started WebraryLinks in a fit of Web 2.0 enthusiasm, but ultimately found that I wasn’t that interested in writing reviews for websites all the time.
4. Keep the blog page clean. As cool as some of those JavaScript widgets are, too many of them can turn your blog into a cluttered mess. When you’re considering adding a widget to your blog, ask yourself if you’re including it because it adds useful functionality, or because you think its cool. If it’s the latter, perhaps its best you did without.
5. Start a post as soon as you can after you get the idea for it. You don’t need to finish, just start it. Take advantage of the capability to save as drafts. Doing do will keep good posts from slipping through your fingers.
6. Tagging is important. Make sure you do a good job tagging/labeling/categorizing your posts. This will help folks find stuff on blog. When you can reuse tags/labels/categories in your blog. This will allow your readers to find all the posts related to a topic easily.
7. A picture is worth a thousand words, so use images and video (embedded or otherwise) to add interest to your blog when appropriate. This is especially true when a graphical presentation explains your thoughts better than words alone.
8. Use consistent formatting. This should be a no-brainer, but so many blogs I read are terribly inconsistent in this regard. Your format should be a way readers can tell what blog their reading. Think long and hard before making changes to be sure that the change is necessary.
9. Be cognizant of how your blog appears in various browsers. It’s probably a good idea to have at least Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 on your system so you can load your blog in both and make sure that it looks right in both. If you’re feeling very ambitious you can add others like Opera or Safari.
10. Make sure you’re having fun. If a blog is work for you, stop. Anyone who reads it can tell and you’re just wasting your time.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately about gaming in libraries. As an avid gamer, I have to say that recent developments in this area are very encouraging. At the same time, I’m afraid I must confess that the articles I’ve been reading have been as frustrating as they are exciting.

On the one hand, the rising of gaming in libraries is an heartening sign that:

• my hobby of choice is loosing its negative stigma
• libraries are increasingly open to “non-traditional” (whatever that means) services

However, I the more I read about gaming in libraries the more discouraged I am by:

• the perception of gaming as a programming alternative, rather than a service libraries provide
• the intense Teen focus of articles on this topic

Looking through the literature, one can easily find a ton of articles of the “How to put on a Teen Gaming program without really trying” variety. Such articles are very helpful to the vast majority of librarians who’ve never picked up a game controller in their life. However, there seems (so far as I can tell) to be very little literature on how to implement gaming as a service. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to use gaming to get teens in the door, thinking of libraries as “cool”. I guess I’ve just become spoiled. I want more!

In my mind, a program will leave, at best, a short-term impression on library customers. Customers (especially the 12-17 set) will think, “Cool! That was fun!” and promptly forget it ever happened. A series of programs does somewhat better as it stretches over time, but it still falls short in my mind. As a gamer, especially one that has a job, school work, and a personal life (trifles, eh?), I want to be able to partake when I ever have the time and inclination and don’t want to have to schedule it around when the library wants to do it.

This touches on my second concern, the focus on teens. As it turns out, I am not unique among gamers. Many of us are employed, socially mature adults with full lives. The ESA’s industry data shows this:

• The average age of gamers is 33 (alas, it turns out that we don’t grow out of it).
• Sixty-nine percent of American heads of households play computer and video games.
• Fifty-three percent of game players expect to be playing as much or more ten years from now than they do today.

These data indicate that gaming is not a fad (as should be obvious by now without the data) and that grown ups (those of us who first started in the Pong - NES period) are playing them just as much as we always have. So why exactly are all the gaming programs for teens? Well, partly its the youth focus of many libraries. This is understandable, because because of all the “mom and apple pie” and “children are our future” reasons that I support that fully. I just wish we could give adults some time at the controls. It would give them a chance to be social and enjoy themselves. More importantly, it may bring a new group of adults into the library who may not have traditionally have even known where we were. This is, after all, one of the sets of the population most likely to look to Google for their infomation needs. Why not refamiliarize them with our existance?

So the next logical step in public library gaming as far as I am concerned has to be the long-term allocation of space for gaming. Libraries really serious about gaming need to factor it into their space planning. You don’t need a huge amount of space, but it does need to be enclosed (noone will come if you keep shushing them). I think that this approach has considerable advantages.

• It’s available on the customer’s terms.
• It will be more of a draw over time, as it will have time to build momentum as a service.
• It encourages staff familiarity with the medium, so they’re aware of both the good and bad sides to it.
• It will actually be a boost to the gaming programming, as it will provide a space to advertise the “special events”.

It is worth mentioning that there’s nothing wrong with a library not being serious about gaming in my mind. We have so many confilcting priorities as it is, that I can hardly blame a library for saying that gaming is not one of them. I just wanted to mention it I guess (I seem to have a talent for starting things).

Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry and it continues to grow despite the current economic slowdown. Gaming is here to stay and the first generation gamers are adults now, so we need to be thinking about how this service will need to mature as the medium matures.

Gawd, what a busy Saturday at my library! The questions came fast and furious and included several curve balls. For example, someone wanted books on building “organic kitchens”, which after some negotiation, we (the customer and I) decided that meant “green kitchens”. There’s surprisingly little out in print on that topic (print, after all, is not typically understood to be a “green” medium). You can find a respectable amount of stuff about green design, green construction, and green architecture, but I was unable to find anything for her specific to kitchens. She left happy with what I did find at my library, so I guess that’s something…

Anyway, it’s been busy. Part of the problem is tax season. I know people can’t be expected to understand this, but I still want to shout it out to the universe:

I AM NOT A TAX ATTORNEY, AN ACCOUNTANT, OR AN AUDITOR!

I get so frustrated when I am asked for tax advice from the hordes of folks who come in for their forms. I can barely fill out my own, yet I (of all people) am being asked what form they need to deduct their business expenses, or whatever. When I tell them (calmer than above, naturally) that I am unqualified to give such advice and try to refer them to someone who could, they give me the “oh that’s okay, just give me your best guess” line (or some variation). I sometimes just want to say, “No you idiot, my best guess could get me fired!” Naturally, I don’t…but I still want to (on occasion). Oh well… It’ll be mostly over in three more days. Then I get to get ready for Summer Reading Club (Woo Hoo), which is vastly preferable for a multitude of reasons (and the better weather).

Addendum 4/18/08

You all will be happy to know, I’m sure, that I survived Tax day. I tell you, it really helped me put things in perspective to speak to colleagues who did tax season before the internet (Gasp! Say it ain’t so!). All I can say is that I am thankful for IRS.gov (boy does that feel weird to say…)!

Allmusic.com - http://www.allmusic.com/ - 3 Stars

It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed a site, so I thought I ought to get my but in gear. Up today is Allmusic, music’s answer to IMDb.

I really like this site, and for a person working an information desk in a public library branch or a reference desk in a music\arts library it is invaluable. It has a huge number of reviews, bios, discographies, and other info on various artists, groups, and composers. There’s quite a bit of album art as well, so if you’re iTunes library is a little plain, so this is a good source for those obscure classical music album covers.

Allmusic has a lot of nice review articles and the Allmusic blog, which highlights new albums, features artists, and posts music news. It includes a new releases section and a nice search function that does a commendable job helping the user find the album or artist for which he’s looking. Many albums also have track previews, which will help you identify the song you heard on the radio while driving home.

On the downside, the site is chock full of ads which is irksome at the very least. The site is also incredibly cluttered, with nothing in the way of “white space”. One does not really know what to look at on the home page. It definitely has the look of a page trying to squeeze in more than it should while keeping the ads nice and visible.

So things look a little different, eh?!

I researched my options and decided that WordPress was going to let me do the things with my blog that I really wanted to do. It has more options for design and some intrigueing features. Of these I really like the ability to make “pages” to go with the blog. This will allow me to add some features to the site and keep things in one compact, professional looking product. Blogger always seemed hobbled to me.

WordPress has its problems too. For example, what exactly is the deal with the ban on custom Javascript? I really do understand their concerns about abuse. I don’t respect them but I understand them (kind of the coward’s solution to the problem, no?) I have had the idea drilled into my head by all my LIS classes that just because its easier to say “no” dosen’t mean that it makes sense. Sure they might have to take more precautions if they allowed custom Javascript, but those precautions would be worth it given the benefits to their users. The end result of all of this is that now I have no more LibraryThing widgets (curses!). This was not a deal-breaker, just a disappointment…

Well, take a look around and enjoy! Let me know what you think!

Wow, what’s with me today…

Either I’m in an unusually bad mood today (not that I have a usual bad mood most days), or the coming of spring has addled everyone’s mind. I have been just snarky at people today. Not to their face, just internally hateful. I suppose it could be a bit of both. Today’s the first really nice day we’ve seen in Columbus so far this year so its definately concievable that noone’s thinking clearly. I have been known to be grouchy, from time to time…

Addendum: 4/18/08

Yeah, reflecting back, I think it was mostly me. Thanks to you for putting up with my surliness. I guess it goes to show that there’s more to a good attitude than good weather!

I bought a new laptop over the weekend (woohoo) . Its nothing too exciting, just a more modern version of my “work” (eg. grown up) laptop. It has all the usual improvements: faster processor, more RAM (after I added it in), and a bright new widescreen display (thank god for widescreen).

It also has Windows Vista. If you’ve been listening to the tech babble over the last year or so, you’ve probably been left with the idea that Vista is going to ruin your life: destroying your credit rating, ending long-term personal relationships, and bringing the wrath of the federal government down upon you.

Well, my experience was a little different. I will preface this by saying that I’ve only had my laptop for 48 hours, so I may discover new delightful “insights” about Vista as I go. Having said that I have to say I kind of like the fact that Vista gives the user new ways to organize content. The various menus and submenus of the “Start” button no longer sprawl across the page. It has built in support for widgets meaning I don’t necessarily jave to have Google Desktop installed. The folder system presents a lo of information on the page without overwhelming me (someone used to digesting a lot of information at once, granted).

Everything looks slick and is fun to use. The old windows sound effects are gone in favor of ones that are less jarring and irritating. The “my pictures” folder does a good job of letting the user get an idea of what’s in the folder.

Vista does require some more computing muscle than XP, which is irksome, but not too much. The base version of Vista really doesn’t ask much of a system. The appearant speed of my new computer isn’t that much faster as a result of the higher requirements for Vista, but it does run better, crashing altogether with far less frequency.

Well, thats all for now. As I learn things of note I’ll share.