Miscellany and stuff (or, 2 point 'all'!)

There is an interesting new book by David Weinberger called Everything is Miscellaneous , reviewed by Karen Schneider at ALATechSource and by Peter Morville. Weinberger was one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and this new offering is yet another to be added to 'the 2.0 Reading List' along with The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The latter come at their topic from a business perspective. The new "Miscellaneous" book moves the discussion closer to issues librarians are concerned about -- like classification. Schneider calls it "dangerous," but important -- clarifying in sum that "the danger comes if we don't listen."

A friend librarian commented on a previous post that he still doesn't know/understand what "2.0" means. Another brief, conceptual definition which makes a lot of sense to me:
Web 1.0 = Read Only (as in Read Only Memory or ROM)
Web 2.0 = the Read/Write Web (in which 'ordinary' users contribute or upload their own content as in blogs, wikis, TouTube and Flickr)

People have started talking about Web 3.0 (!...Wikipedia entry here; Tim Berners-Lee drops the 3.0-bomb and shrugs at 2.0 terminology here; Its relation to Service Oriented Architecture(SEO) is discussed here, and others say it will be the "full video Web") but that's just going too far. To me, the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 is a little like going from Modern to Postmodern (aside from the fact that these are historical terms with particular meanings for historians): You might as well call it Post-1.0 in that everything that comes after it is revolutionary and new and -- not 1.0. Thus, speaking of what comes next becomes a lexical anomaly: What's after postmodern? Post-postmodernism? I think of Web 3.0 (or "Post Web 2.0") as Tom Turner speaks of post-postmodernism—"Let us embrace post-postmodernism—and pray for a better name."(!)

The Blog People Are Coming!

Over at the ALA Techsource blog, Michael Stephens (of Tame the Web) takes a look back at a relatively recent online fracas in the ALA (American Library Association) community regarding outdated attitudes towards blogs and blogging.

Here are some terms which we unfortunately seem to be stuck with, or which have yet to be replaced by better options:

• Blog (both noun and verb -- the latter being the more unfortunate).
• Blogosphere
  
• Biblioblogosphere (the blogosphere of the librarians -- sounds like a subtitle of a B movie sci fi epic)
• Web 2.0 - or "Social Computing"
• Library 2.0 - or "Next Gen Libraries & Librarians"

...And so on (add you own!)

2007 Web 2.0 Awards (from a company called SEOmoz)

Here is a a great window onto the world of Web 2.0. The 2007 Web 2.0 Awards come from SEOmoz, which is a "Seattle-based search-engine optimization company." There is a nice index of these in the Award Categories, from Books and Bookmarking, to Hosted Wikis and Podcast Services, to Mashups* and Widgets **.

* A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. (Wikipedia)

** A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate...web page (Wikipedia)

This is, again, overwhelming if you don't have hours to spend or a very specific goal in mind and some previous experience. Check out the Color Blender (1st prize in Visual Arts) as one example of some cool free stuff!

My Digital Portfolio is up

Well, the semester is nearly over, and I've completed our final web page assignment for the class -- as Digital Portfolio landing page linking to all our work for the class.

I would like to continue blogging after this, but I've become dissatisfied with the title of my blog. If anyone is reading this, you may have noticed I changed the name from Image Remora to just Remora. Now I hate that too. I liked the name one of my fellow students used, *Useless Clutter*. Descriptive, concise, and catchy....

I thought of Perpetual Beta. This is one definition of Web 2.0, meaning *always in a development phase.* I'm taking suggestions. Don't suggest 'Roppin' with Ben' since someone already suggested it. But I guess you can vote for it.

Here's a final image from the semester. Happy Holidays!

Usability and interactivity: Common sense (...and Web 2.0)

Jacob Nielsen annoys me. I just had to get that out of the way, in the remote possibility that this fact was not clear from the rest of this post (to say nothing of the last one). Nielsen's points are not bad or wrong, but I think what bothers me is his self-righteousness about it. Also, his perspective is grounded in a capitalist's view of internet usability. In that context, his (almost) moralistic self-righteousness is intolerable. He values utility over aesthetics. The bottom line is making things easier for the customer, so you (as the seller of things or services online) can make more money.

All the same, the actual content of his site, www.useit.com is really quite unobjectionable. The worst you you could say about it (apart from its presentation) is that it is mostly just common sense. Here are some valuable points he makes which are not simply common sense (except perhaps for those who live and breath on the internet):

• Make your page title something meaningful and direct that search engines will find (what he calls "search engine visibility")
• Organize text for online reading with the following, rather than a "wall of text" or something "non-scannable" (by search engines), like PDF files :

subheads

bulleted lists

highlighted keywords

short paragraphs

the inverted pyramid

a simple writing style, and

de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.

• Avoiding fixed font sizes so people can make it larger if they need to (usability for the visually impaired)*
  

* Try hitting CTRL "+" (plus sign) and CTRL "-" (minus sign) and your browser will change the font size, if the website allows -- hence Nielsen's point)

I'm not sure about his points on the three stages of the Digital Divide. It's certainly true that the economic divide is shrinking as computers become cheaper, but his suggestion that we dumb down websites for the 40% of our population who are "low-literacy users" to a 6th grade reading level on the home page is a bit offensive from a broader societal perspective. He's basically saying that we should market our sites to the lowest common denominator. Shouldn't we simply educate people better, or use the incredible power of the internet to improve education, including information literacy? His bottom line is economic rather than educational, and it makes his self-righteousness intolerable or extremely annoying at best. (To say nothing of that self-satisfied smirk on his face -- 70+ high resolution photos of himself on his usability site! Count 'em.)

Last of all (for the time being) I think he's a little behind the times in terms of "that old saw," web 2.0. Web 2.0 is all about interactivity and usability. Jenny Levine spoke at her NYLA talk about the ease with which one can maintain a website, blog, or RSS aggregator these days, with the "type in the box" model of content creation, such as blogging -- the quintessential example of this. Just type in the box and click "publish." Instant update to your website. She of course was talking about using blogging in library web sites. I think Nielsen's approach to usability has a deep resonance with the theme of "marketing your library" which is an idea which has been around for a while. Having your corporate info in one place on your site (another good point by Nielsen), for instance, is just good PR. And especially for a public library, this kind of transparency is a good idea -- giving easy access to information about staff and the board and the mission statement all in one general space on the library's website. This is the "common sense" of marketing and PR.

But web usability is in a sense one of the driving forces behind web 2.0, and Nielsen seems not be aware of it.

To balance this negative perspective on Jacon Nielsen a little, I was more impressed with Nielsen's colleague Bruce Tognazzini, the Nielsen Norman Group's "software design guru." His site Ask Tog had some really interesting stuff, in particular the idea of Fitt's Law
which is that "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target" -- Discussed in relation to icons on the computer screen, the usefulness of toolbars and taskbars and such. He worked for Apple and Sun Microsystems at different times, if I remember correctly.

______________________

Another topic. I found it hard to come up with usability questions for my questionnaire for this week's assignment, in part because our assignments in the class have always had an aesthetic component which was central to each, whereas this usability survey is focused on the utility of a website rather than on the aesthetic experience of it. So I decided to make half of my survey on people's experience of the aesthetic content of my portfolio (more interesting to all concerned, I presume) as well as on their experience of the interactive web (web 2.0 and the like -- shopping or social networks, etc.) I'm not done with it yet, but that's been my thinking so far.

Since this is supposed to be a photo blog, here is the photo I used as the background to my usability survey. Fall ivy that's fallen off the vine and left colored stems. [altered...]

One other thing

I forgot to mention 2 things. One is that I used an image from Flickr, and I confess I didn't properly credit this on my flash page for this week, but I'm crediting it here. Click on the image to go to it on Flickr.



The other thing is that my page is supposed to go to a page with an MP3 of a cicada with a "Free to sample" Creative Commons license:



You have to register to download anything, I gather, which I didn't have time to do. I realized too that in Internet Explorer the "go to web page" behavior at the end of my animation didn't work. It was supposed to go to the cicada MP3 as linked above. There were better sounding ones but this one had a cooler graphic (actually an image of the sound file)!

Jacob Nielsen stole my lunch money in high school

Jacob Nielsen has about 70 high-resolution photos of himself on his site, with the following warning: *most of the large photos are several hundred kilobytes to download.*

I find it amusing for someone so concerned with usability to offer so many high-definition choices of his own image. I'm being a bit mean spirited, its true, picking on him like that, but for someone with such strong opinions put out there on the web for all to see, he's gotta expect that a little bit.

Anyway, I think he has some good points about Flash, the best points being about usability for people with disabilities and that search features don't see inside a flash application. But as he implies in his addendum, browser support for such things will only get better over time, as they already have. He's a bit self-satisfied though, when he gloats that

Even a big software company will listen to the insights provided by leading usability experts.

Also in his photo (I had to resize it down from about 5000 X 4000 pixels):


My last quibble with Nielsen is that his site is very plain and boring. I was going to be mean and say "like his haircut" but I decided not to. And the writing is not great, especially his intro to this page. OK that's the last one.

My own flash animation for this assignment features a picture of a cicada I took in North Carolina a year ago August. Here's the original:




I used a nice feature in Flash which is a nifty way to convert a bitmap (regular picture) to a vector image, which you can in turn convert to a symbol to make it move around. The command is Modify>Bitmap>Trace Bitmap. You can adjust the color threshold to get more or less detail. I could have done much better than I did if I had used a slightly larger original image size... I like the stylized look the traced bitmap can give.

I was very frustrated by Flash. I had my animation perfect and then tried to add more and in trying to edit the new stuff I was adding it ruined the older stuff. I think maybe I forgot to start a new scene... $%^(%^&(&$#%^(@!(#&!)@()@#&)%@#!!!! Oh well... Live and learn. The end result is that the "orient to path" did not "take" on the last part of my animation -- I even had it doing a motion and shape tween at the same time at one point, but in editing it -- the "undo" and history features are not as handy, thorough or literal as in photoshop-- I was unable to return to an earlier version of my flash document, and had to start over several times. It just takes time to learn these things. This last week was not a good one for practicing patience, speaking personally....

My Library 2.0 Poster Session at NYLA 2006

Library 2.0 (What*s That?): A Guide for the Perplexed

Conference Location in Saratoga Springs, NY, Nov. 1-4, 2006.
(Scroll all the way down for the links).

The *tagline* for my poster was: Library 2.0 is the virtual community center of a Web 2.0 world. This was my first poster session ever, and my first conference. I put the *tagline* (as it were) at the bottom of the poster -- shoulda been at the top... oh well, live and learn. Here are some pictures of my poster followed by links from its content (Librarian blogs, Wikis, Squidoo lenses (sort of like a pathfinder), articles, and Web 2.0 sites sorted roughly by category (some fall into multiple categories of course, or none of them, and are just stuck in).

As people viewed my poster, some looked at it for a minute or so, and then said

OK, so what is Library 2.0?

Then I'd say social computing or participatory networking, and when that got more blank stares, Id say that

its about using technology to connect with patrons, creating a dynamic virtual presence for your library on the internet, using these new tools to communicate and create a community space there on the web. -- It's not Us vs Google, in other words, but us, just as much as Google, on the internet to claim our own space and create our own value there with these tools.

Then they'd start nodding, and say, Ok, that makes sense.

To me, Library 2.0 is about new means (technology -- Web 2.0) for old ends. Libraries and marketing and newsletters and community space are all *old* ideas, but the 2.0 technology gives us a perfect means to these ends. The popularity of MySpace is an indication of what is to come. (Those kids will be our adult patrons before too long!) Library 2.0 is about helping to shape what comes!

For recommended intros to the idea, I'd recommend the Best Practices Wiki and the Squidoo Lenses as the best anchor from which to begin exploring these ideas.
(An annotated guide to the Web 2.0 sites listed at the bottom would have been great, but I this is all I had time for. I should be writing a paper for my Archives class right now!...)

Library 2.0
Blogs by librarians
Librarian in Black
The Shifted Librarian
Tame the Web
Infotangle
Librarian.net
See Also
Library Crunch
Information Wants To Be Free
Library 2.0: an Academic’s Perspective
Free Range Librarian
Blyberg.net
Library Stuff

Wikis to watch
Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki
Blogging Libraries Wiki
Booklover*s Wiki at Princeton Public Library
Toolkit for the Expert Web Searcher (LITA)

Squidoo Lenses
Library 2.0 Reading List
Library 2.0 in Three Easy Steps
Intro to Web 2.0

Articles
Tim O’Reilly: “What is Web 2.0”
Walt Crawford: Cites and Insights, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2006, “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0’”

Library 2.0 OPACs
(The Future is now! The "Web 2 -OPAC")
NCSU Libraries OPAC
Lamson Library (Plymouth State Univ, NH)'s "WPopac" with a Word Press (blogging software) interface!


Web 2.0 sites
(The categories are of a general, approximate *catch-all* variety)

Aggregators, *Trend Followers,* etc.

Bloglines
Blogbridge
Rojo
Topix.net
Swicki
Rollyo
Technorati
Digg
MemeStreams
Suprglu

Organizers
del.ici.ous
FURL
All Consuming
Kaboodle
Ta-Da Lists
Library Thing
Bibliophil
GuruLib
Zotero

Social Networking
Tag World
MySpace
Buddypic
Facebook
LinkedIn
Connotea

Sharing and Collaborating
YouTube
Flickr
Writeboard
Google Docs and Spreadsheets (formery Writely)
Nuvvo
Squidoo
Wikipedia
pbwiki