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Daniel Russell, Google Search Quality & User Happiness
2010 Alaska Library Association Conference, opening keynote speaker

Lewis & Clark left without a decent map
it’s a complicated world out there and you don’t want to end up like the Donner Party (hey, go that way; it looks good)
what does the current information map look like?
let’s be adventurers but keep our eyes and minds open

did a demo of Google Earth
cost to put the flyover together = $0 and four minutes of time
Google will crawl it within 48 hours
when Lewis & Clark published about their trip, it took 10 years
we see the world differently, and the library isn’t what it used to be
stacks are no longer a core competence — the information landscape has radically changed

1200 exabytes of new content are generated each year (1.2 yottabytes if that helps or 1.2 billion terrabytes)
3.6 zetabytes per person per year (mostly music and video)
libraries don’t have to curate and manage that — it stream to you
text words per pseron per year = .1% of that total
the good news is that the amount of reading per person per year has gone up by 3X since 1980 (primarily due to internet access); happening online, not print
so need to develop new skills and new literacies

showed Google Books
can click on the places in a book and travel to all of them
can actually recapitulate Huck Finn’s journey down the river

LoC has 10 terabytes of text data or .01 petabytes
he has 2 LoCs at home
an exabyte = 50,000 years of DVD or 10 billion copies of The Economist (there aren’t enough trees in Alaska to print them all)

we’re supporting this renaissance of access to print culture at the same time we’re expanding online content
1.5 million out of copyright books that can be printed for $8 each

do you care about all of this as long as you can get to the stuff that you care about?
what Google is trying to figure out is how can I read your mind from the couple of words you gave me — which pages you want to see of theirs out of all of those exabytes of data?
it’s not just text anymore

mentioned Hans Rosling’s TED talk about visualizing statistics
mentioned Baby Names Voyager
Google bought software to add visual statistics to Google Docs
the cool part is I can type my name and see when my name peaked
is this a book? no. is it a visualization? yes. but it’s also interactive. where/how do I catalog this?
these kinds of interactive documents allow you to understand in ways that were not possible before
showed what happened to names that begin with vowels during the 40s and 50s — “the valley of the vowels“
the answer to what happened is in the hard consonants
no one knew this until they could see it in this visualization
our notion of what constitutes information and librarianship is changing

how do people search now?
suppose you’re Google and you get the query “jaguar” — what do they want?
one of the differences about being Google though is that you’re at a reference desk where a billion people a day ask the question

what about “iraq?” today, it’s the way; 15 years ago, it was probably antiquities
Google sees queries shifting a lot
“latest release Thinkpad drivers touchpad” = I know exactly what they want
“ebay” = in the top 10 most popular queries in English per day
“google” is also in the top 10 queries per day — why?? are they trying to cause the recursive meltdown of Google’s servers?
there are 20,000 ways to mis-spell “Britany Spears” (and they all want pictures of her)

one of the interesting things they do is use machine-generated algorithms
they don’t have to mis-spell a new celebrities name 20,000 times — their users will do that for them
that’s how informaiton works now

he goes to peoples’ ho

The concept of “Library 2.0″ has been around long enough now that we’ve gone through all the stages and argued it to death, as noticed by Andy Woodworth in a post titled Deconstructing Library 2.0. That’s a good thing, and you should go read his thoughts on the subject.

No matter which side you of the debate you come down on, you can probably prove your case. Me? I agree with Andrew Burkhardt when he notes, “The time has come for libraries to be social on the web. Social is the new normal. It has become mainstream and people expect it. Library 2.0 is not dead, it has just become boring and commonplace. And to quote Clay Shirky, ‘Tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ ”

In his paper Participatory Networks: The Library As Conversation, Dave Lankes said that “libraries should focus on the phenomena made possible by the technology,” not the technology itself, which I think is a pretty good way of thinking about “Library 2.0.” Maybe that’s where we are now, which would be a great way to continue the discussion, hopefully without the moniker. I think several of us thought that’s what we were doing, but it didn’t come across that way.

The hard part, though, is that Library 2.0 doesn’t really replace anything. Like so many library services, the opportunities these new tools afford us are in addition to everything we’re already doing, which causes problems, because we don’t get additional resources to implement them. To serve as many of your users as possible, you have to be in as many of the places where they are as possible. That principle has been the philosophy behind this site from day one, eight years ago. That means being out in your community physically and digitally, and that’s one of the pieces of L2 that I think was never adequately explained.

We’re already pretty good at getting out from behind the physical reference desk. We know how to do it, and we know how we could do it better given more resources. I worry that this is less true in the online world, and that’s where I always hoped L2 would help. As much as I support, love, and advocate for user-centered planning and design, my big regret about the whole “movement” is that it hasn’t focused more on how L2 helps staff.

So that’s what I tend to concentrate my own presentations on — the practical ways in which these new tools can help you. I’ve been a big promoter of RSS since 2002, and I still don’t understand why libraries don’t use it more. Yes, one of the benefits of syndicating content is that your users can subscribe to it, but equally important for me is that it allows me as an organization to get my content off my website so that it’s more visible where my users are. Most importantly, it automates that process so that I don’t have to spend precious resources manually updating a multitude of sites, inevitably forgetting about one of them. The fact that I can syndicate lists of new materials from my OPAC anywhere without human intervention? Priceless.

Why should your library have a blog? There are many benefits, but my biggest reason is because it gets your current news and announcements in a syndicated format, the display of which you can automate anywhere. You can easily recycle your content to Twitter, Facebook, elsewhere on your website, and more. Talk about a great way to get out into your community — how about displaying your current news on the village, park district, school, or a department website without any ongoing effort on your part? That’s a huge win-win in my book. And as someone who manually generated archives for daily posts before there were “blogs,” let me just sing the praises of automatic

Now that I’m on a smartphone that has a real web browser and is capable of multitasking (the Palm Pre), In fact, I find myself expecting it to act like my laptop. I’ve stopped carrying my laptop or my netbook to work each day because I can do so much on my phone, but I’m still noticing where decisions made by web designers make my mobile life easier.

So here’s mobile developer tip #1, my two cents: use plugins and widgets that let users automatically share your content on sites like Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, etc., because you’ll make the user’s life easier. Granted, not all phones support the Javascript that powers this type of service on a web page, but more and more will, so consider getting ahead of the curve and adding it now.

The alternative for me as the reader (acknowledging each person’s situation is different) is to:

1. Leave the site up in a card until I get home in the evening and can manually bookmark it on my laptop. This works about 50% of the time.
2. Email the site to myself so I can bookmark it later on my laptop. This works about 80% of the time but is annoying.
3. Try remembering to revisit the site later on my laptop to bookmark it. This works 0% of the time.

As a result, I’m finding that I’m far more likely to bookmark something if there’s a direct link to post it to Delicious, and that workflow will continue for me until there’s a Pre app that makes this easier, which means I really appreciate sites that offer this. Even better is if you can add it so that it appears in your RSS feed so that it shows up in places like Google Reader and Bloglines, too.

Here are some options to consider for adding this functionality to your site.

• For WordPress blogs, you can use the Sociable plugin (I’m sure there are others, but this is what I use so I know it works). I have another blog post brewing on this topic, but this is yet another reason I encourage libraries to make their “what’s new” page a blog - you can then use the wealth of plugins out there to improve the user’s experience.

  

• For Drupal sites, you can use something like the Share module (I’m going to look into this for ALA Connect. If you’re using a different CMS, check to see if there’s a similar module for it.
• Failing that, or even for use on general web pages, check out something like the Add This widget, although I have to admit I’m not sure how accessible it is.

Regardless, this can be a relatively easy way to help meet the needs of your mobile users, a group that’s just going to grow in the future. Food for thought. Nom nom nom.

The Louisville Free Public Library might no longer be flooded, but it can still use your help. Steve Lawson began this effort with a goal of raising $5,000 for LFPL, and he’s more than halfway there. Please consider donating if you can.

I’ve finally been able to slow down my external (non-ALA) work enough to circle back around to working on my own stuff again. I’ve been wanting to get back to blogging, but I readily acknowledge that I’m still not likely to blog at my 2002-2003 levels ever again.

Watching Steve Rubel change his focus from his blog to his lifestream made me realize that the tools are finally available for me to do something similar. Other long-time bloggers such as Robert Scoble and Jason Griffey have been re-examining their online presences, and it’s exciting to follow the experiments everyone is trying.

While I admire what these folks are doing and appreciate the fact that they’re openly thinking out loud, I knew I wanted to try a different approach. Because as much as I love the cloud, I’m getting a little tired of being bitten by the companies running it. Don’t get me wrong - I love most of those companies, I’m very appreciative of the fact that they offer these services for free (usually at a monetary loss), and I still plan to participate in them, but I’ve also decided that I want to own my lifestream and have an archive of it.

So as I started looking at my options, based on my understanding of each tool, I ruled out possibilities such as displaying my FriendFeed stream as my home page or using a third-party site such as Posterous. Those solutions work well for others and are super cool at what they do, but they don’t let me backup or own my cloud. I’m also not interested in sending the same update to every service because I use them all differently.

The solution I’ve come up with is to use the Lifestream plugin for WordPress, which kind of lets me run a stripped-down version of my own personal FriendFeed (but without the comments on individual items). It totally rocks, so a big thank you to David Cramer for writing and sharing it.

By default, it lets me set up feeds from my major sites, such as Flickr (pictures), delicious (bookmarks), Twitter (microblogging), Google Reader (shared items I’ve read about that day) , YouTube (videos), and more. It also lets me add the RSS feed for any service that’s not already listed (this is one reason I still think RSS is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is still very important). Most major ones are already there - I just don’t use most of them. Surprisingly, FriendFeed isn’t listed yet, but I was able to easily add a feed for items I’ve liked. Since I don’t post much original content to FF, it shouldn’t get too recursive there.

There are two ways you can use this plugin. The first is to create a separate page with your full stream, which updates at set intervals. The alternative, which I’m using, is to do a summary post of all of your activity at a specific time each day. This way, I can aggregate all of my non-blogging activity in one post at the end of the day.

Even better, the Lifestream plugin seems to actually import each item so I have a copy of it. I’m assuming these are in a database I have access to, but I still need to follow up on that. Ideally, this means I have backup copies of all of my text updates on any aggregated service, and I can access it in the future if one of those services ever disappears. In addition, adding the stream to my blog means things like my Google Reader shared items, tweets, and delicious bookmarks get indexed there, so I can search for most of my stuff in one place. It’s not really organized in any way, other than chronological, but I’ll be interested to see if having a searchable version gives me any advantages down the road.

This isn’t ideal, but it’s enough of a first step for me to implement this for a while to see how it works. All lifestream posts from the plugin should appear in the Lifestream category, which I think I’ve now excluded from email updates for my site. I’ve also set Twitterfeed to only share links to posts from my site that have the tag #blogpost in order to avoid a recursive stream there. I’m still looking for a way to prevent the lifestream posts from appearing in FriendFeed. I have a feeling I have to add some magic behind the scenes to get an RSS feed for just the “blogpost” tag or category in order to feed just those items into FF.

Another issue is comments, but I haven’t found a good way to aggregate all of the comments on my items back into my site. I’d love to be wrong that this isn’t yet possible, so please let me know if you’ve done this successfully. It’s also unfortunate that I can’t use an RSS feed of just my comments from FriendFeed, because it counts my delicious descriptions as “comments.”

I also have to make a decision about Facebook and my status updates there. It’s the only site I post to that’s even remotely protected, and even though I don’t post anything there I wouldn’t want the world to read, I still like the idea of having one site that really is just my friends and friendsters. I’m torn, though, because it would be nice to archive those status updates along with the rest of my stream. We’ll see if that desire ultimately wins out over having a smaller online circle.

This solution won’t work for everybody, but I’m going to let this solution run for at least a couple of months to see how it works, and I’d be interested in your feedback over time, but I really like the idea of aggregating my own digital identity so that I have more control over it (especially under my domain). I do intend to keep blogging, although I suppose now technically my blog will be the blogpost tag for this site. The blog items won’t always be this long, but hopefully this will get me back into a flow where I can at least post starter thoughts or discussion points for future exploration.

For so long, my online presence was mostly my blog, but it’s become so much more, and this move helps pull it all together. I can also see myself using this process to facilitate that aggregation. For example, I may start posting more descriptive tweets in order to explain something that’s appearing in my stream that I just don’t have the time to blog about that day or maybe using a Flickr picture to augment a delicious bookmark. Regardless of what happens, it will be an interesting experiment.

I’ll try to post updates about how this new flow works for me, but let me know what you think, too.