Author: griffey

Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of Library IT and a tenured professor at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Categories
Digital Culture

Tag Cloud for 2007 State of the Union

Lately I’m really digging Tag Clouds as information sources of their own, and not just a reflection of a source. For instance, check out the tag cloud for the President’s State of the Union from last night, and see what’s important at a glance…note the difference in frequency of “war” and “security” or “terrorists”.

Welcome to the BoingBoing crowd…thanks for stopping by!

created at TagCrowd.com

Categories
Library Issues

Seattle, ALA MidWinter 2007

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I’m in the pacific Northwest, at the ALA Midwinter meeting! Had a good conference so far, but yesterday the jet lag got to me. It’s only two hours, but it’s the two hours that made me wake up at 5am, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.

Took some great shots of the city yesterday, and of Pike St. Market (you know, the famous one where they throw the fish around). Here’s a few of my favorites:

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Categories
Digital Culture

Collaborative Genealogy

Web 2.0 has now brought us a collaborative genealogy site in Geni.com. It popped up in my del.icio.us search today, and I thought I’d take a look.

Geni example

That’s the interface screen, which begins with you signing up for the site. Doing so begins your tree, and allows you to branch off by clicking the yellow arrows for different relationships (up for parent, down for child, sideways for spouse or sibling). The bit of brilliance is that the field for names includes email, and the recipient can automatically sign up and become part of your tree. It’s a combination of viral and collaborative, and a brilliant way to do genealogy.

There’s also a “background” profile where you can give more info, contact information, etc, so that anyone in your tree can contact you. You can also add photos to your profile, so the entire thing can become a sort of name prompt for those family reunions.

Problems? Well, some families are a lot more complicated than this. My biggest complaint, and I can’t honestly believe they did this, is that the sideways arrow doesn’t prompt for “spouse”, it reads the sex of the selected person and prompts for “husband” or “wife”. Sexism ahoy! They should really change the prompt to Spouse, and allow a radio button for the sex of the spouse. As well, for complex child relationships, it kind of falls apart…step-children aren’t part of the tree either.

The technology and concept is amazing, and if they tweak a few interface issues, I think this is a huge Web 2.0 winner in the making. It’s a social network limited to your family, and a collaborative content creation system all in one. They need to add abilities to export the data, or import from existing genealogy services and much more detailed noted fields (not up front in the tree, just behind the scenes) this might become a huge draw. The best thing they could do is publish an API, and allow for other tools to leverage the information…imagine being able to crawl the tree with an API and generate other bits of info from it.

All in all, a great Beta product, but needs work before hitting the bigtime.

Categories
Digital Culture

The Jesus Phone

My favorite iPhone reaction:

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Categories
Digital Culture

OMFG

Well, I’m an admitted fanboy, but holy christ on a pogostick, Apple has pulled one out this time.

The iPhone is far, far more than anyone expected.

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I, like everyone else, will have to wait until June, but I want!

Categories
Digital Culture

Second Life goes GPL

Linden Labs, the proprietors of the MMORPG Second Life have done what many thought impossible: they’ve released the code for Second Life via GPL.

This is beyond huge. I have difficulty explaining exactly what sort of watershed moment on the ‘net this is, frankly. Second Life was the first online environment where there were clear property rights….what you create, in game, is yours, and is treated more or less like physical property. This allowed the residents of Second Life to create a vibrant economy that paralleled the real world, instead of being solely virtual like so many other MMORPG’s (WoW, etc).

This release now allows anyone to set up a Second Life server, giving avatars options as to where to set up camp. It sets up a situation of unlimited emigration/immigration in-world, and the ability to hop from “state” to “state”. I can see a natural evolution now of different Second Life states that appeal to different user groups (instead of the current “areas” in the single state) which will allow for much more customization and play from the residents.

I wish I had more time to play around in SL. I’ve got an avatar that lives there, but just don’t have the time to devote that I’d like to fully explore the SL world. It’s an amazing place, though, and this move could very well make it the defacto next stage towards the metaverse.

Categories
Digital Culture

New bloginess

After being informed that my current theme is causing no end of errors for reasons unknown, I’m going to be playing with my themes for a day or so. Just to let everyone know, so you don’t think you’ve ended up in the wrong place if it looks a bit funky.

Also, I’m up for suggestions if anyone has a favorite they’d like to see used.

Categories
Digital Culture

Five Things

A bit late to the party, but Iris tagged me, so here they are:

Five things you probably don’t know about me

  1. I was once so ill as a child that my parents were told by doctors that I was going to die. I got better.
  2. I have held many really interesting jobs, including: pathogenic microbiology technician, Cave guide at a KY State Park, and Assistant web designer way back in 1996.
  3. I can juggle flaming torches…3 of them, but at one point could do 5.
  4. I love professional wrestling, especially Lucha Libre and Puroresu. There’s a mythology there that’s missing in our time.
  5. I’m incapable of being grossed out…blood, guts, gore, nothing really gets to me. This is true for both movies and real life. I’ve performed first aid on a motorcycle slide victim (missing most of the skin on his left side), been the first responder to a traffic fatality, and examined a medical cadaver. I don’t have a problem with vasovagal syncope.

Not sure if any of them will take me up on it, but I’ll tag Justin, Jason, and Eprahs.

Categories
Digital Culture

Holiday picture 2006

Here’s my favorite pic of myself from holidays 2006…its just happy!

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Categories
Digital Culture

Folksonomies = Translation Engines

I was lounging about today, idly thinking about folksonomies (hey..it could happen) and I had what I consider a somewhat interesting idea. Are there any existing sites that allow for tagging in multiple languages? I suppose that del.icio.us does by default for language that use the Roman alphabet, but what about systems that use a non-roman…does flickr or technorati allow for Chinese or Japanese kanji? Or for Farsi?

For any system where this were the case, and there was an enormous database of folksonomic data to mine, and the folksonomies were in some way descriptive (it’s possible to have non-descriptive folksonomies…some people actually leverage del.icio.us by using specifically non-descriptive tags in order to pull very specific things from the organization)…well, if you were describing things in the world…would you be able to data mine such a folksonomy as a translation engine?

You would imagine that on flickr, a picture of a red ball might be tagged “red” and “Ball” by multiple languages. By doing some basic statistical work on the data, I think you could come up with a pretty good translation engine.

Anyone out there see that this couldn’t/wouldn’t work? Would this be better than traditional translation engines…I don’t know. It leverages the wisdom of crowds in an interesting new way, though.