Category: Digital Culture

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Digital Culture Personal

No iPhone for me

PIC-0078

To say that I am disappointed in both AT&T and Apple would be putting it mildly. I understand the need to pump up anticipation, as well as moderate supply in order to maintain a certain marketing illusion for the 3G, but the experience of standing in line was so remarkably poorly managed that I find it hard to believe that AT&T has any idea what dealing with customers should be like. They clearly didn’t exhibit any customer service skills on Friday, July 11 during the global launch of the iPhone 3G.

First off: You know how many iPhones you have, and what type. The proper way to handle the line is to print up vouchers for the available stock, walk the line asking people what type they are planning on buying, and give them a voucher. You can tell people without a voucher to come back in the afternoon and place an order…but there is no excuse for letting people stand in line for 3 hours when you know that they aren’t going to be able to buy the thing they are in line for. I’m talking to you, AT&T of Chattanooga: big fat failwhale for your customer service! The minute that your exclusive contract is up with Apple, expect people to bail with their phones like mad…way to think short term.

Categories
BIGWIG Digital Culture Library Issues

Off to ALA Annual

I leave in the morning for ALA Annual 2008, but keep an eye on this space over on the right sidebar. I’m going to stream as much as I can of my Annual trip via Ustream. So bookmark or otherwise check my twitter feed, as I’ll announce my streaming there.

Also, don’t forget to check out the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase 2008. Tons of great content, and lots of interactivity planned…more Ustreaming, plus TWO virtual discussions via Talkshoe. There will be no shortage of virtual participation…come join us!

Categories
Books Digital Culture Media

Cryptonomicon via tag cloud

Two tag cloud posts in a row is a bit much, but I had the idea, so I went with it. This is an infographic of the word frequency of the text of the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Cryptonomicon

It’s a really interesting way to visualize texts (as I’ve pointed out before). So let’s see if I can start a meme. Doesn’t have to be a new book, you can pick one from Project Gutenberg…there certainly are enough good books there. Pick your favorite (or one of your favorites), and post it up.

I’m tagging: Iris, Amanda and Tombrarian.

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

Third Lobe of my Brain


Third Lobe of my Brain

Originally uploaded by griffey.

Inspired by Amanda, here’s my Wordle tag cloud from del.icio.us. It’s really pretty enough to print and hang on my wall.

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Books Digital Culture Media Technology

Kindle in flames?

Two days before I received my Kindle, Roy Tennant published an article on his Digital Libraries blog entitled “Prediction: The Kindle goes down in flames“. I normally agree with Roy on lots of things, but this is a topic where I’m going to pick on him a little.

Let’s rewind to October of 2001, where a plucky little company named Apple released a strange new product called an iPod. With 5 gigabytes of storage, this pocket-sized marvel cost….$399. What did it do? It played music. That’s all it did. Moreover, it only connected to your computer via an esoteric plug called “Firewire” that 90% of the personal computers in the world didn’t have.

It took Apple 3 financial quarters to sell over 200,000 of them, and it wasn’t until 2004 and the cost per gigabyte dropped under $20/GB and the iPod was on it’s third generation that sales really took off.

The Kindle, for all the publicity it has garnered, is only 8 months old. Is it the perfect reading device? I’m not sure yet. I’ve been consuming ebooks for years, beginning with reading them on my Handspring Visor Deluxe in mid-2000. I’ve read them on cell phones, computer screens, and other PDA’s. And I can say without any reservation that after 24 hours with the Kindle that it is a completely new and better reading experience.

The advantages for the Kindle are twofold: a device customized for reading makes reading easier, and the device comes from Amazon. The Kindle is great for reading, not suffering from the issues that, for example, the iPhone might…primarily the issue that an LCD screen just isn’t very good for reading in any form of bright light. The device is driven by Amazon, who has the reach and power in the publishing industry to get books for the device (take a look at the difference between any other ebook provider’s numbers and Amazon’s). Amazon also has the infrastructure to support immediate electronic delivery of any ebook they carry, directly to the device. Anyone else doing that?

The Kindle does several things (it does not, contrary to Tennant’s assertion “only read books”). It allows for reading, annotating, bookmarking, dictionary lookup, and other common reading chores. It also comes with permanent free cellular internet service. Amazon Whispernet gives you, while not a full web experience, a browser and access to the ‘net anywhere you can get a Sprint cell signal. For no additional cost past the cost of the device. Seriously, how much is that worth over a year?

With all that said, I’ve only had the Kindle for less than 48 hours. I wasn’t going to buy one so early in the development cycle, but do I regret having one now? Hell no. It’s a marvelous piece of technology for readers, and I fully expect that in a couple of years I’ll still be toting it around from conference to conference in lieu of a few pounds worth of wood pulp.

If anyone wants to take a look at the Kindle, find me at ALA Annual, and I’ll happily let you play with it. Just holding it, seeing the screen, and seeing how much thought went into the design will make a difference, I promise.

EDIT

Steve Lawson, in the comments, pointed out something that I wanted to address. Tim O’Reilly, in a comment on Roy’s post, says:

“I also struggle with Amazon’s DRM and sole-source approach, which seems to me to be a flawed copy of Apple’s iPod strategy, missing not only Apple’s brilliant design but also the positive externality that consumers could easily add their own music collection to the device by ripping mp3s.”

I am no fan of DRM, and I admit that it gives me pause regarding the Kindle. That said, the “sole-source” approach isn’t true…the Kindle happily ingests any .mobi file you want, and there are plenty of places sourcing native Kindle files of public domain books. First thing I did was put a few dozen of my favorite classics on there, for free. As well, if I had an easy way to digitize the books I already own (in the same rough manner of the digitization of my CDs) I would be doing it, and adding them. The issue there isn’t with the Kindle, it’s that there is no easy digitization of dead trees.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Last thoughts on SWIFT at CiL2008

SWIFT at CiL2008Just wanted to wrap up a few thoughts I had after sitting through the “input session” organized by ITI and The Otter Group on the whole SWIFT/CiL thing. Several really important points came up during that session, which I felt like needed to be pulled out for comment.

First was Ryan Deschamps comment during the (admittedly somewhat tense) discussion. Paraphrased, it was “you don’t just have to be good, you have to be better than me.” This wasn’t said egoistically, just to point out that any particular tool, especially a tool that is commercial in nature, has to be better in significant ways than the tools that are available for free. As well, the tool has to do something that the individual attendees of the conference can’t do either as easily or as quickly by themselves. While I’m quite sure that not everyone at Computers in Libraries is as talented as Ryan, I’m equally sure that anything he or any of the other seriously talented people who were at the input session were to build would be sharable and community driven. As Michael Sauers pointed out on llyfrgellydd.info, several presenters created tools for free, for the hell of it, that ended up being huge drivers of the conference. SWIFT has to be better than them, and it’s not.

Second was the issue that I have with perceived audience of this product. The product is marketed at people who use tools that rely on tags as metadata…flickr, blogs, delicious, etc. It, by necessity, has to have tags in order to pull all the disparate pieces together. But the very people using those services are the people who don’t need SWIFT. The Otter Group developed a platform that is useless for the very people that must use it for it to work.

Kathleen GilroyThird and last is what the session turned out to be. Meredith Farkas has, as usual, a thoughtful post on her take on the session, and comments on the very real tension in the room. I think the tension was a result of the clash between expectation and implementation…we expected an actual feedback session, and we got a sales pitch. Meredith got to the party a little late, and might have missed the fascinating anecdote about where Kathleen got the name for the product (SWIFT is named after a bird!).

We. Don’t. Care. We use products called things like ooVoo, Tumblr, Hulu, and Twitter. Clearly names are not at the top of our list when we choose products or service. We didn’t care about the history of the product, nor even really about its intended use. The street finds its own uses. The point of Web2.0 and Library 2.0 is to provide tools.

Several people in the room commented on the fact that The Otter Group seemed not at all interested in really hearing about the problems with the product. Everything was blamed on “being beta”, or on the lawyers, or something. My take on it is that they just don’t seem to get the social web, as hard as they tried and as much history as they have in trying to make it a commercial product. They fell hard once with their ALA Bootcamp, and if possible fell even harder with Cil2008 and SWIFT.

Oh, and since I know that eventually Kathleen and The Otter Group will see this: Who won the Wii?

Categories
Books Digital Culture Library Issues Media Music Technology

The new information economy

Over the course of the last 20 years, there has been a radical shift in the economies of information. We’ve moved from a world in which information was plentiful but distributed and difficult to find to a world where information is even more plentiful, but ubiquitous and easy to find. Libraries are suffering now as a result of their inability of unwillingness to change based on the new method of information indexing, exchange, and archival.

Libraries were a central part of the public sphere because of that information imbalance. Most libraries have moved to a new model that emphasizes access and comfort instead of being the storehouse of knowledge they once were. Access is something that libraries have on their side, because information, in defiance of the normal rules of supply and demand, still insists on being expensive.

Prepare for another shift, because the next 5-10 years is going to change the rules again.

Chris Anderson, in the latest Wired magazine, outlines the next information revolution: Free.

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

Anderson outlines his argument in the context of business, but his points really show us that the nominal cost of information delivery is the core of the revolution. Of course, the fact that the delivery is free does not immediately mean that the information being delivered is free…that change arises from more traditional competitive pressure. What are traditional information services like books, movies, and television competing with these days? They are competing with free, easily available, highly portable, and in nearly every way more useful unauthorized versions of themselves.

When customers look at the following options, what do you think they choose?

Buying TV shows on iTunes, where they can watch them on their authorized computer and iPods, but not on their Zune or PSP or anywhere else they might want OR downloading a .torrent of their favorite TV show that is higher in quality than the iTunes download that they can watch anywhere they want.

Buying an audiobook from Audible, which has limited playability on only approved devices, or grabbing a P2P copy of that audiobook with no limitations (and no price).

Reading a book on Harper-Collins website, embedded in your browser is one option. Another is the Tor model, where once a week they are providing a free book, in multiple formats (pdf, html, mobi) for you to do with as you will. Move it to an ebook reader. Read it on your computer. Put it on your cellphone. Another option is the library.

It’s obvious that things that are free have an immediate advantage, and libraries have been free for a very long time in the US. But even free vs free has its calculus. If we look at the above examples, it’s very important for libraries to realize that they aren’t competing with iTunes and Audible. They are competing with .torrents and other P2P technologies that disintermediate the information distribution process.

But even free has choices: One example is Hulu, the beta site for NBC/Fox/etc. They pulled their shows from YouTube, citing copyright violations, and launched Hulu, where they can control the message and availability. Then there is OpenHulu, a site that scrapes Hulu and provides the ability to watch the same shows with no login or account creation. Yet another choice is the aforementioned Torrent or other P2P distribution, where there are no commercials, no requirement to stream instead of download, and the ability to watch them on the device of your choice. The advantage of Hulu and OpenHulu over torrenting is instant gratification. Which wins?

So when there are two freely available sources for information, what drives choice? Lots of different aspects of the interaction between the patron and the information make the difference. Ease of use. Availability. Speed. Quality. Brand recognition. Marketing.

Anderson points out that free is the future of commerce, and I absolutely see it as the future of media and information generally. How do libraries then compete in a world where their major advantage is completely nullified? What do we bring to the new information economy, because we need to be planning and implementing now to have any hope of competition.

I think I know some of the ways we compete, but that’s another post. What do you think we can do to stay relevant?

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues Technology

I really hate Zotero

There, I said it. Zotero should warm the heart of any academic, but somehow it escapes me. I’ve been loath to admit it for a long time, especially since I was part of the beta, and tried it for a long time. Plus, it’s exactly the sort of tool that I should really love.

Except I don’t.

Why not? Well, after examining my prejudice, I came to one conclusion: I no longer have any patience with applications that are local. Unless the application I want AND my data live in the cloud, I just won’t use it. I’ve found myself, over the last 6 months to a year, moving nearly everything I do online. Documents are created with Google Docs, I prefer Gmail to any local mail client I’ve tried, heck, I’ve even started using Flickr’s editing deal with Picnik to do my photo edits, and I luuuuuuurve me some photoshop.

What’s up with this change? I really only use two computers; my work PC and my Macbook. It wouldn’t be that hard to use local programs, and sync my documents. The problem is that it’s any effort at all. Syncing my documents shouldn’t be something that I think about, it should just happen…Mac nearly has it right with their .mac syncing, but the PC world just doesn’t operate like that without some serious effort on the user’s part. If Apple would move hard into this space, perhaps with Google as a partner…I think they could revolutionize computing yet again, especially if they leveraged their media power as a part of the cloud storage.

But I digress…

After using Zotero for awhile, I found myself cursing the fact that I had two different databases of information…the “macbook” stuff and the “desktop” stuff. This is why the third lobe of my brain is del.icio.us…I don’t have to think about where I might need that information. It just goes to the cloud, and I pull it down no matter where in the world I may be. I know that Zotero has listed on it’s homepage:

Remote library backup
Shared collections
Access your library from anywhere via the web

Give me that, and maybe it becomes a tool that is useful to me. But until then, local just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Categories
Digital Culture Images Technology

Product Review: Eye-Fi

As a part of having a new Eliza around, we went camera shopping for a new digital camera. I asked for feedback from a bunch of friends as to what digital camera they used and liked, and took those suggestions and matched them against my list of requirements. I wanted something that would do both still and video well, preferably HD video for future-proofing, and had a decent pocketability.

After a failed attempt at locating the Sanyo Xacti model that I wanted, I discovered the Canon TX-1. We’ve loved our Canons from the past…our last two cameras were Canon; one of the original Elphs, back with they were APS film based, and then our immediate past digital, a 4 megapixel Elph. With our history with Canon, plus the TX-1’s optical image stabilization, we decided to give up on the Xacti and just go with the Canon.

But that’s not the product I wanted to sing the praises of in this post. No, I’m beyond thrilled with the memory card I bought to go with the TX-1. Yep, the memory card…if your digital camera takes SD cards, you should immediately buy one of these:

eyefi

A brilliant little piece of tech, the Eye-Fi combines a 2 gig SD card with built in wifi, giving any camera the ability to automatically upload pictures that you take to your computer, to any of dozens of web photo sites, or both. The card comes with a little USB dock, and has the software necessary to tie the card to your computer and website on itself. You plug it into your computer, and it walks you through linking the card, your wifi point, the computer you’re on, and the website in question.

Once it is set up, the process is simply take a picture, and…that’s it. You take a picture and as long as your camera stays on it will upload your pics to your computer and to the web automagically. Now there are limits, and ways that I would love to have the product behave that it doesn’t.

For one, the card attaches itself to your wifi point…not to your computer. I would vastly prefer the card to attach via an ad-hoc network to my computer, and then have the computer do the heavy lifting to the web. That way it would work even when I was traveling, without having to logon to the Eye-Fi manager website and manually change the settings. You can make it work now, but it’s less easy than I’d like.

Still, if you do most of your uploading from home, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

The Kindle and Reference 2.0

Ok, so we’ve all seen the press, read the Newsweek story, and if you’re reading this you probably read my take on the Amazon Kindle. Here’s a new feature that wasn’t heavily marketed for the Kindle, that has a direct impact on library efforts…and the surprising thing is, it has nothing to do with reading a book.

I’m talking about Amazon NowNow.

It’s an “experimental” feature on the Kindle, but NowNow is a human-powered answer engine that uses the Amazon Mechanical Turk group to search and answer questions for users. The service is in beta, and has been for a year or so (Jessamyn blogged about NowNow back in January).

So what’s the big deal? Well, the Kindle is an always-on internet appliance…anywhere you can get a cell signal, you can be online with the thing. Which means that you can ask a question and get an answer, from nearly anywhere, from a human, emailed directly to the device you used to ask the question in the first place. And this is built into the device…yes, Amazon might decide to charge for this, but right now they aren’t.

Is this Reference 2.0? Imagine being asked a research question by a patron, finding the perfect article for them, and being able to send that article to the device they are going to use to read it. Yes, I realize that laptops sort of fill this goal already, but the Kindle is certainly a more user-centered way of getting at this process. The patron doesn’t have to find a way to ask us questions…the device they are using is a direct line to us. It might not be that distinct from a webpage with a meebo widget…but I think it is qualitatively different somehow.

How?

Discuss.