Pivot and the future of search
In my presentation at this years OLA Superconference I spoke about the impact of data visualization and information aesthetics on search. I just came across a beautiful demonstration of this, Pivot from Microsoft.
…Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
Check out Gary Flake’s presentation from this years TED conference.
Maker Culture in the media
In my earlier post on MiniSoOnCon I mentioned that journalism students from Ryerson and UWO were covering the event as part of a project on Maker Culture. You can now see the first part of the series on rabble.ca and The Tyee.
Google Wave in education and libraries
Since the launch of Google Wave, there seems to be confusion about how best to use it. However, The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at attempts by colleges to engage with the technology in light of earlier predictions that it could replace course management software.
Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his “Internet in American Life” course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a “wave” to discuss the impact of the Internet on energy sustainability.
But what if you merged a biology class and a philosophy class? You could have them evaluate a bioethics case study, suggests Mr. Schroeder, director of the university’s Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service. Or what about a class on Asian history? You could use Wave’s translation tool and hook up with a group of Chinese students.
What about libraries? Well, over at the UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog there is an analysis of how Google Wave has been received by librarians in the United Kingdom, where it seems that, like the rest of us, they intend to “wait and see”.
Overall, whilst interest in Wave was high, there was a degree of scepticism regarding how useful it is to librarians. Tellingly, some respondents felt that there are not enough extensions for Wave to make it useful to librarians yet and that nobody has actually found a valuable practical use for Wave in libraries at this point. One respondent went as far as to state that Wave has yet to be used for anything beyond time wasting. On the whole, respondents seemed happy to let Wave develop and let other people find uses for it before they approach it with any seriousness.
Can libraries learn from The Rocky Mountain News?
Here is a thought provoking presentation by John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News. Founded in 1859, The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper. However, it published its final edition on February 27, 2009. It was the first major paper to close after the economic crash and Temple outlines the events that led to the paper’s closure, many of them related to the paper’s inability to deal with new technologies. He believes that the lessons he learned can be broadly applied, and I am sure librarians can draw insights from his presentation to help us understand our engagement with both emerging technologies and our users.
Temple’s ten lessons are as follows;
- Know what business you’re in.
- Know your customers.
- Know your competition.
- Know your goal.
- Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
- Measure, measure, measure.
- Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
- Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
- To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
- Invest in R&D.
Tuesday tech links: Conferences
I love attending conferences and try to squeeze in as many as possible. However, time, distance and expense have to be taken into consideration, so my options are often limited. The following are upcoming conferences I wish I could attend. If anyone out there is attending any of these, please contact me, as attending conferences vicariously is often just as entertaining.
1. ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. I’ve mentioned the real-time web many times on this blog, and this event should produce some exciting insights.
The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit will be made up of a smart and diverse group of people. Together we will discuss the key questions, in the process creating a final agenda on-site - and in real-time! The Real-Time Web is changing so fast that no predetermined agenda of talking heads on stage can do it justice.
2. The Internet as Playground and Factory. A fascinating subject that is rarely discussed in the rush to find the next up-and-coming social media app.
Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to establish commonalities between suburbanites across the United States. Currently, communities that were previously sustained through national newspapers now started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind televisions sets in favor of communing with — and through– their computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease, tag, detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of their labor, corporations expropriate value. Guests in the virtual world Second Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to ourselves?
3. Engaging Data Forum. As we enter the next phase of the web, it seems privacy will become an even more contentious issue.
The Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information is the launching event of the Engaging Data Initiative, which will include a series of discussion panels and conferences at MIT. This initiative seeks to address the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information by bringing together the main stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including social scientists, engineers, manufacturers, telecommunications service providers, Internet companies, credit companies and banks, privacy officers, lawyers, and watchdogs, and government officials.
Wildcard. Shift Electronic Arts Festival. I firmly believe that librarians, when looking at technology and trying to divine its future direction and what it will mean for our profession, should pay greater attention to the art world, where early adopters and innovators can be found.
From the dazzling shaman of dance music Ebony Bones to electro pioneers Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius aka Cluster, from Susan Collins’ live-video broadcast from a haunted house in Britain and real-time tech-necromancy courtesy of Hamburg robotics artists F18, to seriously fathoming the borders of reality with the video medium: with “Magic. Tech-Evocations and Assumptions of Paranormal Realities” as its theme, Shift guarantees an enchantingly varied programme.
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