Crowdsourcing that I can believe in…

Lower division English football club Ebbsfleet United are owned by a community of subscribers to an Internet site.  The owners of the club pay 35 British Pounds a year for the right to own a part of the club.  Now, before you start saying “don’t the Green Bay Packers do that too,” note the the owners of Ebbsfleet actually participate in personnel decisions.  That’s right, they are crowdsourcing the role of the general manager.  And, they are winning!  I wonder what Andrew Keen would thing of all this.

I think that the fans of the Reds should demand this.  There is little way that we as a group could do any worse, right?

Great Firefox Extention

Lifehacker reports on a Firefox Extention that allow you to select multiple links on a webpage and have them all open in seperate tabs.  I think that this is really useful for opening multiple links in a RSS reader in one step.   Download it here

Perhaps we should actually take note…

David Lee King has an interesting post of notes taken at a presentation by Marshall Breeding at ALA Midwinter in Denver.  The idea that libraries should use the experiences and search behavior of their patrons is one that I strongly support.  A generation ago, we had to start from scratch with every patron.  Perhaps more importantly, they did not see the value of information.  Now, we have a generation of library users that grasp the importance of information and also have a well developed set of information seeking behaviors.  But, we push back arguing that our systems are more precise, often holding up the beauty of controlled vocabulary as the primary example.  However, if our systems make no sense to our users (and any academic librarian who teaches a lot of BI sessions know that they do not), then we should use the systems that do make sense to them as models.  I really like Breeding’s point about Amazon; why is it that our facets are incomprehensible to users while Amazon’s require no training?  I think this has to do with the nature of faceted library catalogs.  They pull the facets from the MARC record.  To the majority of library users, the information from the MARC record is of little use.

But there is another thing about the library catalog that has been bothering my lately.  When I search for books by an unfamilar author, all I get is a list of records without context.  What I mean is that I have no way of knowing if it is considered an authoritative source.  Also, I don’t know if it is considered A major wor by that author.  To get this information, I have to go to Amazon.  So me, a librarian who believes in the power of our systems, is forced to go to a commercial website for necessary information.  We really need to rectify this situation or risk being faced with obsolescence.

Reissue, Repackage…

Although the web may have failed as a streaming medium during yesterday’s inauguration, it will also us to pick apart every moment and word of the event.  Take for instance this service from Delve Media, that allows you to search inside video content.   A search on “change” or “god” will show you where those words appear in the inaugural address using a heat map.  The really cool thing is that is will automatically include related terms in your search.

Is Guitar Hero the death of the garage band?

I was listening to Minor Threat yesterday driving home from work and thought that it seems to me that few kids even try to play music anymore.  How many good bands started in a suburban garage?  Kids got the musical urge, got their mom and dad to buy them a cheap electric guitar, bass or drum set, and then set about learning how to make music with three chords and a cloud of dust.  How many metal muscians got their start this way?  Or, gutter punks traded their skateboards for a cheap Strat knockoff and a tiny amp.  This is how you make punk bands.  My concern is that the simulation of music in video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are now so good that it satisfies that need to create and kids will no longer learn to play.  Just like it is easier to play Tony Hawk Pro Skater then actually learning how to skate, it is much less frustrating to play guitar hero than to actually have to play a guitar.  This just seems to be yet another example of a third order simulacrum as defined by Baudrillard; for a large number of kids, there is no music, only the simulation of it on Guitar Hero.

Sue him! Now!!!!

Israili nationalist/conservative Benjamin Netanyahu has stolen Obama’s website.  Normally I am not in favor of litigation, but this has to be stopped!!!

From the “how could she not see this coming” file…

Now, I realize that some folks (usually Euros) take their lives in Second Life very seriously.  But this story about virtual love and loss at cnn.com just goes to show that those who will marry virtually will also cheat virtually.  Virtual men is the same as real men, only much better looking.  But I wonder if this act of virtual infidelity is more of a relationship crime than if the couple had originally met in the flesh?  She knows that this dude takes virtual lovin’ even more seriously than the real thing.

New Rush

Funny thing, I was never interested in the world of investing until now. Now, mind you, I am not about to invest any of my money into the stock market, but I have been following individual stocks like a hawk since last Wednesday. Why? Because I miss the constant influx of data that the election provided. I used to start everyday by looking at Pollster to check the poll numbers. I knew that I would wake up to Zogby and R2K, get Rass at 9:30 and Gallup at 1:00. Then, Rass would provide state numbers at 6:30. This data shaped my moods for the day. Then I could go over to 538 and for analysis of what it all meant from that genius of stats Nate Silver.

You see, as a librarian, I am an information junky. Before the election, I satisfied this addiction with sports. Sports have numbers. Lots of numbers. My favorite is the +/- stat in hockey, but my love of that sport is incidental to the stats. On the other hand, I follow baseball only because I love the stats. It is the mother of all sports for those of us that like to feel like the smartest guy in the room. But, much like Nate Silver, I found the polling numbers in the electoral cycle to be just as addicting. The “realness” of it all gave those numbers more import than Joey Vatto’s OBP or the fact that Daniel Briere is a career -30 player in the NHL (take that, Philly!). But, now it’s all over. But the stock market has more numbers and stats that I know what to do with. I am having a good time learning about the strengths and weaknesses of the P/E and P/S numbers. Now, if only we librarians actually made enough money to invest, I could try to invest in stock whose P/S has dropped well under 1 during the current free fall (US Steel and General Electric, in case you care). But alas, my poverty is saving me from losing money. Ironic, isn’t it?

Wi-fi for the camera

Even though the economy is in the toilet, my gadget lust is still in overdrive.  Take this for example.  It looks like a standard 4GB SD card, but it has built-in wi-fi.  What this means is that I can take a bunch of pictures, and then when I get home I just have to turn on the camera and my photos will be automatically uploaded to my PC.  What’s even better is that I can set up an automatic upload to Flickr.  My kids two grandmas are always begging me to upload new photos to Flickr but I never get the time.  This little device would solve all that.

Yet another attempt to stay relevant

In yet another attempt by my profession to remain relevant in a world driven by ubiquitous information, librarians are collaborating on a project to develop a search engine that will be limited to a subset of relevant sites.  My fear in this is that librarians as a group are not large enough to crowdsource something like this, and the service will be limited by the sites that are included in the search.  But I have a broader issue with this concept; it presumes that there are “true” sites out there and we as a profession know where they are.  What a service like this does is to give the sites chosen by this group of librarians a weight of authenticity and truthfulness that will serve to privilege them over sources that may have a different perspective.  We have a tendency to favor traditional reference sources like subject encyclopedias and handbooks as if they have no bias.  But on issues that have a political charge (abortion anyone), there is no such thing.  The other thing is that the academy, and librarians included, have a vested interested in maintaining the existing system of scholarly publishing because it helps to preserve their authority.  So, most initiatives like this one will push “official” sources of information at the expense of crowdsourced, user-generated content.  Given the power of blogging and other types of user-submitted sources of information, as proven during this recent election cycle, we attempt to denigrate them to our peril.  There are better ways for librarians to remain relevant.  My feeling is that truth is relative and context-dependent, and that we would be better served to instruct our patrons in evaluating resources.