Opportunity Knocks

Web 2.0 and the Library

TLNPlymouth LibrarySeptember 27, 2006

John Blyberg (blybergj@aadl.org)

Steve JohnsonDiscoverwww.discover.com

“There’s a comparable quiet revolution underway right now, one that is likely to fundamentally transform the way we use the Web in the coming years...”

www.discovery.com/issues/oct-05/departments/emerging-technology/

Good morning. Thanks very much for coming, and many thanks to TLN and the Plymouth Library for their kind speaking invitation.

I’m pleased and excited by the fact that TLN has put together this program on Web 2.0. I hope that you’ll find, after today, that Web 2.0 and libraries have the potential to synthesize into a new, exciting, and effective way to information brokering.

Understanding Web 2.0 & Library 2.0

• About Web 2.0

• Why is it different?

• Why is it important?

• What comprises Web 2.0?

• How does it relate to libraries?

• What’s next?

Rosemary has asked me to kick off this day by providing a general overview of of Web 2.0

I’d like to get an idea of how many people here have a pretty good idea of what Web 2.0 is?How many people here currently use what, would be considered, Web 2.0 tools?

So I think I’m going to start it by highlighting some of the fundamental changes were seeing with the web, how it different from “Web 1.0” and what the significance of these changes are.

I also want to showcase some specific tools and technologies that are especially pertinent in our industry and how we might go about using them. I hope that as we go along here, the value of Web 2.0 and Web 2.0 tools and services now available will reveal itself.

Of course, what is a talk about technology if we can’t speculate about the future, so, I’m going to do a little about that as well (symantic web)

I’d also like to leave some time for Questions and Answers, since this topic is very deep and I’m just going to be scratching the surface of Web 2.0.

So, as you listen to the speakers today, bear in mind that Web 2.0 is somewhat if an intangible concept.

It represents an evolutionary, and for some sectors, revolutionary shift in internet technology whereby the entire web experience becomes much more user-centric and user-friendly.

What’s all this about Web 2.0?

So, why Web 2.0?

Well, the phrase itself was coined by the publisher, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media in 2004. Known for his menagerie of books with animals on the covers.. they are all tech-related publications. A lot of them are also printed right up the street here at Malloy.

Anyway, When he coined the term Web 2.0, his intention was to describe a second generation of web-based services such as social networking communication tools, wikis, and folksonomies. (if you’re scratching your head right now wondering what the heck a wiki is, don’t worry, you’re not alone, and I’m going to talk about wikis, social networking, and a number of other web 2.0 goodies)

What’s important here, is that this new technology enables people to collaborate and share information online in new, interesting ways. The term “web 2.0” itself is a buzzword, but the technologies behind it are real and revolutionary.

So what are several (not all, but several) of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0?

The way I see it, is that there are two fundamental ingredients in a Web 2.0 service: people and data.

Network Effects

One to one

Some to some

Many to many(critical mass)

What I find unique about Web 2.0, is that it turns user-centricity and user-friendliness into an asset because data, in this world, is a commodity. More specifically, user-generated data.

And how do you “get” that data? And what data do you make available to your users?

Obviously, as libraries, we have a TON of data on our shelves, and quite a bit in our systems, but for all intents and purposes, that data is static. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very valuable, but it’s not he type of data were talking about here.

The idea behind network effect is that by making a platform, or entry tool, ubiquitous, you begin to generate a sustainable stream of data that is further consumed, at which point, that platform itself becomes secondary to the data.

Ok, so in plain English...

You can look at it by saying that the more users a service has, the more useful it becomes to existing and potentially new users. This is the economy behind social networking sites that provide free access to their tools and services.

Sites such as flickr and myspace depend on that critical mass of users to sustain their growth, both in terms of data and number of ACTIVE users. (and there is a big difference between active and inactive users).

In the case of MySpace, it’s just isn’t as “cool” as it once was (it’s a passing fad), and it no longer has as much penetration in the college market which is why it’s no longer the king of the playground -- that title is shifting to Facebook and YouTube. But I’ll be talking about MySpace and Facebook more a little later.

The real benefit these service providers have realized, comes from the very data their users generate. In a way, this is a practical application of viral marketing that requires very little in terms of advertising because growth is determined by how contageous the service is.

Fundamentally, humans want interaction with other humans, and this model slides right in to that most basic desire and harnesses its growth potential.

The Long Tail (or how distribution will change our lives forever)

Sites like Amazon.com have found a way to turn this into a perpetual goldmine.

In 2004, Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, introduced the world to the “Long Tail” when we wrote an article in Wired Magazine that described the business model behind succesful web-based stores like Amazon and Netflix.

He focused on Amazon and Netflix because, at the time, they were two services that had become highly successful using just this type of application.

So what is it?

If you were to look at the DVD or CD shelves at Wal-Mart, you would see thousands of titles and artists, but, in reality, they would comprise only a tiny sliver, percentage-wise, of all the material in publication. That’s because in Wal-Mart, shelf-space is prime real-estate, where only the best selling material may dwell.. (we all know about that)

Amazon, on the other hand, doesn’t care about shelf-space, No, they said, “we’re going to revolutionize the way we distribute our product”

And they did this in a number of ways.

First, they INVOLVED the customers themselves. They allowed them to rate material, publish reviews, put together wishlists, favorites lists, and a number of other social tools. The other major feature they put in place was the “Users who bought this, also bought...”

They rapidly built up this massive set of social data that allowed them to precicely target each user individually. They didn’t just leave their users to their own devices to search and browse their massive collection (the yellow portion of this long tail graph), they put only what that user is interested in in from of their eyeballs. Sales from the long-tail far outweigh those of the body of popular items.

This is an overly simplistic assesment of the Long Tail, but my point in bringing it up is that Web 2.0 has radically changed the role of “User” in the information retrieval process.

Web 2.0 will challenge even the most... robust... information experts

The internet has changed the information game forever. Web 2.0 has changed the web forever because it, in essence, democratizes not only the consumption of information, but the creation of it as well.

Web 2.0 is the information age’s “rise of the proletariate”, so to speak.

Information consumers no longer want, or need, to consult an “expert” to get the answers they need because the vast majority of the info they’re looking for consists of news, oppinions, advice, and reccomendations.

In Steve Johnson’s previous quote, he goes on to say “Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulates like nutrients in a rain forest.”

As information experts, we’re seeing and going to see drastic changes in the way our users interact with and solicit information. Traditional ideas of authority are no longer pertinent, or valued as they once were. This means that in order to remain relevent to our users, we need to embrace the same things they are.

I don’t think that we can afford to be complacent--we need to be discussing and investigating ways of making this new paradigm work for us.

Search & Catalog functionality is vastly improving

Think about how many pages Google has indexed:

According to Google’s Timeline - http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.htmlAt the end of 2000, Google had indexed 1.3 billion pagesBy the end of 2001, it had indexed approximately 4 billion pages.By August 2005, Google had indexed 8 billion pages!

Now, go do a search and see how fast results are displayed.This is partly due to hardware improvements, but the real player here is Google’s extremely powerful software.

But what does this mean for us and the web in general?

First, it means that larger quantities of information can now be PRACTICALLY made available on the web. What was prohibitive, only ten years ago, is now entirely possible.

This, then, means that technological barriers no longer exist and companies can put together highly data-intensive applications.

It also has given rise to what’s called the “distributed web” -- a constallation of web services that have become interdependent. In other words, when you go to one site, there is a good chance that its actually talking to servers all over the country (or world) to service a single request.

This type of “distributed computing” i what’s given rise to the ability to embed a great deal of rich content in web pages, quickly.

Incidentally, I think its fairly easy to recognize the difference in quality between the results Google gives a user versus the results our OPACs do. Our users shouldn’t have to be information professionals in order to retrieve the material they need. We can learn a lot from a model that is a) simple and b) works well.

Activism finds a venue

If you pay attention to politics, you’ll know that blogs have been playing an increasingly important role in election campaigns.

Other activist groups have jumped on this new technology and are some of the earliest adopters. Why? Because it’s where the young, energetic talent is. It basically provides a very large, international soap box from which these groups can evangelize, discuss issues, and even raise money.

How many of you are familiar with the term “Smart Mob?”

Smart Mobs are very interesting things. The concept was first introduced by a fellow named Howard Reingold in his book “Smartmobs: The next social revolution”.

A smart mob is a group of people that do not behave in the manner you might expect of a quote-unquote “mob”. Instead, they harness the power of networked devices such as cellphones, instant messaging, text messaging, and the like to rapidly and efficiently direct their movement.

For instance, a smart mob could be directed to rapidly descend on a particular retailer on a specific street at a specific time, do a specific thing, say, sit in the middle of the street chanting the same thing for exactly 60 seconds, then quickly dissapear.

A good example of this were the Seattle anti-globalization rallies.

So were seeing some very tangible, emerging political implications from this technology.

The line between public and personal begins to blur

Another one of the characteristics of this new Web, is the blurring of public and private. Social software sites such as MySpace and Facebook allow users to document their lives online in a forum where other users can read and comment on eachother’s “page”.

What’s interesting here, is that while the “older” web users are less inclined to air their personal laundry online, Teens seems to have little compunction to do so. This is why we’ve heard so much about these two particular social networking sites in the media.

It’s also what has put language into the proposed DOPA law (the Delete Online Predator’s Act) that specificaly targets Social Networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

A small issue of personal rights...

And so, politicians have become inolved with this, along with community activists who are putting pressure on libraries to block or filter these types of sites.

I’m not going to go into to many specifics about MySpace because Nick will be talking about it a little later in much more detail, but I do have some thoughts on the matter.

My take on MySpace and Facebook may not sit well with some of my peers that are actively trying to promote these sites--especially with teens.

We need to be taking some careful consideration of what we want out relationship to these sites to be, independent from the controversy. I think it’s premature to start blocking these sites--in fact, I’m against blocking sites at all. But before we start entering into these particular arenas, we should definately have some serious conversations.

I say this because these sites have impacted the futures of a number of high school and college students in a very negative way. Just last week, a college football player was dismissed from his football team for some disparaging remarks he made against his coach on his Facebook account.

Many companies are now checking up on potential employees--looking at their myspace and facebook accounts. What these kids may not realize, or even grasp, is that even though they change their pages, they are cached forever, so that anyone can see what they were up to at any point in time. What these kids are posting to MySpace now will follow them or the rest of their lives.

These are the online equivalent to tattoos, except that tattoos can now be removed.

BUT, we should still have the right to screw up the rest of our lives. Look, I have three children myself, and I’m going to be darn sure to impress upon them the same things I’m talking about right now. And that where the responsibility should stay-- at HOME, not at the library, or at school, or in the legislature.

That said, what should our relationship be to these sites? We should certainly be providing information to parents on how to encourage responsible use. But should be be creating MySpace

Who are the players?

• Wikipedia

• Blogger

• YouTube

• del.icio.us

• Flickr

• Google

• Many more ...

Ok, let’s shift gears here a little bit and start talking specifics.

It’s easy to find economists these days that liken the “web 2.0” boom to the dot-com boom. And, in part, they’re correct. There are more web 2.0 companies cropping up than the market can support. That said, this glut of web 2-ness is nothing like the dot-com era. Venture capitalists are still very cautious, and tend to require new companies to actually have good ideas.

So we will see die-offs, but nothing like those of the dot-com bust. Additionally, we’re seeing a great deal of innovation that is being snatched up and used in a number of interesting ways.

I’m going to introduce some of the larger, more well known Web 2.0 sites today, but bear in mind that there are many more.

Blogging

• Technorati tracks over 54 million blogs

• About 1.2 million blog posts are tracked by Technorati every day: ~ 50,000 per hour!

• The blogoshphere doubles every 6 months

• It’s 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

Technorati is a site that acts as a search engine for blogs (short for web log). But it also keeps statistics on most of the blogs on the net today. It currently tracks over 54 million blogs.

Let me ask a few questions,How many people are familiar with blogs and blogging?How many of you blog personally?How many of you work at a library that blogs?

Blogs have actually be around for awhile, but in the last two years have enjoyed a tremendous popularity boost. I think because the barrier to entry is so low--it’s very easy to start a blog--and, like I mentioned before, people are social animals and want to express themsevles and network with other people. Blogs are the perfect way to do this.

Writing a Blog Entry...

Another reason for the success of blogs is how easy it is to maintain one. In a way, they are mini Content Management Systems. Very little technical expertise is required to post new entries.

As you can see here from this screenshot of my blog, he most basic elements of the post are the Title and the Content. No special knowledge of HTML is required.

A finished Blog Post

Title

Body

TagsComments

The basic anatomy og a Blog post looks somehat like this,

You have a title, the body of the post.. in which you can see all the different links. You can even have embedded images if you like.

You’ll also notice on the bottom here the post date and time. This is important because it is, after all, a “log”.

Every blog post also features what is called a “permalink” -- a permalink is nothing more than a persistent URL to just that post. Ideally, they should be short, susinct URLs tht are a combination of both the date and the title of the post.

Many, if not most, blogs allow for commenting. As you can see here, there are no comments to this post. Comments allow people to respond to your post.

Posts are often categorized into predetermined catagories. This allows for easy searching later on.Tagging is often referred to as “folksonomy” and is yet another metadata type that allows for new ways of accessing and searching data.

AADL’s Books Blog

When designing our site, we made the decision to make Blogs the centerpiece of our Content Management strategy.

Drupal

A Flickr Tag Cloud

For instance, Tag Clouds are extremely popular on many web 2.0 sites and are commonly found on blogs as well. This particular tag cloud comes from flickr and as you can see it presents a very interesting way of representing popularity.

(describe tag cloud)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is one of those technologies that have come about to fill a need and eliminate work.

It is simply a bit of text called “XML” that other programs can understand and interperate. Embedded in that text is a digest of any kind of published information. For instance, blogs are perfect candidates.

You utilize RSS feeds by pointing an “aggregator” at the feed. Over time, you’ll add more and more RSS feeds to your aggregator. You’ll then be able to view and read that information or those blogs in one single place instead of jumping around to numerous sites.

Bloglines is a free, online aggregator that is very popular. Bloglines allows you to choose wether or not you’d like to share your subscription list. So, this is a screenshot of Jenny Levine’s bloglines, Jenny writes the blog “The Shifted Librarian” and is a popular Web 2.0 evangelist.

But you can see here....

Other uses for RSS

RSS

We’ve also incorporated RSS into our site and catalog in a number of other ways. This is an example of RSS being used to track changes to catalog seaches.

Wiki’s: The democratic website

Wiki’s are another tool in the Web 2.0 chest.

Wikipedia is, perhaps, one of the most well-known wiki’s on the web and is, indeed, a very impressive collection of articles.

Wiki’s basically democratize the web-page creation process. The idea behind the wiki is that anyone can edit a page (or if you like, anyone with an account). It is a collaborative authoring tool in its purest form.

They require a little higher level of comfort with technology and web-based tools, but are still very easy to edit and update once you’ve been indoctrinated to it. It is certainly within the scope of anyone in this room.

SJCPL’s Subject Guide Wiki

St. Joseph County Public Library in Indiana has put together a fantastic subject guide wiki. They’ve put in a lot of work and have demonstrated how wiki’s can be a great collaborative tool for libraries.

AADL’s staff wiki

This is an example of a staff-only wiki that we use at AADL as a way of fostering internal communication and sharing information and expertise.

So you can see that there are a wide rage of uses for wikis because they are simply collaborative documents.

Social Bookmarking

Another very hot Web 2.0 site is del.icio.us. Delicious is a social bookmarking site that lets people store their bookmarks online instead of in their browsers so that they are available to you wherever you go (even if you’re not on your usual computer).

But it’s also so much more than that. Delicious allows you to tag and rank your bookmarks.

(more description)

For example, instead of Google, try delicious a few times and you may be surprised at the difference in the experience as well as the results you get.

Flickr

Finally,

I wanted to showcase Flickr, which is one of the most, if the most, popular photo-sharing Web 2.0 sites on the net right now.

Flickr allows users to upload and manage photos, tag them, categorize them, share them and allow other people to comment on them.

Again, Flickr is a free tool for anyone and because it’s such a high quality tool at that, they’ve been very successful at gaining, and maintaining, critical mass within their user base.

I can literally spend hours browsing through people’s Flickr accounts if I’m not careful.

ALA on Flickr

ALA set up a Flickr account shortly after annual, I believe, and has posted some very moving pictures of the Katrina recovery effort in New Orleans.

MLC on Flickr

And of course, the Michigan Library Consortium is on Flickr...

There is no reason why your library couldn’t have a flickr account.

Advanced Web 2.0: APIs Mashups etc...

Use your imagination....

Let’s try a little experiment...

Q & A?

I entitled this talk opportunity knocks because....

Q&A?