General 12 May 2008 06:53 am
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General 09 May 2008 06:53 am
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General 05 May 2008 06:53 am
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General 02 May 2008 06:53 am
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Library & Conferences 29 Apr 2008 09:30 am
Growing up, I thought of libraries as places you went to get books. That’s before I got a salary, and discovered amazon.com.
In the last few years, I’ve realized that idea of libraries is totally wrong. Libraries are where the librarians are, and librarians are people who understand information and how to organize it better than almost anybody. That makes libraries and librarians incredibly interesting. So it’s with much interest that I see the announcement for the “One Big Library” unconference, forwarded by John Dupuis:
Announcing the One Big Library Unconference
http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/
E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca
When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Where: The Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”
The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.
It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis.
In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like to get together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:
- The future of libraries
- Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
- Uses of social software in libraries
- Tools to support and extend the One Big Library
Our goals are:
- Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
- Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
Robot 29 Apr 2008 06:40 am
Via Marc Andreessen, whose title, “Don’t fool yourself - they’re coming for us”, seems spookily appropriate.
General 28 Apr 2008 06:53 am
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General 26 Apr 2008 10:24 pm
How can Google search be beaten? Google’s edge is to do search better than other companies, i.e., they have access to knowledge about search those other companies don’t, in part because they place a high premium on developing such knowledge in-house.
What happens if Google’s understanding of search starts to saturate, and further research produces only small gains in user experience? The knowledge gap to their competitors will start to close. Other companies will be able to replicate the search experience Google offers. The advantage will then shift to whichever company can manage the operations side of search (e.g., maintaining large teams, large data centers and so on) better. Google’s culture - all those clever people improving search - will then become a liability, not an asset.
This is the classic path to commodization. A new industry opens up. In the early days, the race is to those who develop know-how quickly, providing an edge in service. As know-how saturates, everyone can provide the same service, and the edge moves to whoever can manage operations the best. The old innovators are actually at a disadvantage at this point, since they have a culture strongly invested in innovation.
In Google’s case, there’s another interesting possibility. Maybe search just keeps getting better and better. It’s certainly an interesting enough problem that that may well be posible. But if our knowledge of search ever starts to saturate, Google may find itself needing another source of support for its major business (advertising).
General 26 Apr 2008 10:13 pm
Does anyone know of a good discussion of how institutions change? I’ve looked around a fair bit, online, in catalogues, and in bookstores. Nothing I’ve found has quite fit the bill.
Update: Shortly after posting this, I thought of Cosma’s notebooks, which do indeed contain several promising leads.
General 25 Apr 2008 05:02 pm
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