CERN is the latest library to share their book data, as CERN emerging technologies librarian Patrick Danowski announced on twitter. The Open Book Data Project is further described on their website and in a youtube video (below) purpose-made for the occasion. The data is dual-licensed as CC0 and PDDL.

This isn’t the first time that library data has been shared with a splash.

After speaking at Code4Lib 2008 (my first Code4Lib conference), Brewster Kahle was presented with MARC records from the Oregon Summit consortium.

In 2007, a number of Library of Congress records were deposited in connection with
Scriblio, a faceted catalog Casey Durfee described at Code4Lib2007. Scriblio has gone through several incarnations; the open source Kochief project is the latest.

Further, as Jonathan Gorman and I were discussing in #code4lib earlier this week, there are several collections of MARC records and more donated to Open Library hosted at the Internet Archive. A few are misclassified so also consider keyword searches (‘MARC’ and ‘MARC libraries’) if you’re trying to find all the MARC records that archive.org has.

Linked data in libraries is coming along more slowly; fruit, perhaps, for another post.

Where do you look for bibliographic records? Feel free to leave tips in the comments!

‘Conversations’ is deliberately plural, I think, to evoke the many conversations, invisible to one another: “The comments, ratings, and annotations increasingly happen at the aggregator and are invisible to the original source.”

Using Salmon, an aggregator pushes comments back to a “Salmon endpoint” (via POST). These can be published (or moderated) upstream at the original source. See also the summary of the Salmon protocol.

Comments swimming upstream…

Fragmentation of conversation.

Disconnects between older and newer generations of social media

Lack of control of identity, contacts, and data.

A better social Web on mobile devices.

Poor integration between social media and location services.

Difficulty of coherently engaging in social activity across many channels.

Coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media.

from “The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch” encountered via Ed H. Chi’s post at the PARC Augmented Social Cognition blog.

The trends? Openness, portability, aggregation of distributed content. Hopefully we’ll see more on all these fronts in 2010 and beyond. Hinchcliffe also suggests that we want “Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices.”

See the full post at ZDNet for more discussion and references to a number of standards, formats, and related developments. In the next post, I’ll highlight Salmon, a protocol for distributed commenting, which I’d neither encountered nor heard of.

Tweetie

Jill Gengler: I love being able to save someone’s bacon.

Tom Coates: The great slab of fatty prok that I pretned to call a brain is almost totally recumbent this morning. Come on piggy!

We’re making progress at archiving individual streams, I think. But the overall conversation, “what was I seeing then”, and the links between things? Needs work, at least chez moi!

• User’s current status
• Private conversations
• Links to web content
  • links to blog and news articles
  • links to images and videos
  • other links
• Politics, sports, current events
• Product recommendations/complaints
• Advertising  “posted from a company’s twitter account”
• Spam
• Other messages “that don’t quite fit under any of the above categories. Fan messages to celebrities, shoutouts to other users, web-based polls and quizzes, and so on.”

via Hak-Lae Kim on twitter

Your brain builds something from whatever mental flotsam and jetsam is in your head. Perhaps it’s a useful thing, an answer to a question you didn’t know you needed. Perhaps it’s just an interesting combination of thoughts put into a story. It’s dreaming, but you’re awake.

-[Rands]

…when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention – you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

-[Richard Hamming]

Metaresearch?

Shawn Micallef from Spacing Toronto has a lovely photoessay about Galway. I think he captures the city well. It gives a flavor of the place, from a North American perspective:

Geese at Galway Bay by Shawn Micallef

Go read/see the whole thing.

Ribbit Mobile is similar to Google Voice: it’s a next-generation phone system currently aimed at the US and UK markets. You use your own (presumably mobile) number. What really got my attention, though, was a new social feature they call “Caller ID 2.0″:

Ribbit wants to leverage your social networks for Caller ID

When a call comes in, Ribbit Mobile will reach into the social web and bring you the recent LinkedIn updates, Facebook updates, Tweets, and Flickr photos of the person calling you. Ribbit Mobile lets you know not just who is calling but what the caller has been up to on the web.

I was already excited about Ribbit when I first encountered them.

I guess it’s time to try out their Google Wave gadgets! And if Google Voice or VoIP with your mobile number has any appeal, I’d advise you to request an invite for their beta. Note that they’ve already got plans to charge for their services.

1. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number.

2. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

3. Entrusted data. This is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data — someone else does.

4. Incidental data. Incidental data is data the other people post about you. Again, it’s basically same same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that 1) you don’t have control over it, and 2) you didn’t create it in the first place.

5. Behavioral data. This is data that the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with.

See Schenier’s post for discussion. Via a pointer on Rob Styles’ blog, in turn via Rob’s tweet.

Have you come across other taxonomies for social networking data?

Here’s a simple but far less expressive one way to characterize data on social networks. Is it “about you” or “from you”? Either the first, the second, neither, or both. “Aboutness”, however, is ontologically challenging. Any use for this?

Collaboration/shared control isn’t considered in this taxonomy. For instance, “entrusted data” doesn’t capture the notion of “shared data” in a collaborative system such as wave, a wiki, or perhaps even email.

For behavioral data in libraries, see also “intentional data”, as used by Lorcan Dempsey, back to 2005 (and many times since) [for instance, in discussion with "emergent knowledge"]. I prefer “behavioral data” since much data about intention is by no means deliberate/intentional!

I watched, with rapt fascination, the hour-long intro video¹ back in May. Though video is usually something I consume for entertainment, not information.

So it may be that my hopes were too high. Given that Wave is a ‘preview’ (is that one level below beta?), there’s still hope for the future.

Things I don’t like about wave:

• The new stuff isn’t always at the bottom, and ‘diff’ is a video
• I have to add my own contacts all over again, and they’ve got new “email” addresses
• Closed system–so I can’t communicate with just anybody
• Feels very slow
• Need to click to edit–yet I’m still always creating errant blank notes
• I can’t tell what I can edit and what I can’t
• What’s the etiquette?²
• Doesn’t separate content and discussion
• Waves with lots of people get really long really quickly
• Other maintenance–like, I guess I’m supposed to add a picture for myself?
• The ‘inbox’ is really a list of things I’m paying attention to. ‘inbox’ seems a misnomer.
• I can’t subscribe to wave alerts via email (e.g. if I haven’t logged in in some amount of time, remind me by email that I might want to)
• Those damn arrows! I DON’T WANT TO SCROLL!!!!!
• I want a list of bots, and to add a bot by clicking a button.
• I want a ‘make this public’ button, rather than having to scramble for an email address to add.

For more information about wave, check Google’s About pages, Wikipedia’s overview, or the in-progress wiki aiming to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. At the moment, I’ve still got a few invites to give away, if you’d like to try it out for yourself.

Overall, I’m struck by the length and lack of summarization in Wave. One of the reasons I keep using gmail is that it (often but not always) helps me to keep track of the conversation. Wave doesn’t do that right now: the ‘preview’ or subject line just pulls from the first blip. (Even just pulling from the latest blip would help!)

I have a few active collaborations in Wave (SIOC, the ‘unofficial code4lib conference wave’, and a small advertising/new media conversation we’re testing moving from email). Perhaps as time goes on I’ll have a better understanding of what it’s good for in practice. Meanwhile, I welcome pointers to others’ experiences, especially easy-to-digest tips about how you’re using Wave!

1. oops–make that 1:20!
2. For instance, I *am* going to delete blips and extraneous comments to make things easier to follow. In a wiki this would be expected. In my own inbox it’s up to me. But in a public listserv conversation it’s verboten, except perhaps for spam deletion.