Transformation of the digital world
From PLN
Transformation of the digital world
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Transformation of the digital world
- by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest February 2008
John Blossom’s summary of the Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) recent Information Industry Summit provides some useful insights for library leaders. Here are a few excerpts from his notes:
- Transformative technologies. More content is “available from more people and organizations for more audiences than ever before and the ability to monetize content in more contexts than ever before is truly unprecedented.” While this is great for publishers and other organizations that are a part of this transformation, it’s a serious challenge to those “who are locked into older cost structures and...are slow to adapt to new opportunities…”
- User-generated content. The “more user-generated content there is, the less [people] read a paper and go to the movies.” “User-generated videos are creating their own cultural icons quickly, inexpensively and with a different kind of focus.”
- Social media. Another “chapter of disintermediation” may be unfolding for publishers. A survey of SIIA publishers revealed that they are beginning to embrace social media with “much of the same confusion, fear and skills gap that existed when they first faced the Web.” While traditional publishers may remain relevant, many of the gains are moving toward publishers who have most aggressively deployed social media technologies that put content where audiences want it.
- Search as an editorial tool. Panelists from Thomson Corporation, Financial Times Search, HighBeam and Connotate discussed new forms of high-value content aggregation. These companies are focusing on applications that can fit into people’s workflows. Users “need content in their workflow,” and they need “to be able to embed that information in any page.” Metadata is key to all this. “Keyword search is so yesterday.” “You don’t have metadata, you won’t get there.”
- Google. David Eun, Google’s VP Content Partnerships, said “value now comes from ubiquity, not scarcity.” The old business model was false scarcity, but now companies that succeed embrace ubiquity. The “Internet has grown faster than any previous medium.” It took 45 years for TV to reach a billion dollars in revenue; it took the Internet 3 years. There’s an exabyte of new content every year, enough content to fill 150,000 Library of Congresses. At Google they focus first on the user, not technology. Innovation at Google is from the bottom-up; “not one product comes from a senior executive... We always say don’t present me with a problem, present me with a problem with a possible answer.”
- Technology’s impact. We overestimate technology’s impact on consumer behavior in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.
- (John Blossom, ContentBlogger, Jan. 31, 2008.)
The Semantic Web goes mainstream
- Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest February 2008
My favorite technology journal, MIT’s Technology Review, has a brief blurb on a new Web application that helps people track personal data. It’s so brief, in fact, that I’m quoting pretty much the whole thing here, with my emphasis added:
- Twine,...from San Francisco startup Radar Networks, helps people keep track of personal data, including e-mails, documents, photos, videos and visited Web pages. But its artificial-intelligence algorithms also help categorize that data, sometimes finding surprising connections in disparate content. It is one of the first commercial applications to take advantage of standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium for the Semantic Web, an envisioned network that will automatically classify and sort information.
Product: Twine
Cost: Free
Source: www.twine.com
Company: Radar Networks
- (The Semantic Web goes mainstream, Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2008.)
The evolution of web search
- Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest February 2008
Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig, discusses changes in Web search over the last 10 years and the future of Web search.
What’s changed?
Scale. There’s a “thousand times more information,” which now includes not just Web pages, but also video, pictures, blogs, and other media and formats.
Immediacy. When Norvig started at Google in 2001, they were reindexing once a month; they thought of it as a “library catalogue.” Now they see it “more as up-to-the-minute media.”
What does the future hold?
Natural language searching? Google’s focus is more on “the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for.”
Personalization. That’s hard to do for the entire Web, but they’re starting with easier things, like news articles.
Integration. In two to five years, Norvig sees more integration at Google--“various kinds of content,” such as speech recognition, all kinds of phone interfaces, and also integration of Google’s “various properties.” Norvig says Google “used to put the onus on the user and ask them if they wanted Web search or image search or video search. Now we’re trying to solve that for them and serve up the results in a way that makes sense.”
- (Kate Greene, "Q&A: Peter Norvig: Google’s director of research talks about the evolution of web search", Technology Review, Jan/Feb. 2008.)
Metadata marketing: risks and opportunities
- by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest February 2008
A post on Conversation starter from Harvard Business talks about the importance of metadata as a result of the explosion in user-generated content.
User-generated digital content (e.g., photos taken on your cell phone) and passively-generated data (e.g., your Skype profile) leave footprints (or data trails) of your behaviors. “In an increasingly connected future, the data trails from all these sources will create a massive universe of metadata.”
New devices will provide lenses through which this data can be viewed and analyzed. For example, in New York City taxis with GPS systems already enable traffic patterns to be studied and revised. Soon marketers will be able “to read the emotions of large numbers of people in a geographical area, [and] know not only where to put [the] next electronic billboard, but also what it should display...”
All of this available data has serious implications for people’s behavior, and it raises major questions about whom to trust.
“Individuals and companies will need to find and walk a new line between serving customers and exploiting them, either way with pinpoint accuracy. In the brave new world of aggregated data, companies will need to monitor themselves as well.”
- (Jan Chipchase, "Metadata marketing: risks and opportunities", Conversation starter, Feb. 8, 2008.)
Related articles
- Should libraries host user generated content? - Kathryn Greenhill makes a case for libraries hosting patron-written blogs and other user-generated content.
- Revaluing the book in the hypertext era - Glen Holt considers books, libraries and "the hypertext era."
- Google and libraries - Much has changed since January 2006, when this LLN Peer Panel first appeared, but much hasn't.
