December 2007 Archives

Have you heard about Knol yet? This is the name for Google's new online encyclopedia, which was announced last week. In case you're curious about the name, Knol stands for 'unit of knowledge.' One Google OS commenter called Knol "a collection of creditable blogs on interested knowledge." That's a nice way to explain it. Another commenter called it an update on "old-school About.com." Yep. To help us visualize Knol, Google put up an example Knol on insomnia.

There are several ideas at play in Knol:
Knols will be solo-authored pieces (unlike Wikipedia). Readers will not be able to edit entries, but can write reviews, submit comments and suggest edits. Anyone will be able to contribute a Knol--Google's hope is that the online community will identify and suggest improvements for weak Knols, similarly elevating strong Knols.

Each Knol entry will feature peer-reviews. This is an interesting idea. Could this be a first step towards a large-scale effort in evaluating freely available Web content? It is very similar to the process at play in Scholarpedia. Scholarpedia (which focuses on a few very specific areas in the sciences) is authored by 'curators' (who are elected, invited by the Editor-in-Chief or other curators, or have a 'high Scholar index'). Each entry is peer-reviewed by a fellow expert in the field prior to the entry being accepted and published.

--Knol is a whole other level: Google becomes the producer of information. (this from a Huffington Post article on Knol). Somewhere (although I can't find it now) I read that this is Google's strategy for involvement in the third level of search. The first level is the main search interface. (i.e., the top-level Google page). The second level is the Google search results pages (on which you can bet Knol results would be highly placed). And the third level is the content itself, which is Knol. If Knol results are emphasized at the top of a Google search results page, what will this do to Wikipedia?

And finally, a thought-provoking quote from the Disruptive Library Technology Jester:

Evaluating the trustworthiness of a Wikipedia article involves looking at the cited references for the information contained in the article. (This is why another one of the standards for articles is verifiability through citations.) By contrast, the trustworthiness of a Knol will likely be based in part on the perception of the individual author and the commentary/ratings/etc. from the surrounding social networking community.

This should be an interesting experiment in authoring and evaluating information. If you'd like to read more, take a look at my del.icio.us list of Knol articles.

P.S. Thanks to Amy D. for the recommended reading and the inspiration for this post's title! :)

To say that I am obsessed with reading and thinking about the books of my youth is an understatement. In some respects, this continuing preoccupation with children's literature is what led me to librarianship. I kept rereading the books I read as a child, particularly those by Paul Zindel, Daniel Pinkwater, and Louise Fitzhugh.

Given that, I was happy to see this post touting one of my favorite sites---Loganberry Books' Stump the Bookseller. I love children's book stumpers. I visit this site regularly, and I've even helped solve a few stumpers on there (although, admittedly, my knowledge of children's books is nowhere near as expansive as most of the people frequenting that forum.) Chances are, if it's a question I can answer, it usually involves a long-forgotten title from Parent's Magazine Press (I had many of them when I was a kid) or it is a post asking for the book about the doll left in the freezer case at the grocery store (we read this arcane tale every year at the school I used to work at).

The upshot of this post? If you have a book from your childhood that you'd like to find again (ala the 'lavender blue, strawberry choo choo train" in the above linked post), I'd love to hear about it. Consider it your holiday gift to me! If we can't figure it out together, we can always turn to Loganberry Books.

Chris Stubbs has a neat post on how Beacon threw some Epicurious pie recipes onto his Facebook Mini Feed. I had been waiting to see a good example of Beacon in action and this was it. I need some friends who are conspicuous consumers and see no problem with letting everyone know about it. If you do nothing but rent Blockbuster movies and buy shoes at Zappos, please friend me. (And if you're interested, here's a list of all of the current Beacon advertisers (as of 11/22)--although Epicurious is not listed in there..)

Of course, Stubbs conveniently took the pie recipe references out of his profile page, so I had to try it out for myself. (Hey, there's no shame in liking a good pie recipe!) Here's my encapsulation of Beacon in action:

Step One: Go to Epicurious and look up a Barefoot Contessa recipe. (Ina will always be my favorite.)

Step Two: Be somewhat miffed that there are only two Barefoot Contessa (aka Ina) recipes on there--ice cream bombe (nifty but daunting) and pork loin with fennel (the show with that one is coming up this week---I am way too consumed with Ina's recipes.)

Step Three: Add pork loin with fennel to my recipe box. Epicurious's server contacted Facebook.

Step Four: Pop-up comes up mentioning that I added notice of this recipe to my profile on Facebook. It does give an opt-out "no thanks" option, but the entire thing is a little confusing and pretty easy to miss.

Step Five: Go to Facebook and see this:

This is a nice step in the right direction as far as letting users know when third-party information will be listed in Facebook. The entire process, however, shows its colors. Never has so much guilt been displayed within an online transaction. Can you imagine if Gmail asked you several times, before you sent a message, "Are you sure you want to do this?" "Still sure?" "How about now?"

Whatever advertising utility Beacon might have had is gone because of this. Is there a way to seamlessly share a range of personal information online without crossing privacy boundaries? Is anyone on Facebook even on Epicurious besides me and Stubbs' girlfriend? Questions, questions.

And finally...

Step Six: Wonder what Epicurious is getting out of this other than some bad vibes from their users and perhaps a few more ad clicks.

P.S. in case you never want to go through any of this yourself, here's the easiest way to block Beacon.

Tame the Web alerted me to the Dublin City Libraries Pageflakes experiment.

Take a look at it for yourself. I am a big Pageflakes devotee, and I absolutely think Pageflakes has utility in creating specialized online environments in libraries and other organizations.

But (you knew that was coming), this page is being used as this top-level home page for all public terminals in the Dublin City Library. You sit down at a computer there and login, and this is what you will see. Notice that there is no direct search for the catalog on this page (a link is there). The only search box on the page is for Google. Will this throw off patrons? Are they really leveraging their own resources in this page? It would be interesting to know what their feedback is.

I used to work in a lovely, sylvan public library, and my guess is that a page like this would create general confusion for many of the patrons there. My assumption is that public library patrons (and perhaps, one could say, most library patrons in general) expect the library home page to be primarily a branded, inwardly focused mechanism, linking and providing search options for library-centered tools. That's not to say that a home page can't point toward freely available tools, simply that there should always be a relevance (and perhaps a communicated relationship with library resources) in linking to them.

I think that this page has potential, but (in my opinion) right now it is far too focused on freely available tools like del.icio.us, Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, etc... We can't forget to leverage the opportunity that a library home page provides (particularly those within the building itself) to highlight and make easily available library resources. It is a marketing tool and it is some of our most powerful real estate.

That said, it's an interesting, boundary pushing experiment in trying to blend traditional library home page content with freely available tools, resources and information.

What do you think?