I was up bright and early this morning so that I could walk on the wharf before breakfast and still make it to the keynote this morning. One of the reasons I particularly like speaking at Internet Librarian is that it consistently attracts interesting presenters (thanks in no small part to the efforts of Jane Dysart, the program chair). Lee Rainie, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is the headliner today.
(An aside: I hate conference room chairs. They’re exactly the wrong height for me, so I end up with my laptop sliding off my lap. I need to get one of those nifty portable desk things that I’ve see Joi using.)
There’s an “official” conference blog this year, as well as a wiki.
Ah, finally they’ve gotten through the preliminaries and mutual congratulations and moved on to introducing Lee.
No powerpoint! w00t! (The audience applauds when he says this, including the woman sitting next to me…who’s working on her own powerpoint presentation for a later talk. She seems not to recognize the irony.) He also refers to a conference where there was a projected IRC channel during his talk. Does a nice job of summing up the pluses and minuses of that. (He says to try googling “Lee Rainie and Yoda,” but when I got online and tried it I had no luck…) He thanks us for not putting him through that hazing here.
He asks how many people are live blogging his talk (~6), and how many plan to blog aspects (another handful)—good indicator of changes in the profession.
He reads from a text about what happens when new technologies enter mainstream culture, the role of information gatekeepers is significantly affected. Turns out that he’s reading from the history of the printing press—but it could just as easily be applied to the internet.
What’s happened over the past year, from his project’s point of view? What’s coming?
Obvious place of decline is chat rooms. Blogs, IM, and threaded discussion forums appear to have taken up that slack.
Teenagers and the internet:
Kids ages 12-17 are more connected than others, more intense users. They love and use IM, they love and use their cell phones (only 45% have cell phones—but if they have them, they love them). If you combine their IM and cell phone use, teenagers are redefining what it means to be present (great quote). His daughter was featured in a news story entitled “the conversation never ends”. 8 out of 10 teenagers play online gains (54% gain in 2 years). Also a 38% increase in getting news online; 71% growth in buying things online (up to 43% of teens). They increasingly use the Internet for health information—particularly for “sensitive subjects.”
Strikingly, teens are creating content. He says they’re about to release a new report on this topic. (Yay!) New surveys show that 19% of teenagers have created blogs (3x the adult rate); an even higher % have created and worked on their own web sites.
Teenagers are frenetic multitaskers. Hardly any of them do a single thing at a time. They’ve been referred to as Generation “M” (for media). When you add up the time they spend using their various forms media, it’s about 8.5 hours a day—but they do it in 6.5 hours of real time.
Question: How do teens respond to advertising? Answer is that they see it as just one more input—they’re skeptical, but not as put off as adults. (That resonates with what I’ve seen in my kids.)
Question: Is there less depth of contact because of “all this stimulation”. (Geez, what a value-laden question.) I jump in here (because I can’t keep my mouth shut, natch) about last week’s MSR piece from NYT Magazine (which I refuse to link to because they’ve put it behind their stupid “Times Select” paywall), and the fact that we can’t necessarily extrapolate from our own experiences (and limitations) to those of our kids.
Politics and Internet
(Missed some of this…)
Tried to test for the extent to which people isolated themselves from opposing views online. They found that the internet contributed to a wider range of political views. Wired Americans, and especially broadband users, were more likely to have encountered opposing views. The Internet appears to be more of a door opener than an echo chamber.
Stephen Abrams asks about the extent to which consumers are aware of how search option optimization has affected their information consumption? Rainie says no, most internet users are quite unsophisticated, even to the extent of not differentiating between paid and non-paid search results. Notes that there’s still a huge education role here.
Internet and “Major Moments”
They redid a survey about how people used the internet at “milestone moments’ in their lives—buying a house, having a child, facing an illness, etc. He cites a bunch of numbers, but I can’t keep up. (I assume this will be in an upcoming Pew Report, anyhow.)
Question: Is there backlash to the “always on, always connected” trend? Rainie says there’s anecdotal evidence that’s changing—from email-free Fridays to computer- and connectivity-free vacations.
What are the key trends he sees?
There are public toilets in France now that have IP addresses; there are golf balls with RFID tags. Says the RFID-ification of American is well underway. Mobile access is untethering us—you can start cooking dinner by sending commands from your phone, for example.
Their numbers on content creation are nearly 3 years old; they’re about to do a new one.
Emphasizes the social dimension of search—says he sees that as incredibly important.
What should librarians be paying attention to?
Can libraries help us find the balance between being connected and being contemplative? (best line of the talk…)
He thinks that librarians are best suited to helping us create “information habitats” that strike this balance.
Wow. Great presentation! Rainie’s wonderful, and sets an awfully high bar for me tomorrow!
Mary Ellen Bates’ annual search tips talk. This was a great talk two years ago, and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s version. I just hope I can keep up!
I’m here not so much to find out things I didn’t know so much as I am to find out what a skilled, savvy librarian thinks her not-quite-so-savvy colleagues need to know. (This session is pretty crowded…a good sign.)
Jessamyn West cracks me up. Funny, smart presentation on “Flickr, tagging, and the F-word.” I walk in a few minutes late (oops), and she’s talking about Flickr. Focuses on the metadata available on Flickr, particularly in the form of tags. She shows photos of hers tagged with “library” as an example. Goes on to show other neat tag tricks—from clustering to tag clouds to affinity groups.
She shifts into a tagging v classification riff, in an attempt to calm ruffled library feathers. Does a brief discussion of “folksonomy” (she calls it “the F-word”). Says the most interesting thing about it in contrast to traditional classification is that it’s flat. Downsides? Synonym problems (library? libraries? il05? il2005?) Who should the burden be on—the tagger or the searcher?
Talks about “desire lines,” that the paths that people put down are a clue to where the “official” paths should go. She has a number of links to related reading; will see if I can find those and add them here.
(I love that when she’s done tagging, she’s available on IM. This is definitely a tech-savvy panel.)
Next up is Jenny Levine, the famous “Shifted Librarian,” who talks about del.icio.us. She does a basic overview of how it works, then goes to how libraries are using it. the LaGrangeParkLibrary reference librarians use it as a shared “ready reference” site. Great examples of tagging problems (dvdstobuy and dvdstopurchase…beyond the overlap, there’s the time-senstivity of those tags). Thomas Ford Memorial Library web site has a live links feed from del.
Then shows CiteULike, the academic/bibliographic version. (Doesn’t show the sweet integration with existing sites like ACM.)
Then it’s a rapid-fire run through other tagging sites—last.fm, 43 Things, Yahoo! MyWeb, Yummy! (a PDF posting service—I hadn’t seen this one), a few others.
Suggests the D-Lib article on social bookmarking (by the folks at Nature magazine) for more reading, along with articles by Clay Shirky and Thomas Vander Wal.
There’s a question about what happens when people assign inflammatory tags. Jenny’s sanguine—“this will work itself out.”
Jenny shows the Technology Review August issue on social computing tools, recommends it as an indication that this is a “watershed” point.
(Am going to hit “post” and then come back later to clean it up and add links.)
This is a two-part session, so it will go for nearly two hours. We’ll see how long I last. But I feel some sense of obligation to go to the search-related sessions so that I can go back and ask MSR or MSN to reimburse me for the extra day here that the conference organizers didn’t cover (I get two nights in the hotel as a speaker, but if I’d only stayed for that I would have missed a lot of the most interesting search presentations on either Monday or Wednesday).
Genie Tyburski starts out by talking about “setting limits” on time, sources, email, etc…makes me wonder if this is going to be somewhat like a “lifehacking for librarians” session. (If not, that would be a great session for a future IL panel, I think. Jane, you reading this? What do you think? :) She says email is unreliable, unproductive, and distracting. (Well, you could say the same thing about people, couldn’t you?) She talks about disposable addresses for logging into websites (I prefer the BugMeNot approach, when possible). Yes, this is sounding a lot like a lifehacker kind of talk. Not sure I’m going to get a lot out of it, since I’m already a faithful reader of 43 Folders and Lifehacker, and a recent convert to the GTD approach. She pushes RSS, but I see this as a false dichotomy. It’s not an alternative to email, unless most of your email comes from distribution lists. RSS is great for one-to-many, but lousy for one-to-one or many-to-many.
She talks about a tool called “WebSite-Watcher,” which she runs as a desktop application to monitor websites for changes. (Ah, shades of the infamous Winer-Watcher…) I’d prefer to lean on publishers to provide RSS rather than using this approach (I assume this is basically screen-scraping to generate the equivalent of RSS updates). Also mentions one called TrackEngine—she describes it as a similar approach, but a quick look at their site makes me wonder. They describe themselves as an “active bookmark manager”—will have to spend a little time with it to see what it involves.
Next up is Gary Price, from ResourceShelf.com and SearchEngineWatch.com. Can’t read the stuff on his screen, but it’s online. He reminds us of how few people have actually hear of RSS—the Yahoo survey said 12%. Points out how important explaining and describing this to end users is. He talks about a couple of bookmarking/clipping sites: Furl, eClips, filangy (huh…haven’t heard of this last one. worth exploring). He also demos Website-Watcher, and recommends it highly. My first impression is that it’s so ugly—but clearly it has devoted users.
Whoa—he gives the first mention of MSN I’ve heard, and a plug for start.com. Nice to hear someone talk about a site other than Yahoo.
Shows indeed.com, a metasearch engine for job sites—not just compilation sites, but also job postings on corporate sites—here’s a search for Microsoft jobs in Redmond. Points out that monitoring job openings can give you insight into what companies are up to.
Recommends Whois Source for good domain name searching/monitoring. Provides some nice tools; will have to start using this one.
Shows a couple of useful special-purpose research and news sites:
* Diplomacy Monitor for government documents from all over the world
* Paper Chase for legal documents
* iHealth beat for health technology
* SmartBrief: targeted newsfeeds on industry topics (subscription required, but it’s free)
* Topix.net: he calls this his service of the year for 2005, the best news service he knows of—better than Yahoo or Google
* NewsNow.co.uk: awful search, but great sources and topic organization
He’s reeling off more stuff, but I’m burning out here. :/ Think I’m going to skip out on the last section, which is Steven Cohen’s riff on RSS, followed by Q&A. I need the mental break more than I need more links…
If any powerbook-toting Internet Librarian attendees are reading this, I desperately need a powerbook DVI-to-VGA video adapter for my keynote tomorrow morning. I left both of mine at home :(
Worst case scenario, I’ll borrow a laptop from someone else and load up my images from a USB drive, but it would be nice if I could use my Mac.
So, if you’re here in Monterey and have one of these that you could lend me for 45 minutes tomorrow morning, email me at myblogname at gmail dot com, or comment here, or just stop by the podium before my talk tomorrow morning….
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