internet librarian 05: my keynote

I promised the audience this morning that I'd blog my own keynote, though there doesn't seem to be much point to it given the great coverage from so many other conference bloggers: Librarian in Black, Library Techtonics, The Shifted Librarian, dave's blog, See Also, Travelin' Librarian, walking paper, and the official conference blog. (I got these from Technorati and the conference blog list; if you blogged the talk and I missed your post, leave a comment...)

Overall, I think the talk went well, though I didn't have the "high" I sometimes get when everything just clicks. Maybe it's just hard to connect with such a big room. Or maybe I actually overprepared--I spent a lot of time last night trying to organize my thoughts, but it felt like I was trying to do too much--I didn't feel as though I was delivering a clear take-away message. If I were grading, I'd give it a "B," I think.

But for those of you who've come to the site because I promised links and details from the talk, here are the notes I was talking from, annotated with links as appropriate:

how much things have changed since the 2003 conference, as evidenced by things I overheard on Monday morning:

• "yeah, they're talking about social software and blogs and all that stuff." -- in a classic "that's so 5 minutes ago" voice
• "I flickr'ed a photo of you and Stephen Abrams."
• "it's blah blah flickr blah blah tags blah blah don't be afraid..." (literally)

Yesterday Technorati indexed its 20 millionth blog - an elementary school in France

It's hard to speak on the second day (but at least it's not the third)

• Lee Rainie took the Long Tail and CPA pieces - and stole my "no powerpoint" thunder
• Jenny Levine and Jessamyn West took the tagging
• Mary Ellen Bates & Gary Price took the social bookmarking

So what's left for me?

• Long Tail details -- it's all about social/viral: this is where librarians shine
• Why do most search tools still suck? (Kathy Sierra's concept car image and happy users graph)
• Power of social search -- people are better filters than algorithms (myweb vs Google for "clay" or "tags"; can't link to the myweb because you have to be logged in as me for it to work)
• Trusted information sources are not the same as "buddies." What if you could syndicate your library bookmarks? What if you could provide proactive (rather than reactive) search filters? (the LaGrange Park Library has started using del.icio.us!)
• dark side of social tagging: What happens to the long tail? if there's not a critical mass of taggers, are the tags really helpful? Or do they end up making the long tail even more invisible? Is "majority rules" the best way to describe content? (ESP game example)
• is continuous partial attention bad for us, or just bad for us? attention is a form of capital--we're going to have to start earning it, not demanding it.
• lifehacking is better than prozac: geek GTD cults, 43 Folders, Lifehacker.com, NYT magazine article, 10/16/05 "Meet the Life Hackers" (behind the paywall now, so I won't link to it)
• and for the person who slipped me the note at the end of the presentation, here's the link to Mary Czerwinski's Microsoft Research study on how big screens make you more productive... :)