Category: Non Sequiturs

Perhaps I’ve been asleep at the switch, but I just noticed an interesting use of two of my favorite social software tools over at The Washington Post. They include a Technorati and del.icio.us gadgets alongside articles.
So, for example, if you’re blogging about the Post’s article on Shani Davis’ decision to withdraw from the 10,000-meter race at the Olympics, there’s a Technorati “who blogged this” box in which your blog will appear. And if you want to save and tag the article into del.icio.us, there’s a link built in to the article for just that.
It’s refreshing to see a newspaper — like most publishers, primarily concerned with bringing eyeballs to its pages — trying new technologies that might actually increase the linkability of their articles. By making it simple to add their content to at least several major social software tools, the Post’s editors are making it easier for people to find the relevant news on their web site.
I’m not sure what the connection is to libraries, exactly, but thought I’d share anyway.
Update: Now that Technorati has worked its magic, I realize that the real draw for adding a “who blogs this” sidebar: it’s a great ego feeder for bloggers! There my humble little blog is, listed in the sidebar of a Washington Post article. Guess which newspaper I’m going to be trolling for ideas?

Coming soon: The RSSTroom Reader. Think of the possibilities for expanding readership of your feeds to all your public facilities! (Full details are available here.)
I think the end-of-year hustle and bustle is getting to me.

Case Western Reserve University’s CaseWiki caught my eye in this article. The school published a wiki that any authorized Case user may edit (visitors may leave comments). Topics include people, academics, organizations, social life (activities, bars, restaurants, theaters, etc.). It looks to be developing into an all-purpose guide to life at CWRU.
Like so many bottom-up tools, CaseWiki relies on the self-correcting power of the population contributing to it. It’s not anonymous, so there’s reputation at stake (like in the blog world). This raises a question that occurred to me during the recent NEASIS&T “Buy, Hack, or Build” conference: what is the minimum number of participants a wiki needs to be self-correcting and (I hesitate to use this word to a librarian audience) “authoritative”? It seems to me that a small number of wiki participants — say, fewer than a dozen — lends itself to groupthink too easily. Large wikis — the Wikipedia, for example — are self correcting. Where’s the threshhold between the two? A few dozen users? A few score?
Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section…

Jakob Nielsen, the well-known usability guru, offers a list of the “Top Ten Design Mistakes” for weblogs. There’s lots of good stuff here, but the basic item to remember is that weblogs are web sites. Even if you’re using an authoring tool (Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, etc.), it’s incumbent on you as a weblog author to provide information on who you are, to stick to your topic, to publish regularly, and to construct meaningful links.

This is a bit far afield, but it got me wondering (not always a good thing).
OCLC has launched an alpha version of an OpenURL resolver. The idea behind this is fairly straightforward, but the devil, as always, will be in the details. OpenURL is a standard for formatting citations (of books, journal articles, etc.) in a URL format that can be passed between a citation database and a full text service for which the user (or the user’s library) has obtained access. For example, if you do a search in a database that your library has access to and has activated OpenURL links in, you would see a link after each citation to find the full text. That link would take you to a “link resolver” provided by your library. The link resolver would determine, based on the citation information provided in the link, the best full-text source for that particular item. It might be a full-text database, it might be a paper copy of the journal in the library stacks, or it might be interlibrary loan. You’d see a list of possible sources of the full text, which you could click through to.
Where this great system falls apart, a bit, is if you do not have access to a link resolver or if you are providing citations of one kind or another to people who are not part of your library’s licensing arrangements for full-text resources. For example, to bring it back to RSS, if you maintained a list of publications by your patrons (or your library staff) and published that list of citations by RSS, you’d want to make it easy for your RSS subscribers to get to the full text. Since you don’t know the URL of the link resolver each of your RSS subscribers uses (if they even have access to one at all), this becomes difficult.
Hence the OCLC OpenURL resolver. The idea is to provide a central resolver that will guess, based on the IP address of the particular user clicking on the link, what the appropriate link resolver might be. So if you are on the Tufts campus, for example, it will know (because Tufts told OCLC) that the resolver address is whatever. Or if you’re in another similar environment, the OCLC link resolver would know where you are. This works less well, at least initially, for home users on broadband, but I’d guess it would still be possible to make good guesses based on cities what the public library link resolver would be (assuming cable and telephone companies assign blocks of IP addresses in a somewhat systematic way).

Tagaloging: The process of adding tags and building the wonderfully flexible self-organizing collections of information like Flickr, Furl, del.icio.us, and their ilk. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time looking at these tools and not enough time socializing with other humans, but the term strikes a chord with me, more clearly descriptive to my librarian brain than “folksonomy.”
This was probably not worth a blog entry, but there you go.