RSS4Lib

I wrote about geotagging photographs way back in the fall of 2006. This means attaching longitude and latitude data to a photograph so it can be mapped. Most shutterbugs who geotag their photos do so after the fact, using various mechanisms, in Flickr or with iPhoto plug-ins, for example.
Now, it seems, easy geotagging of photo easy will be added to Apple’s iPhone — at least, according to one report at AppleInsider. If the iPhone does have GPS (or even if it relies on the current mechanism of approximating the iPhone’s location, by triangulating on cell phone towers), every picture taken with an iPhone could have location data attached.
Depending on the resolution of the location, it would be possible to build collections of photos from multiple users over time of a given location.
Of course, the privacy implications are interesting, too — will a photograph taken of someone without the subject’s knowledge, published to Flickr with a geotag, be considered evidence of that person’s whereabouts? This expands the risks to privacy already created by CCTV systems, such as those installed in many cities (Singapore, London, etc.). If everyone has a camera with geotagging capability built in, and publishes their photos to the Internet — how easy will it be to scan them to learn if a person suspected of being at that location at a particular time might be in the background?

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch allow users to save “web clips” — favorite web pages — directly to the device’s home screen — so one tap of the finger on the icon takes you directly to that site. By default, the iPhone or iPod Touch use a nearly-impossible-to-read screen shot to represent the web clip; few web sites end up being visually identifiable on the home screen.
There’s a great opportunity for branding here. Apple has made it very easy to create custom icons for your web site. There are 2 steps:

1. Make a graphic that is 57 x 57 pixels and save it in PNG format.
2. Name this file apple-touch-icon.png and save it to the main (“root”) level of your web server.

(Credit to The Primary Vivid Weblog for documenting the process in plain English.)
When you add a web clip to your iPhone or iPod Touch’s home screen, it automatically (and unavoidably) adds a glow effect and rounded corners to the graphic you provide. To compensate for this, use this web clip Photoshop template (from iPhoneMinds) that shows just where the usable space in that 57 x 57 pixel square is and how it will look with the glow effect.
How easy is it? It took me (a truly novice Photoshop user) about 5 minutes to make an icon for RSS4Lib — if you’re using an iPhone or iPod Touch, save this page to your home screen to see it, or just view http://www.rss4lib.com/apple-touch-icon.png.
If your library has iPhone or iPod Touch users, why not extend your brand to their mobile desktop?

The 2.0 world — in libraries in particular, or the web in general — is helping to address the information management problem of ambiguity. In his inaugural column in the May issue of KMWorld,” Now, everything is fragmented,” David Snowden notes: “The more you structure material, the more you summarize (either as an editor or using technology), the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change…”
Much of what the knowledge management world, and, for that matter, librarians more broadly, seek to accomplish is to get the right bit of information to the person who is looking for it at the right time. However, as we build systems to accomplish that task, we often run counter to both the defining characteristic of our age and what he describes as one of the defining characteristics of our species. Snowden writes:
First, we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness. Second, we are homo sapiens at least in part because we were first homo narrans: the storytelling ape. Dealing with anecdotal material from multiple sources and creating our own stories in turn has been a critical part of our evolutionary development.
Information systems are typically built to remove ambiguity. They are tailored to the specific need at hand. Snowden notes that there is a risk to building systems that remove ambiguity by “chunking” information into discrete elements. This risk is shown through research (in national security, in particular) that indicates raw intelligence is more useful over longer periods of time than the reports based on that raw data. 2.0 environments, in which users of information build on the raw materials, mixing and matching sources in novel ways, are more flexible, allowing for changing needs to reflect themselves over time.
A mentor and twice-supervisor of mine described someone’s ability to survive in an organization by saying that the individual either had or lacked a “high tolerance for ambiguity.” Having a high tolerance was a good thing: if you could keep your relative sanity as organizational priorities and day-to-day exigencies changed, you were in good shape. As librarians, we need to develop a high tolerance for ambiguity in the information systems we design and provide. By this, I don’t mean developing to wishy-washy specifications. I do mean that we need to build systems that enable our users to pursue information-seeking paths we don’t, or can’t, anticipate. Systems must be built to allow others to get to the raw data, manipulate it, and do what they will. As we today’s information needs, we must also allow for flexible interpretation and serendipity of discovery.