May 08, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, Search
I was very interested to read this brief piece about the 'new discipline' of 'computational advertising':
Web advertising is the primary driving force behind many Web activities, including Internet search as well as publishing of online content by third-party providers. A new discipline - Computational Advertising - has recently emerged, which studies the process of advertising on the Internet from a variety of angles. A successful advertising campaign should be relevant to the immediate user's information need as well as more generally to user's background and personalized interest profile, be economically worthwhile to the advertiser and the intermediaries (e.g., the search engine), as well as be aesthetically pleasant and not detrimental to user experience. [ACL-08: HLT - Tutorials]
This is from the notice about a tutorial session at ACL-08: HLT which is taking place in Columbus in June. The conference combines the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) with the Human Language Technology Conference (HLT) of the North American Chapter of the ACL.
Given the nature of the conference, the tutorial has a particular focus:
In this tutorial, we focus on one important aspect of online advertising, namely, contextual relevance. It is essential to emphasize that in most cases the context of user actions is defined by a body of text, hence the ad matching problem lends itself to many NLP methods. At first approximation, the process of obtaining relevant ads can be reduced to conventional information retrieval, where one constructs a query that describes the user's context, and then executes this query against a large inverted index of ads. We show how to augment the standard information retrieval approach using query expansion and text classification techniques. We demonstrate how to employ a relevance feedback assumption and use Web search results retrieved by the query. This step allows one to use the Web as a repository of relevant query-specific knowledge. We also go beyond the conventional bag of words indexing, and construct additional features using a large external taxonomy and a lexicon of named entities obtained by analyzing the entire Web as a corpus. Computational advertising poses numerous challenges and open research problems in text summarization, natural language generation, named entity extraction, computer-human interaction, and others. The last part of the tutorial will be devoted to recent research results as well as open problems, such as automatically classifying cases when no ads should be shown, handling geographic names, context modeling for vertical portals, and using natural language generation to automatically create advertising campaigns. [ACL-08: HLT - Tutorials]
Via Michael White.
April 21, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I spoke at the JISC conference in Birmingham last week. It was at a session related to the JISC's Libraries of the Future initiative. A special supplement on academic libraries is appearing in the Guardian Newspaper to accompany the initiative. A range of topics is covered; the treatment is high level and journalistic, as you would expect. This is a nice achievement by JISC, as it puts a range of positive stories about libraries in front of the University community (where, in a note to non-UK readers, the Guardian has high penetration). Via eFoundations:
Material from the supplement, covering information literacy, physical learning spaces, Library 2.0, business models, digitisation, users and librarians is already available on the Guardian Web site. [eFoundations: Libraries of the future]
jiscconference08
April 18, 2008
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Categories:
Marketing
, ebooks and other e-resources
I bought [i] a New York Times yesterday in our local Borders and, over coffee, was interested to open up a large two page spread advertising the newly named Thomson Reuters, A new name and a new logo.
I was interested to read the following in the business pages (under an 'advertising' label).
Thomson’s desire to raise its public profile as it completes the $16.6 billion transaction is partly a reflection of an era when information has never been so accessible and the struggle to maintain profitability at the companies that provide it, particularly among incumbents, has never been more difficult. “In the simplest terms, we see this as the opportunity to be the new power brand in the global information industry,” said Gustav Carlson, Thomson Reuters’ chief marketing officer. “We don’t simply accumulate data. Thomson’s strategic evolution has been from print to digital and now into a supplier of intelligent information.” Thomson’s newspaper holdings once included The Times of London, The Globe and Mail in Toronto and an array of less distinguished smaller newspapers. But as it abandoned paper for digital publishing, Thomson became the antithesis of companies like Google that treat information as a no-cost commodity for selling advertising. Instead, Thomson has focused on building vast databases of material that is dull to most people but of great value to professionals, and the company charges them accordingly. More recently, that data has been integrated into systems that sift through it, organize it and, in some cases, make suggestions to users about actions to take. A litigation lawyer researching a case involving asbestosis through the company’s Westlaw service, for example, will be presented with information from Thomson Scientific about the disease along with legal decisions related to it.[A Name to Herald Its Merger: Thomson Reuters - New York Times]
I was struck by the parallel with the Elsevier note I did a couple of weeks ago, on how information wants to be both free and expensive.
What we see here is a reallocation from the 'information wants to be free' arena, where business magazines (including Library Journal, part of the group being divested) are increasingly supported by advertising revenue and are in competition with a network environment rich in alternative sources, to the 'information wants to be expensive' arena where the value resides in providing business-critical information tightly integrated into workflow solutions. [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Free and not free]
Providers are taking steps to increase the value of data - through workflow integration, timeliness, data mining, and so on - to differentiate their offer from generally available information. In this case, the article talks about information never having 'been so accessible', and places the focus on added value professionally relevant information. The data is mined to create new relationships.
Thomson-Reuters seem to want to capture the idea of this added value in the expression "intelligent information". I am not sure if that works for me .....
Related entry:
[1] Too much paper there to justify a subscription ;-)
March 21, 2008
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Categories:
Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
I mentioned iSoton a few weeks ago, an exploratory twopointification of a University of Southampton web presence (and see the follow-up conversation on Brian Kelly's blog). As many readers will know, Southampton is the home of major R&D, advocacy and support activities for open access (see the eprints.org page).
I was looking for the eprints pages earlier and landed on the University of Southampton's search pages. Very nice, I thought. Rather than just offer a straight search they try to anticipate some of the ways in which people might be looking for things, and they offer trails into appropriate parts of the website, as well as several different searches across University content. I was particularly struck by the fact that they offer a search of the University's Institutional Repository, labeled 'research publications' alongside 'people' and 'experts'. It is entirely reasonable that the University Website search page should offer a search of University research outputs; I wonder will such a search option on the institutional website ever become universally routine or expected?
Noticeable also are the links to Del.icio.us, which are present throughout the website. These link to the University of Southampton presence on Del.icio.us, and are an interesting example of an organization piggybacking on other services. I hope that there is some investigation of how this approach works, as we have very little real information about the impact of initiatives like this where there is a designed attempt to amplify a web presence through leverage of widely used, network-level channels.
Related entry:
March 20, 2008
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Categories:
Marketing
And talking about University College Dublin, check out the Book Bag Blog if you want to see pictures of the library book bag in far flung places - and why wouldn't you ....? Here is an entry on their reader services blog describing it:
 What have Antarctica, Paris, Munich, Prague and Belfield got in common? The UCD library book bag, of course! Go to our sister blog here to see where our fetching and useful book-carrying bags have been spotted. And you can join in the fun by sending us a photo of your book bag in some exotic or unusual place. The best picture will win a prize so secret that even we don’t know what it is yet! To enter, simply purchase a book bag for a thrifty €2.00 at any of the James Joyce Library issue desks. Then purchase tickets to far flung locations and get snapping. Maolsheachlann
[Reader Services@ucd Library: Check out our book bag blog now!]
March 16, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Learning and research - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation:
The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research output and that of your peers. It provides an indication of the quality and the consistency of the researcher's work by looking at the number of articles published and the number of citations received over time. In Scopus the h-index presents a metric that takes all of an author's articles published between 1996 to present into account and thus provides a transparent mean to evaluate the impact of an author in the most recent 12 years. You will also find quick links to your publications, citation counts and co-authors.
I am sure that this has gone to many readers of this blog also.
A very superficial examination shows that Scopus provides some useful approaches for merging and demerging result sets based on knowledge provided by the searcher. It pulls together a lot of contextual data in its profiles, based on mining of article details. I found it useful. I have not looked at Web of Knowledge recently so I do not know how it compares.
Four overlapping things struck me about this invitation and the service:
- Reputation management. The direct appeal in the invitation is to the author's interest in his or her research impact or reputation. Reputation management is of growing interest, for individuals and for institutions. I think that this creates an interesting intersection between research support/administration services and library/information services around such things as the relationship between institutional repositories and the recording of faculty publications, consistent naming of authors and institutions so as not to fragment impact through incorrect pulling together of publications, faculty expertise databases, citation management, and so on. The interaction between personal disclosure (what I put on my website, or social networking sites, or ...), institutional management, and third party data aggregation/manipulation will also be interesting to watch.
- Making data work harder. The SCOPUS profiles are based on extensive mining and manipulation of data to create the context on their pages (affiliations, citations, cited by, h-index, etc). Increasingly, in many cases, we will expect to see such further analysis to create context and depth. Think of what we see in a Google Book Search page, an Amazon results page, a Worldcat Identities page.
- Socialising Knowledge networks. The academic literature and the tools we have created to organize it reveal networks of knowledge. Citations, subject indexing, cross-reference structures, and so on, create connections between people, documents, ideas, institutions. Increasingly, we can mobilize these connections in digital environments, and make other connections. Alongside these 'classical' networks, we are seeing newer social networks emerge. One of the more interesting developments we will see will be the integration of our classically created networks and these new social networks. I was interested to see for example discussions around user-driven name disambiguation at Crossref. SCOPUS offers you the opportunity to submit feedback on a profile: presumably this will develop over time to allow greater interaction between those doing the profiling, based on available data, and those profiled, based on their knowledge.
- We know where you live. Related to the last point, I was interested, and quite impressed, that they could send me an email pointing me to my profile page and that it all worked out. I do not have a very common name; I wonder what criteria they had in place before they would send you an email, and how many of them went astray. It is also interesting to see a publisher of a bibliographic tool reach out to users/authors in this way, with an incentive for them to get interested in a particular product. It potentially creates an interesting dynamic for the library.
Related entries:
February 20, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, User experience
iSoton is an interesting web presence from the University of Southampton. I wonder how well it is being received and used.
There are six panels. One displays a (short) list of university podcasts; another displays standard virtual tour stuff.
The other four are more interesting. One displays the University's wikipedia entry. One displays photos from Flickr (I am not sure how they are being selected: is it more than the 'university of southampton' tag?). One displays videos from Youtube (again, I am not sure if these are any videos which show up on a 'university of southampton' search or if some other selection criteria apply).
And finally, one displays a tag cloud which links through to underlying del.icio.us pages of links to University of Southampton pages. So, for example, the jobs tag links through to a page of links about University policies, amenities and so on that might be of interest to somebody looking for a job. In this case, there is more active management of the collection by the user 'Southampton'.
I liked what I assume to be the intent here (there are no links to explanatory material). Although, this seems like a sketch for what one might do, rather than the fully worked through presence. For example, why not display the full del.icio.us tag cloud which gives richer access to the Southampton pages? What would the best approach be to showcasing research and learning outputs?
The site is designed by Precedent, "specialists in strategic thinking, digital communications and brand communications". A moment with Google revealed:
James Soutar, a senior branding and communications consultant at Precedent, said the web would be "the principal battlefield" in the competition for students. Information on consumer and social networking sites, such as Facebook, could become as influential as that on universities' own websites, he added. [Times Higher Education - Post-92 websites fail on the basics]
February 03, 2008
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Marketing
, Standards
'open' is a word that usually needs to be qualified to be of any use in our conversations. Simply standing on its own it is not clear what it means. Unless qualified the word is like 'home made', 'new' or 'natural', a widely applied promotional label with little informational value.
The storm in a teacup around OpenTranslators is interesting in this context. This is a hosted service from Care Affiliates, working with Index Data and WebFeat. It is a nice idea.
OpenTranslators will allow libraries to use the federated search interface of their choice to access over 10,000 databases using SRU/SRW/Z39.50. The databases consist of: licensed databases, free databases, catalogs, Z39.50, Telnet and proprietary databases. Libraries that already have a Z39.50 client in their OPAC will be able to connect to, not only library catalogs, but also thousands of additional databases. Those libraries that are building or already using an open source federated search tool will now be able to expand the world of information that can be accessed. Finally, for those institutions/organizations building new mashup clients, this will allow them to access and use vast amounts of additional content. [OpenTranslators; the ability to choose the Federated Search Interface and Content of your choice using open standards.]
This is open in the sense that it is placing a standards-based layer over a bundle of useful functionality. The translators can be accessed through a well-defined public interface (in this case SRU/SRW/Z39.50), the definition of which is under the control of no single organization. This is a well-established and long-standing sense of 'open', as in 'open standards' or 'open systems'.
However, calling a service 'open' in this sense says absolutely nothing about the business model or configuration under which it is made available. It might be available for free, on a fee-for-use basis, as a subscription service; it might be available as locally deployable software, as a service in the cloud, and so on. In this case, Care Affiliates are making a subscription service available to users on a hosted basis.
To use the service you need appropriate client (SRU/SRW/Z39.50) capability. There are many choices here. Libraries will have this capability as part of software they buy from a vendor, or in some cases as part of an open source package. There is no necessary link between 'open source' and the use of the 'OpenTranslators' service.
While this new development was generally welcomed, some of the responses discussed the service in terms of 'open source' or even 'open access'.
This prompted the following from Dan Chudnov (who had taken notes and was naming names). Language mattered, he suggested, and .....
Open source, open access, and open standards are completely different activities undertaken by completely different combinations of people in completely different circumstances. To conflate them all because of the common word "open" is shortsighted enough - to misapply the terms against the intent of the proponents of each of these separate categories of endeavors is to sow distrust. [Welcome to 1998 | One Big Library.]
Looking at these exchanges I was reminded of early discussion around OAI where the 'O' for open looked towards 'open access' but also towards open standards independent of the business model supporting the application.
The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. [Open Archives Initiative]
February 01, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I mentioned the other day that the Times had nominated Philip Larkin, poet and librarian ("the toad work") as the greatest British writer since 1945.
Through the wonders of resource sharing I have got hold of a copy of his history of the library at the University of Hull, updated by Maeve Brennan (from Western Michigan University, if you are interested ;-).
Larkin, Philip, and Maeve Brennan. A Lifted Study-Storehouse The Brynmor Jones Library, 1929-1979. Philip Larkin memorial series, no.1. Hull: Hull University Press, 1987.
There, I was interested to read:
.... independent history implies independence of operation, and since a library is always first and foremost a service it should be reluctant to arrogate to itself any qualities suggesting an identity separate from the community it serves.
Which is a nice reminder that libraries are not ends in themselves. Something that is very well said by Eleanor Jo Rodger in one of the more interesting things I have read in the last few years (in the September 2007 American Libraries). Interesting enough to bear repeating. She places the library in the context of its host environment, and closes with this paragraph:
Creating value for our host systems always involves three things: Librarians must understand their host systems; they must understand the source of their claim to being a legitimate part of their system; and they must do their work well so the system is better because they are there. It's usually far more a matter of asking and listening than it is of telling and pleading.
Incidentally, 'study-storehouse' pulls together - a little clumsily? - the dual role of the library as a place for people and as a store for materials discussed by Larkin in the text.
Related entries:
January 23, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
Library jargon explained: a resource at Swansea University Library and Information Services. Good that they have provided this? Bad that we need it?
Call number - The call number, the number placed on the spine of a book, is a code which provides information about the subject of the book and its location in the library. Books are arranged by subject so that you can find other similar books nearby. Our finding, borrowing and reserving page has more information. In the Swansea University libraries we use Library of Congress classification. [Swansea University - Glossary A - L]
December 01, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
It is always interesting to read about libraries and librarians when the writer comes from outside the library environment. I have just come across the December 2007 issue of the Canadian University Affairs. It contains an article intriguingly entitled The new librarians.
A new class of librarians is emerging: forward-thinking men and women, attuned to the revolutionary trends affecting academic libraries, are leading the charge for change. These tech-savvy librarians are plugged into the needs of a new generation and adapting their services to keep libraries relevant and valuable. [The new librarians]
It was refreshing to read something so positive about libraries in such a publication, and, although not a very rounded view of libraries (or librarians: the profiles are all of men) it usefully emphasized some new directions for the readership. Worth a look.
November 01, 2007
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Learning and research - systems and technologies
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, User experience
Our activities in the network world leave traces. The analysis of these traces is now a major undertaking as organizations mine this data to understand behaviors, to improve their systems, and to refine their offer.
Tony Hirst has a series of posts about 'course analytics':
In contrast to the academic analytics, one of the things I set out to explore was how an off the shelf web stats analytics tool (Google Analytics) could be used to help me learn more about what students were doing with our online course materials, and help me identify what - if anything - a "learning site's" goals could be, and what the site might be optimised for. [OUseful Info: Course Analytics - Prequel]
And further ....
For the moment, what I am interested in is how website analytics can be used applied to online course websites in order to gain a better understanding of online study habits and the bahaviour of students taking an online course. [OUseful Info: Course Analytics, Part 1 - Visitor Behaviour]
He provides some interesting analysis, looking at how students use course materials. He then extends the question to the library website, and based on discussion with his Open University library colleagues he suggests a list of questions that might be tackled with this approach. What sort of search engine searches result in referrals to the library website, for example. How well is actual page popularity mapped by front page navigation options? And so on.
He wonders what success looks like:
How to define library website goals is another interesting exercise... If the site was Amazon, where the aim is to sell goods, a relevant goal page would be a "Thanks for the cash - the goods will be with you in a day or two" page. What is the range of useful, successful transactions on a Library website? [OUseful Info]
He is interested in hearing from libraries who use Google Analytics, or similar off the shelf approaches, and about what they are measuring. If you have some experience, leave him a comment .....
November 01, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
Well, this must be a first! The current issue of the Harvard Business Review carries an interview with Lynne Brindley, Director of the British Library.
Do you have a favorite piece from the collection?
I never answer that question. I want people to understand
that we’re not a museum. We have a responsibility to our
heritage, but our mission is to foster innovation and build
future knowledge on top of past knowledge. [Harvard Business Review, November 2007, p 32]
Via Brian Lavoie.
October 16, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Metadata
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, The cultural and scholarly record
, User experience
I find it convenient to think about current library systems activities in terms of support for three materials workflows: bought/print materials, licensed/electronic materials, and digital/digitized materials. This is being pragmatic rather than pure, and is open to challenge on many grounds. I have discussed these at more length here, and suggested some ways in which they are developing. Development is in two directions: each of the areas continues to develop itself, while at the same time there is a growing desire to find better ways of working across them (e.g. at the discovery layer, or in terms of a more unified approach to metadata creation/management).
Now, we have an agreed and well-understood set of processes around the first category. These are encapsulated in the integrated library system, and still quite strongly influence library organization. These include things like selection, acquisition, cataloging, circulation, catalog, and so on.
We have a less well agreed set of processes around the second area, and an emerging apparatus of systems support. This includes resolvers, ERM systems, A to Z lists, metasearch, and so on. A level of agreement is apparent in that substitutable systems are now available to support this activity. However, differences in organizational structure to support the area and low takeup of ERM systems suggest that we are in early days. One place where there is likely to be further evolution relates to the creation, management and sharing of the data used to drive these systems.
And we have a much less well agreed set of processes around the third area. Libraries are exploring repositories for digitized collections, they are creating institutional repositories, and building workflows for content preparation and ingest, metadata creation, and so on. In fact, there is no agreed level of service in this area: you do not naturally expect to find particular services here in the way, for example, that you expect to find a circulation system. Of course, this lack of agreement makes this a potentially expensive area. There is a lot of figuring out what to do, and routine off-the-shelf tools or services may not necessarily exist across the range of what you want to do.
This is an overly complex systems landscape, and it will have to be rationalized in coming years so that libraries can spend more time putting their systems to work in support of their users and less time actually getting their systems to work together at all.
Anyway, this is by way of prelude to an observation about repositories. A couple of repository launches have come over my horizon in recent weeks.
The first is the Digital Conservancy at the University of Minnesota, which I mentioned the other day. This aims to provide services in relation to two classes of material: faculty research outputs and university administrative materials that traditionally would have gone to the University Archives. As I suggest in my post this makes a lot of sense: the repository aims to support the full range of institutionally produced intellectual outputs.
The second was the Open University's Open Research Online, "a repository of our research publications and other research outputs." In this case, the service aims to provide support for all the research outputs of OU academics. So, what you will find are deposited open access materials. However, you will also find citations to books, journal articles, and so on, which are not actually available in the repository: you may be referred to a publisher site. The repository aims to provide a full record to research activity, not only the open access materials.
What we have here, then, are well-worked through services which offer overlapping but different views onto their University's intellectual outputs. This is not a major issue as universities work towards a view of what should be offered and what their constituencies value.
However, in the longer term, lack of agreement about services and supporting processes may be a barrier, on the management side where different systems support is needed, or on the user side where different services from different universities may lead to confusion, reducing the gravitational pull that familiarity supports.
Aside: Of course, in the longer run also, there are interesting questions about the relationship between these institutional services and network level services but that is a discussion for another day.
Related entries:
October 15, 2007
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Categories:
Marketing
, Social networking
So here is a chart showing the choices made by those of my Facebook 'friends' who chose to disclose political preferences in their profiles.
As I suggested the other day one would expect a 'liberal' emphasis in the library community. Although I wonder what the distribution is among those who chose not to disclose.
In this context, I was interested to read this post by Greg Mankiw earlier in the week.
The chart is generated by the Socialistics application. Given its name, maybe it puts a finger on the scales ;-)
Socialistics is a creation of Techenlightenment, which appears to exist to create Facebook applications:
Techlightenment is a brand of D.sruptive Limited, an innovations house. We don't only build application for client, but we implement our own thinking into the technology we build so as to accelerate understanding of the marketplace. A recent example was Socialistics, which received rapid critical acclaim. This wasn't simply an application, but a method of understanding social relationships. [Techlightenment: an enlightened approach to technology]
September 16, 2007
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Categories:
Marketing
, Miscellaneous
, Social networking
Following my remarks about the 'amplified conference' the other day, I was interested to read this from Andy Powell: A large part of your event's impact will come from the collective writing, images and videos by the people who attended. The only effective way of tying all this material together after the event is via the event tag. It's easy to forget, but I'd go as far as saying that the tag is almost as important as the venue. In fact, in a sense, the tag becomes the virtual venue for the event's digital legacy. [ eFoundations: Tags as virtual venues]
This makes sense. However, what struck me more than the nature of the advice was a thought about its reception. I think that a lot of people would immediately see the pragmatic sense of doing what Andy suggests. However, I know that some of the folks I deal with (and I go to a lot of events ;-) would be puzzled at the suggestion, or not really feel that the type of network amplification that an agreed tag would facilitate is all that important.
We all have ways of thinking about how events are different. This reminds me that recently I have been struck by the fact that one of the most important ways in which events now feel different to me relates to the extent to which they are in fact 'amplified' by participant bloggers and picture-takers.
Related entry:
September 16, 2007
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Libraries - distributed environments
, Marketing
, Search
, User experience
I have been using the phrase 'discovery happens elsewhere' in recent presentations. I think it captures quite nicely an increasingly important part of how we think about our services.
No single website is the sole focus of a user's attention. Increasingly people discover websites, or encounter content from them, in a variety of places. These may be network level services (Google, ...), or personal services (my RSS aggregator or 'webtop'), or services which allow me to traverse from personal to network (Delicious, LibraryThing, ...).
This means thinking about services in different ways. About how we disclose stuff to other discovery environments; about where our metadata is; about URL structures, RSS feeds, and so on.
I have suggested before that it would be an interesting experiment to think about our services as if they had no user interface. Here maybe it would be interesting to think about services as if they could only be reached from some other place. It makes you think about the variety of other places that discovery happens.
Credits. 'Discovery happens elsewhere' is influenced by Steve Rubel's use of the phrase 'traffic happens elsewhere' in his discussion of what he calls the 'cut and paste' web.
Related entries:
September 06, 2007
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Marketing
, User experience
The iPod hookup with Starbucks has had a mixed reception. I thought that it was intriguing as one of those little newsflashes from the future. From a story about how the current iPod form factor will be replaced by one based on the iPhone. In a curious marketing twist, Apple will take advantage of the machine's wireless capability by linking up with the Starbucks coffee chain. Customers who hear a song they like playing in the cafe will be able to download it immediately at the touch of a button. [Farewell to a classic design as Jobs unveils the iPod touch | Technology | The Guardian]
As the network permeates more of our environment, discovery happens everywhere. And discovery without fulfilment disappoints.
Engadget carries a blow-by-blow discussion of the Jobs' announcement, which included a presentation by Howard Schultz ofStarbucks'.
I was interested to see that Starbucks has 14,000 stores worldwide, open 7 new stores a day, and has 50 million customers a week. We have been living in
We live a hundred yards or so off High Street, a pre-freeway north-south arterial road in Columbus. In the (gulp) nearly six years we have been here we have seen the following coffee shops open within 1.7 miles (according to Google Maps) of where we live: two branches of Starbucks, one Caribou, one Cup o'Joes (local) and one Crimson Cup (local). Folks must be drinking a lot of coffee .... and meeting, working, communicating in the 'on-demand' space they provide. It is a natural place to provide service - and it has been interesting to see how Starbucks has developed its media business around this space.
It seems to me that the role of the coffee house, and it must be said, Starbucks in particular given its reach, in the contemporary urban setting is becoming clearer. Starbucks provides time-place alignment in busy, moving lives: in other words it provides 'on-demand place'. It provides a place which is convenient at the time that it is required. This may be for downtime (a place to spend time relaxing), connect-time (a place to spend time connecting to the network), rendezvous time (a place to spend time with others), work-time (a place to spend time working). A colleague recently described Starbucks to me as his mobile office when he was on the road. It is not unusual to see job interviews take place there. [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Starbucks and other coffee houses - an observation and a prediction] Coffee too, of course, ...... and music.
Related entries: Starbucks and perceptions
September 04, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
I quoted Eleanor Jo Rodger a while ago in these pages:
News stories like this and the ongoing Amazoogle discussion prompt us to think about the value of libraries. In that context, I recommend that everybody read Joey Rodger's article on value and vision:Valuable is not about our professional values; in the paradigm of the value of public libraries, we are the producers, not the consumers of services. Our personal sense of what is valuable really doesn't matter much at all unless it matches that of our customers. [WebJunction] [Lorcan Dempsey's weblog, the value of libraries]
I have just read her excellent short article in the September American Libraries, What's a library worth? which again would repay reading by all (at the time of writing the September issue does not appear to be online). Libraries are not ends in themselves, and she places the library firmly in the context of the host system (a city or a university for example). It closes with this paragraph:
Creating value for our host systems always involves three things: Librarians must understand their host systems; they must understand the source of their claim to being a legitimate part of their system; and they must do their work well so the system is better because they are there. It's usually far more a matter of asking and listening than it is of telling and pleading.
August 31, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, User experience
The current issue of Newsweek discusses a new book on the use of aggregated user data: Super Crunchers: why thinking-by-numbers is the new way to be smart. As more activities move online, we have more data about intentions, choices, attention. The punchline of the story is that service choices are increasingly guided by intelligence mined from this data, which in turn signals a reduced role for intuition and human judgment. This points to a major change in the networked environment, as services develop reflexively based on data-driven reconfiguration. Everywhere data is collected about what we do, and used to improve services, target offers, and deepen the relationship the supplier has with the end user.
But according to a new book by Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale, this is a microcosm of a powerful trend that will shape the economy for years to come: the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them "Super Crunchers," which is also the title of his book, ... In fields from criminal law (where statistical projections of recidivism are taking discretion away from judges and parole boards) to oenophilia (where a formula involving temperature and rainfall is a better predictor of the quality of a vintage than the palates of the most vaunted experts), "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers. ... ... But the same explosion of computing power gives large companies powerful new tools with which to entice—or, in some cases, to torment—their customers. "It's going to be easier to find the products and services we want," Ayres predicts. "The sellers are doing the work for us." Amazon's computers know what we'll like even before we figure it out for ourselves; Netflix customers, says Ayres, like the movies the service recommends better than the ones they choose on their own. But auto dealers can use the same kinds of data to calculate to a fine point just how far they can push their customers on price and loan rates. When airlines cancel a flight, Ayres writes, they use an algorithm to predict which customers are most vulnerable to being lured away by a competitor and to give them, not the airline's own best customers, priority in rebooking. [How Data Mining Is Replacing Intuition - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com]
It is interesting to think about libraries in this context, where there is a contrast with the general environmental trend. While a key potential strength of the library is its proximity to and knowledge of its users, its automated customer relationship management is shallow and short-lived. Typically it is not data-driven (based on what you have already borrowed, you might be interested in this; people who borrowed this, also borrowed that; people who searched for this, ended up borrowing that; and so on). The use of such data in support of collection development is variable. Now, there are some good reasons for restraint, to do with privacy or the quality of the library experience. And we do not have good mechanisms for aggregating such data to improve the service. But as personal contact with all users is not likely, and as folks come more to expect personalized experiences, recommendations, and other features, then we will likely see more options emerge.
Update: there is a piece by Ayres in today's FT extracted from the book.
Related entries:
August 30, 2007
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, General - systems and technologies
, Learning and research - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, User experience
I mentioned Jim Collins' book on the social sectors the other day. I have just acquired Susan Gibbons' book, The academic library and the net gen student: making the connections. I was interested to see her make use of Collins' material in the opening chapter where she suggests the following as the mission of an academic library:
The goal of an academic library is to be the best in the world at serving the unique teaching, learning and research needs of its home academic institution by being active participants in the creation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge. [p. 10]
She closes the chapter like so:
We cannot simply rest on our knowledge that the students, members of the rising Net Generation, are different. We must understand how and why and embrace those differences - not ignore, reject, or dismiss them. Our roles as translators requires us to meet undergraduates where they are, mentally, physically, and virtually, and help bring them to where the faculty reside. If we cannot begin to deepen our affinity with undergraduate students now, how much more daunting and difficult the task will be when they become our Net Generation faculty. [p. 11]
I have been in a couple of discussions recently which raise a related issue. To what extent is faculty's perception of the library based on memories of their use when they were undergraduates and graduate students?
In her final chapter, the author discusses five guiding principles for the academic library under the following headings:
- Adopting an R&D culture
- Rethinking "library as place"
- Accepting that the library is not the virtual place
- Supporting authorship in the digital age
- Understanding our users
August 22, 2007
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Marketing
, User experience
I was looking at Macenstein earlier. And was slightly surprised after a while to notice that amongst the Amazon ads appearing on the right were some for very familiar stuff.
Turns out that Macenstein is feeding me my own personalized Amazon data. And it looks as if other people might be similarly surprised as there are several links to 'privacy information'.
This explains that Macenstein is an Amazon Associate Web site.
Your browser automatically sends any Amazon cookies on your computer to our server when you view this type of Amazon.com link on an Associate Web site. (For more information about how Amazon uses cookies, see our Privacy Notice.) Although we may use your Amazon.com cookie to determine whether you are a recognized Amazon visitor and to offer personalized content (such as product recommendations) and special offers, we do not keep or attempt to construct a record of the Web sites you visit. [Amazon.com Associates Privacy Information]
And in response to a question about whether these 'placements' are the same as the personalized recommendations you would see on Amazon itself:
They can be. The products you see listed when visiting an Amazon Associate's site can be based on a variety of factors, such as that site's topics and sales history. We might also show you items based on your own personal purchase history at Amazon.com. The Associate Web site hosting this Amazon.com link does not have access to these "personalized" recommendations. [Amazon.com Associates Privacy Information]
I thought this was interesting for several reasons. It is another example of how what we see is increasingly situational, dependent on what a service knows about us. I saw this from our home machine. I would see something different from my work machine. It is also an example of what Steve Rubel says in a very interesting post about making content embeddable in fine-grained ways: "traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere".
In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site. [Micro Persuasion]
Incidentally, I was looking at Macenstein because of the Steve Wozniak story noted by John Naughton.
The Rubel reference, well worth a read, is via dlf-dispatches. Twittering Stu also discusses it.
July 12, 2007
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Marketing
Cultural diplomacy is a report from the UK think tank Demos which I finally read on a plane ride this week. It talks about the role of cultural institutions and manifestations in international relations and,while charting international differences of approach, notes that cultural diplomacy is sometimes underappreciated as a 'soft' influencer. The report talks about cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy and cultural literacy, and emphasizes the growing importance of the latter two. Public diplomacy aims to reach broad masses of people with a favorable image of a country, and to be effective, has to enlist a broad part of the population in support of it. Hence, in part, the importance of cultural literacy. Clearly, each issue connects to the wider range of ways in which we now communicate.
While hard power is the ability to coerce (through military or economic means), soft power is the means to attract and persuade. As one British expert has put it: 'Public diplomancy is based on the premise that the image and reputation of a country are public goods which can create either an enabling or disabling environment for individual transactions.' [14 = Leonard et al]
Libraries, museums and archives are seen to have an important role in UK public diplomacy.
Our national cultural institutions are not static depositories for cultural artefacts; they are active participants in the articulation and communication of our own and others' sense of identity. Museums, galleries and libraries in particular 'provide the means by which a nation represents its relationship to its own history and to that of "other" cultures, functioning as monuments to the nation, and as such they have played a pivotal role in the fomation of nation states'. [20 = Reinventing the nation : British heritage and the bicultural settlement in New Zealand / Lynda Dyson in Littler and Naidoo]
And, interestingly, the report recommends support for acquisitions by these organization to maintain the 'range, quality and contemporary relevance of our cultural assets'. In turn, it recommends that national cultural institutions (such as the British Library) should develop explicit international strategies which take account of government goals.
Now, shortly after finishing this document I was walking through Union Sta |
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