Pardon my self-puffery, but this means a lot to me. Howard Rheingold, who is way up on my list of Net heroes, picked his three favorite books of the year for strategy + business, the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine:

Of the three books, I believe David Weinberger’s is the standout; it is not just prescient and useful, but profound. Weinberger looks deep below the obviously lucrative business model of Internet search and sees how the ability to tag and search extends human knowledge the way mathematics and the alphabet did. Everything Is Miscellaneous is not just the best book on behavioral theory of 2007, it’s the best book I’ve read all year — a rare combination of important social science and business insight, and fun to read…

Thank you, Howard. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous howard_rheingold ]

Tell Lijit.com what social networking sites you’re in and what content aggregation tools you use and it will create a search engine that returns results that you or your social network has created. Give it a try:

Lijit Search

Kathy Gould at The Palos Verdes Library District blog has a very interesting post (which I’m proud to say was kicked off by something in my book) on the role of librarians as catalogs are enabled to sort themselves based on why someone is searching for something. The post grew out of a conversation with Betth Jefferson at Bibliocommons.

“So what happens when this role of helping people find the information that meets their particular needs is transferred from the librarian to the user community at large?” Kathy asks. The answer she gives presents librarians as creators and maintainers of the systems (an information architecture role, as I’d call it), as guides to and through the system, as voices in the system, and as facilitators of the library’s role in the community. But she puts it better than I just did.

Sounds right to me. [Tags: ]

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

The main article is a response to Anthony Grafton’s recent article in the New Yorker that tries to de-hype claims about the future of libraries.

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle.

Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to a recent conference on the future of books. [Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

November 19, 2007

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle. Cluetrain is not.
Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to his contribution to a recent conference on the future of books.

[Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Hugh McKellar at KMWorld has posted a long interview with me about the miscellaneous and business. Hugh is a good interviewer, and I am a long-winded interviewee.

Aargh. Steven Levy’s excellent article on the new Amazon e-reading device came out a day before I was about to send out the new issue of my newsletter, the main article of which is about the future of books. I hate when that happens!

Well, I’ll send it out anyway, and will link to it here tomorrow. Damn the pace of human events! [Tags: books libraries steven_levy amazon ]

The estimable Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC points to a presentation by Michael Panzer (also of the OCLC) about how to “webbify” the Dewey Decimal System.

The question Michael addresses is how to take the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the “networked level,” defined as “Infrastructural improvements to make a KOS [Knowledge Organization System] web-scale accessible, to make sharing, syndicating, leveraging of its data feasible.” He begins by scoping the problem. He then talks about the issues in webbifying the DDC, which he boils down to three: URI design, caption design, and format considerations.

He proposes a scheme for URI’s (which, especially in the condensed form of a PowerPoint presentation I don’t fully understand, but are probably beyond me even if spelled out), with examples such as http://dewey.info/concept/338.4/en/edn/22/. Notice the DDC number after the “concept” designation.

Captions he acknowledges depend on context, and with Web services (Michael points out), one cannot always know the context in which one’s captions are going to be used. He also discusses the importance of maintaining the hierarchy, but the bullet points are too compressed. (Not a criticism. The PowerPoint deck wasn’t intended to be self-standing, and I don’t know enough to be able to fill in all the missing context.)

To the third point, he looks at adopting either the MARC 21 or (and?) SKOS formats.

As Duncan says, “This is part of an ongoing investigation of what it means to release more of the value of ‘classic large-scale vocabularies’ in a web environment.” There’s lots of info packed into Dewey’s system. How can we best liberate that info?

[Tags: dewey_decimal_system libraries kos michael_panzer]

There’s a transcript of a long chat about my book among librarians in a book club, led by Stolvano Barbosa. They give it a good going over, including frequent drubbings. Fascinating, at least to me; I kept wanted to jump in, but that’s sort of hard to do with a transcript :)

I spent some time this week with Patrick  de Laive, one of the founders of Fleck.com, a reinvention of Third Voice that looks much more promising. Fleck lets you leave comments and annotations on any site. Those notes can be seen either by the whole world or by one of your designated groups. It has obvious applications within an organization, and is a nice, open annotation platform that people may find lots of uses for. Plus, it’s a pretty cool implementation, and the upcoming one has lots and lots of miscellaneous goodies.

I’ve flecked the “play pen” page where you may be reading this post…