Actually he doesn’t say much other than to joke about me complaining about the length of the shows. (And to point out the awful comment spam I get. Arg! I need to get a new comment spam filter in place.)

I still hold by my idea that a shorter show would get me to listen everyday!

In his own words:

“I’ve been asked (no pun intended) to do several things including:

1) Outreach to the library and education communities

++ This means a lot of things including doing what I’ve been doing (training, conference presentations, etc.).

++ Working closely with leaders of both communities to make Ask Jeeves a product that librarians and educators can count on.

++ A conduit (a person on the “inside” if you prefer) for these communities and from companies who serve these markets to share their ideas and services. What can we do better? How can we improve and meet your needs? We’re here to listen. Perhaps a service that librarians would find useful is already out there and we can work to bring the two sides together. It would be exciting to leverage what librarians and libraries already offer and make them more readily accessible to the public on AJ.”

It’s great to see librarians continue to be hired by search companies and I’ll be curious to see what comes of this hire.

I grab these podcasts on my Zen Creative if I’m going for a walk or a jog or to the gym. Rather than reading the daily headlines I can listen to them. But on days when I do read the headlines I don’t bother with the podcast. Doing both takes too much time and is redundant.

Generally I like the podcasts but they could be cut from 10-15 minutes (or sometimes more like 20 or 30 minutes) to about 5 minutes each day. Less joking around by the guys and more news! They also run ads at the beginning of the show, but it’s easy to fast-forward past those, which I guess is an advertising flaw. The conversational format is sometimes awkward, but hopefully over time the guys will settle in and get more comfortable with it.

It’s sort of interesting to me as a search engine employee, but does anyone else actually care about these people? I don’t know…

This is because I used that phrase as a test query for a couple of search engine reviews I did. But obviously people who end up on the Search Lounge looking for instructions on jump starting their bikes are going to be disappointed when all they find is a review of how some search engine handled that query.

So with that in mind here is a decent article from about.com about How to Jump Start Your Motorcycle. I hope this helps.

If you’re a blog writer and search engines are referring traffic for terms that have only a small mention on your site, how about being helpful and posting a good link to send people on their way.

Standing in an airport taxi line listening to a woman blab about loud kids on her flight got me thinking about all these technologies that are aimed at fostering communication between people. Cell phones, text messaging, digital photography, blogs, etc. In general I’m for these new modes of communication that make everyone a creator, however it creates a challenge for search companies. Not only are search engines expected to index and retrieve bits of text from massive collections of blogs, for instance, but in the future search engines will be required to index and retrieve words from people’s voice communications. Because we are moving to a world in which every form of communication is perceived as creation, search engines are required to index and search every word that woman said. Yet what’s the point of archiving her complaints about a loud flight? It’s possible that it could be useful to her in the future, but most likely it won’t ever be and it will cloud and obscure useful information.

Right now I have the option to archive my IM chat sessions. When will I have this option for my phone calls? When I do the first thing I’ll do is categorize my conversations and voice mails into a directory. I’ll have a category for my wife, a category for parents with sub-categories for each parent, etc. Then people will create the technology to let me tag my phone calls so I can classify calls as “xmas gift list", “new year’s eve plans", etc. And then eventually I’ll be able to do full-text searching of each phone call so I can zoom in to the part I’m interested in. Beyond personal communications, companies will be able to record voice communications to their customers and then post those in a searchable format. I’ll search my ISP for the voice menu instructions about hooking up my DSL service.

OK, great, in the future I’ll be able to search voice conversations as well as web pages, blogs, my email, and my IM using one or several search interfaces. But is this a good thing? For each of these categories of information there will be those who exploit them for their own personal profit: spammers. They will figure out how to drive traffic to their content through each of these technologies. And so the search engines will have to not only index all that content, but they’ll also have to devise crime-fighting techniques to identify and remove from retrieval the spam. The engines are faced with removing the trivial as well as the nefarious. Same as now, but with new formats in the future. Controlled vocabularies and pre-defined structures, like the Library of Congress Subject Headings, are not faced with spam (though bias creeps in), but in this world, where everyone’s a creator, pre-defined taxonomies and ontologies are being stretched thin due to the massive scale of information, hence the rise of folksonomies.

And privacy? To have a private dialogue the only way will be face to face until people start walking around with voice recorders in their cell phones and then every face to face conversation will also be archived and retrievable. Is this really what we want? Is it enough to put access restrictions on our own private archives? No.

Librarians, archivists, search engines, and all other information professionals need to decide what to do with so much data. The only way I can see through this mess is a melding of open structures and controlled structures. There needs to be a layer that sits on top of open structures like flickr and Furl and helps to organize things. This is the role of information professionals: to help organize while not interfering too much. Build thesauri, bridge related concepts, point out broader and narrower terms, but not hamper users from defining their own tags for content. In that way we can identify the woman’s cell phone call about her flight for what it is: a daily conversation between two people not worthy of permanent preservation.

A city offers:

1. A sacred space for its citizens to come together for purposes of spirituality, camaraderie, and devotion to that which is greater than the individual.
2. Security for its citizens.
3. An environment conducive to commerce.

Historically all of these are pretty easy to see. In contemporary times #1 has been supplanted to some degree by secular things like civic pride, community organizations, public gatherings, and sports.

In the context of the web, search engines (portals?) provide these three things for us now. Let’s see if this works:

1. Sacred space - People gather together through search engines based on shared interests and communities.
2. Security - Users trust search engines to guide them safely through the web.
3, Commerce - I think this is the easiest one to see. Search engines facilitate 21st century commerce.

Am I stretching the analogy too far?
Physical location means less than ever and I wonder what the future of the city will be.

Adam Smith, the Google Product Manager on the panel, did a fine job I thought. It’s not easy being in front of many hundred librarians. He obviously takes issues around digitization seriously, though he also kept to the company line about wanting “to do what’s right". I think they’d be better not repeating these types of statements all the time. It’s starting to feel a bit forced. But in any case, I think it’s great that he agreed to be on the panel. Too bad Amazon and the Open Content Alliance didn’t also have panelists. Too bad Brewster Kahle wasn’t a panelist!

Some news that was announced last night was that Microsoft has agreed to join the Open Content Alliance along with the Internet Archive, Yahoo! and other organizations. According to the information I learned last night, Microsoft is going to pay for the digitization of 150,000 books.

Some random good quotes from the panel:
* The most requested interlibrary loan book last year was the Da Vinci Code. Would it just be cheaper for libraries to buy a used copy from Amazon and send it to a patron than do ILL?
* In the future, Internet Librarian will simply called the Librarian Conference.

New terms (to me this first one was new, but a quick search on Yahoo returns many matches, including this news.com article from February, 2005):
Astroturf: a blog that looks like a personal blog, but is really sponsored by a corporation. I often wonder, for instance, about blogs I see dedicated to 1970s TV shows. The term can also be applied to political groups who start fake grassroots blogs.

biblioblogosphere - the world of librarian blogs.

Good quote:
“There is nothing more pathetic than a librarian who gets the facts wrong.”
The context for this quote was her adamant insistence that we as librarians fact-check everything we publish.

Another good point she made was about transparency and how important it is to provide “About Me” sections. I totally agree. It doesn’t have to be an extensive bio, but at least provide a brief paragraph so that I can at least think I’m reading a real person’s writing and not astroturf or a splog.

*She mentioned Exalead as having some of the best advanced search syntax capabilities for web searching, including phonetic and approximate spelling. (See my review of Exalead from last November.
*http://www.housingmaps.com/ - maps Craigslist real estate listings to Google Maps so you can see on a map where the listings are located.
*She mentioned, by my count, 11 different Yahoo! products and services, such as Y!Q, podcasts.yahoo.com, Konfabulator, MyWeb, Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Site Explorer, and more.
*Amazon’s Statistically Improbably Phrases - a data mining feature for searching books that shows which phrases in a book are “statistically improbable”. These phrases provide more unique index terms and then let users find other books with the same terms.