LibraryTechtonics

Liz Lawley, information specialist extraordinaire, associate professor, and visiting researcher at Microsoft, expounded on the wonderful usefulness of social software, and how it reveals that the future of search is really in human filtering.

The blog comes of age, social software is next.
When she spoke at Internet Librarian two years ago, and asked “who’s blogging this”, no one raised their hands. Back then, people just didn’t know about blogging and its significance to our community. Now it’s a whole new world, with a good number of folks in the room raising hands high and proud.

She started her presentation with a story of overhearing people in the hallway yesterday having a converstaion about social software, which turned out to be Marydee and Jessamyn, and someone saying, “I Flickred a photo of you last night,” which turned out to be me talking to Eli (here’s the photo she used on her slide).

She was listening to *us* in our little klotch in the hallway, and realized that librarianship really is a different world, more and more about the rise of social software, technologies being talked about like it’s so 5 minutes ago. Blogging is a a new age of self-marketing. It’s so big that if you search for “liz” on google, her blog is the *third* hit, because she constantly posts new and interesting content. Make a presence on the web with a blog, and you will get noticed.

Most tools “from a standpoint of usability…suck”
Working at Microsoft at the beginning, she had a “cognitive disjoint” because somehow all of these smart people still created crappy software. After working there a few months, and chatting with Kathy Sierra who shared her confusion over how this could be, she understands it a bit better.

Take the concept car example on Cathy Sierra’s blog. It started out as a Great Idea, “and then something bad happened”. Risk aversion, politics, and whatever keep good ideas out of the end product, and in the end, creates software that is really just not useful.

Software needs make people feel empowered by making tasks easy to perform. Software vendors need to stop dumbing down software because they think users are dumb, making software suck, and stop trying to change the user, which will never happen. Vendors really need to make the software smarter and easier to use, and let usability be their friend.

Trying to “create the algorithmic equivalent of the librarian”.
Liz is in love with The Long Tail. The power law of distributions dictates that while the big blogs that everyone reads are full of what everyone else knows, The Long Tail is where the tasty bits of information live. Librarians have always been good at being the harvesters of tasty bits, and social bookmarking and other social computing applications are really a chance for librarians to shine.

Become the filter. Tools can help.
Tech is trying to “create the algorithmic equivalent of the librarian” through social computing, and it’s just not working. The key is to make software usable instead of trying to make it smart like people, then actually add the human element.

Tools like Yahoo! My Web, furl, and del.icio.us, are based on the notion that there are groups of people interested in like topics. Instead of sifting through general, unruly, and often irrelevant search results on a search engine, where the context of knowledge is not present, you can create networks of people who share interests, and refine the search to stores of “Joe Expert” knowledge. So a search of “clay” on Google, which will try to find every iteration of clay possible, will not return “Clay Shirkey”, a search of My Web might actually give you “Clay Shirkey” in the first few hits. It’s the “what do I read next?” of bookmarks, aggregated in one place and shared, so that you no longer need to contend with endless emails of “you should read this” URLs.

Authority, appropriateness, and “I didn’t ‘friend’ you because…”
Librarians find social computing and folksonomies scary. There’s a lack of control, there’s the issue of authority, and not everyone who you know is really smart in the “you’re my Joe Expert” way. Add to that the weirdness of adding slang/regional language, judging what is derogatory, and vandalism, and librarian’s start to implode. However, social software is by nature self-regulatory, though not a perfect system, and there are risks involved, but without risks there is no growth.

If librarians can remember that social computing is not looking to replace the librarian (especially if librarians get involved) or classification, but really to supplement what we do to aid in progress, then we can not only be rock stars, but our patrons will love us for it. Getting over the risk hump, in my mind, is Scary #1, while taking the plunge and using the stuff is Scary #2. My question to non-techie librarians especially is: what can we do to diminish Scaries 1 & 2?

Let’s not live in a Terminator society, trying to build smarter machines which may come to eradicate us some day. Embracing social computing is a great way to supplement everyday librarian skills with tool that help us become better filters, and show people how librarians are still relevant in the emerging technology age.

Interesting bits about how Liz writes presentations

• As a rule, Liz doesn’t put her presentation on paper until the day before she presents, because inevitably someone steals all of her good ideas, and there’s nothing left to talk about. But it does let her observe themes and incorporate them into her talk.

  For instance, Lee spoke yesterday about The Long Tail, Jessamyn and Jenny presented on tagging, and it was all stuff she wanted to cover.

• Yesterday when we chatted after she overheard us talking and introduced herself (go moxie!), she said she wouldn’t be using Powerpoint slides, but she did end up using Powerpoint, but just for pictures. She said she wanted a site to just show pictures in a series with timing. I’d say she could use Flickr for that, posting screenshots and collage images to a set, and setting the slide show to go at a slow, steady pace, with the ability to pause, and go back and forth in the images.
• During her presentation, del.icio.us wouldn’t load. But she had backup screenshots on her slides. Moral: always be prepared.
• She’s going to try to blog her presentation, which she’s never done it before. So. Very. Cool.

Tags: conference