Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 meme map from the FOO Camp 2005 “What is Web 2.0?” brainstorming session strikes me like the outputs from most of the brainstorming sessions I’ve attended over the years - to get the full value you just had to be there.

Nevertheless it does have value in identifying some of the technology, social, and economic threads that run through the ongoing debate around trying to define this thing that has the the label Web 2.0 attached to it.

Most attempts to come up with a description that encompasses peoples behavior, as much as the technologies they use, are like trying to nail jelly to a wall. It would be interesting, but thankfully impossible, to compare the number of keystrokes consumed globally in producing applications that could be considered Web 2.0 with those consumed in blogging about a definition for it.

I had to smile at Dave Winer’s recent stir of the pot “Web 2.0 is really simple, it’s RSS 2.0.” - Thats a bit like saying the automobile is really simple, its gasoline! RSS 2.0 is key if not fundamental to the emergence of Web 2.0, but the whole story? - I think not.

Anyway I believe Web 2.0 is like many other things, that are compared to love - you can’t satisfactorily describe it to anyone but you know when you are in it.

Finally I agree with Richard MacManus, that Susan Mernit said it way better than many:

“The enduring lesson of all of the social media and emerging technologies is that we’ve created an a la carte, do it yourself platform where users can engage with sophisticated forms of search, feeds, metadata and APIs, social networks and identity, and commerce and fill these vessels with their own information
–And that’s the heart of the revolution, IMHO.“

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William Heath in his EU member states v Google: no contest posting on Ideal government europe is demanding his taxes back from the European-jingoistic response to Google’s audacity in wanting to search the whole planet including Europe’s Library collections. [I paraphrase].

His complaint being that the European Governments have piled in loads of money to try, and not succeed, to beat Google at their own game.

Mind you quotes like this from Jacques Chirac the French President instils one with a certain amount of trepidation:

“We’re engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy“…..”In France, in Europe, it’s our power that’s at stake“

So taking a look at The European Library you find a traditional OPAC-looking web site which performs a broadcast search across an EU online catalogue, and the catalogues hosted in the member countries. It’s interesting [the first time you do a search] to watch the result counts (and the odd error) totting up from each member country. Thereafter you start wondering why the results are not just there, as they would be in Google.

Once you scratch the surface, it becomes very clear that it is the result of stitching together many dissimilar systems. For instance the display of character sets - search for ‘harry potter’ and the first result from the British Library displays thus “Harri Potter i v’i?a?zen’ Azkabanu / Dz?h?. K. Roling ; z anhliis’koï pereklav Viktor Morozov ; za redakt?s?ii?e?i?u? Ivana Malkovycha.” I’m sure in a European project, with more participating countries and therefore languages than you can shake a stick at, they could have got the correct display of Unicode/UTF8 sorted from the start. The site comes with a Beta Version Warning so that perfection cannot be expected, maybe we have just got used to the quality of other perpetual beta offerings.

So is William’s plea for his money back a valid one? Unfortunately not. Google Print, which he is comparing it with, searches the contents of books that have been digitized. Whereas The European Library, like traditional library search engines uses the bibliographic metadata that has been catalogued about the books. So they are doing very different jobs. Mind you if you could combine both capabilities, that would be powerful.

That is not to say that his points about user experience are not valid, they are. This comparison does raise some fundamental issues though.

Why do Google services always go like a rocket? - Because they harvest the content in to their own servers. Why don’t projects like The European Library do that? - Because its too difficult (harvesting, hosting, supporting the load, copyright reasons, ownership reasons, competing thiefdom reasons, imprecise protocols and data formats, project funding uncertainty, etc., etc.) well at least it always has been too difficult to do it any other way.

Looking at the site it seems apparent that its underlying architecture is a traditional Web 1.0 application with a smattering of things like XSLT to add functionality in to the user interface. So is there a better way in the emerging world of Web 2.0?

Taking it to the extreme, why not let the users browser search all these catalogues directly. Routing it all through some servers in The Netherlands is bound to slow things up. Some of the AJAX work I have been doing for the Talis Research days, shows that is very possible.

There again with intelligent harvesting where possible, plus intelligent caching where not, aggregated search performance that approached Google speed may be possible. And anyway does the user really care which country’s library holds an item. They firstly need to find out if what they are searching for exists, and then how to get access to it. [But that is a whole other story!]

Those who have been following Panlibus and other Talis Blogs such as Silkworm will know that we have been deep in to projects addressing the way that open participative architectures utilising techniques loosely labelled as Web 2.0, can open up closed collections such as Library catalogues [from the local to the national] liberating them to become part of a distributed information environment. As the Talis Insight Conference approaches, you should be hearing more on this.

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Have you ever had the experience of seeing something in a shop and then not being able to buy it? The sales assistant will say something like, “Sorry it’s our display item.” Overall I sense this occurs less frequently now than it used to, although it did happen to me at the weekend. It’s very frustrating! Users must feel similarly frustrated when they use some of the UK’s library resource discovery systems to get a simple thing like a book.

Discovery: UK regional systems
There are several such systems around now. For the UK there is no national system but you can search regional systems. I can discover the library holdings of (primarily university) libraries round the M25 motorway, London’s public libraries by using “What’s in London Libraries” - WiLL, public libraries in the South West of England using “Wisdom” or public and academic libraries in Scotland (CAIRNS). And there are others.

If you know about these systems (and for some people of course that’s a big if), it’s not that hard to find a library that has the book you want. You can find it but you can’t have it! I searched for “The Telling Line: 15 contemporary book illustrators”, by Douglas Martin. This book is out of print so it made sense to try and find a copy in a library. Indeed I located over a dozen copies in London alone. I also located a copy in the National Library of Scotland with the tempting message “available now” (apparently this copy is “stored in George IV bridge”). But there is no option to order (request) it unless, in some cases, I happened to be registered already as member of the relevant library: I wasn’t! So I gave up on the UK’s public libraries and tried Ireland.

Discovery: Ireland –a national approach
The “BorrowBooks” website provides a simple interface to most of Ireland’s public library holdings. It looks like you can make a request no matter what public library you are a member of. The site says “Anyone who is a current member of any of the Irish public library authorities’ services may make a request online straightaway. If you are not a member at the moment, contact your nearest library branch to join.” That’s certainly a lot clearer and an improvement over the UK. But I can’t join an Irish public library so remain very frustrated. .

Fulfilment
Why tell me about all these copies (and indicate that they are “available” in some cases) via publicly available web sites and then refuse to offer me any satisfactory fulfilment mechanism? Not even a credit card helps. So I try Amazon. Despite the fact the book I want is out of print, I find the title straight away and see there are 22 second hand copies available. I pay £9.50 plus £2.75 postage and packing to have it delivered to my door. I have subsequently found out that my local second hand bookshop will also buy the book off me for £4.50 so you might say the actual transaction cost is £7.75. I’m certain that’s less that than transaction cost to a public or academic library of processing an Inter-Library Loan (ILL) request. My book was relatively expensive. There are many titles on Amazon that are available for little more than postage and packing.

The point here is that I found the book on Amazon but I did not get the book from Amazon. I got it from a second hand bookshop. Amazon is a platform that provides services such as a search interface, “enrichments” (reviews and book jacket images) and, most importantly of all a simple fulfilment and payment mechanism. For the second hand bookshop all that complexity is taken away. It makes it cheaper to sell second hand books and I benefit from a process that I can do at home in a few minutes and I get the book delivered to my door in three days.

Therefore getting “hidden” library resources easily discoverable is just part of the story. The challenge is also to provide a genuine fulfilment service. The ILL service in libraries today is mostly pretty creaky. Libraries tend not to shout about it as they fear they won’t be able to meet the costs of potentially rampant demand.
The time is ripe for a radical evaluation of the ILL provision in libraries. Talis is a major stakeholder with our UnityWeb service. Librarians use it to help them fulfil requests from the public. Last year we commissioned a report on the future of ILL and we will be unveiling our plans for a next generation service under the banner of project Skywalk at the Talis Insight conference in November.

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Kable’s William Heath posts results of the Ideal Government blog’s recent competition to find the best map-based use of public sector information.

As I mentioned last week on my own blog, information suitable for presentation on a map really is everywhere; all that’s needed is some ’spatial component’, whether an address, a set of coordinates, or whatever.

Changes in the way that data are made available, along with increased availability of accessible means for anyone to make maps ensures that there is a healthy community working to produce and share a wide range of maps for all purposes.

William includes mention of LibMap in his results, Richard Wallis’ experiment in a different way of utilising and presenting information stored in Project Silkworm’s Directory.

Technorati Tags: Google Maps, Government, Talis, Virtual Earth

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Here at Talis, we do a lot to reach out to our customers, as you would expect. They, for example, get Talis Talk every month, and communicate with teams and individuals here in the usual variety of ways.

We’re also becoming increasingly proactive in engaging, both with the wider library community, and with entirely new audiences such as those forming around Web 2.0 and the Participation Age. In this context, we’re not selling products. Rather, we’re carrying forward an important conversation about the way in which society, its institutions and our expectations are changing, and about how we need to think, experiment and build together in new ways. The conversations involve Talis customers and non-customers alike, and will have a fundamental impact upon the ways in which future services are assembled.

We have our annual conference, with this year’s in Birmingham (UK) on 15 and 16 November. We also get out to present at other people’s events.

We have our new series of Research Days, the third of which was successfully held earlier this week.

We have panlibus, and a growing stable of sister blogs with which to carry the debate forward on the leading edge. We also write for a variety of journals and trade publications.

Very soon, we’ll be launching our new magazine, both in print and online. Watch this space for the formal launch announcement, but with our Marketing team occasionally requisitioning my desk this week to spread out the final proofs, I can vouch for how good it looks…

We’re also about to start a very different venture, with our entry into the world of podcasting, and that is the real subject of this post.

Existing technology podcasts, such as those distributed through IT Conversations, are excellent. There is certainly room for more, though, and we believe that Talis brings a perspective to this space that is currently unique and potentially of interest to quite a diverse audience. We straddle the library/information science and technology worlds, and can clearly see how much each stands to gain from the other. With these podcasts, we intend to build bridges between the two, whilst also offering content of interest and relevance to those who may currently consider themselves to occupy only one of these spaces.

We are currently approaching a number of contributors, with a view to signing them up to do interviews with us. Within Talis, we of course have a long list of people we’d like to hear speak, and I’m working my way through that list just now. If there are any people you’d especially like to hear (or if you’d like to volunteer yourself!), please send an e-mail to podcasts [at] talis[dot]com.

Once we have an agreed set of speakers and topics for the next few months of podcasting, we’ll publish it here and invite questions to the speakers from all of you. Where feasible, we’ll incorporate your questions into the interview.

We look forward to reaching out and engaging with the community in a new - and hopefully participative - manner, and I personally look forward to the opportunity this grants me to talk with many of those from whom I have so much to learn!

Technorati Tags: Libraries, Podcasting, Talis, Web 2.0

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As reported by the Amazon Web Services Blog and the IEBlog there have been some behind the scenes efforts between the Microsoft IE7 development team and their colleagues at Amazon’s A9 to roll Opensearch capability into the next IE release.

So why did Microsoft team go down this route? Because it was simple and built on stuff they had already:

IE7 Beta1 shipped with a set of 5 search providers and there wasn?t a way (short of hacking the registry) to add more search providers. When we started looking into how a site should describe itself, our first thought was the ?src? format. After all, it was pretty simple and it could describe how to construct the query to get the search result page back.

There were 2 things that made us pause, however. First, ?src? isn?t XML. This meant that we would need to write a custom parser. A new format would bring its share of security threats. ?src? didn?t seem so simple anymore. Second and more important, OpenSearch 1.0 had brought forward the idea of programming, re-mixing and subscribing to search results…. … With search being such an important aspect of our user?s daily lives, a browser ought to do something special with search results. In OpenSearch, we saw the foundation for making this happen in future releases of IE….

…OpenSearch 1.0 describes how to get search results as RSS. IE7 has great RSS support and renders search result RSS in a very readable way. So, IE7 could be backwards compatible with OpenSearch 1.0. But, we needed a format that could *also* describe a site with only an HTML interface.

Ah, but what about licensing - Creative Commons rides to the rescue again!

Only one thing stood in the way. Aaron and I looked through the OpenSearch spec and couldn?t find how it was licensed. We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible to deploy this technology. The feedback from releasing the simple list extensions under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license was very positive. Our preference was that OpenSearch would have a similar license. We mailed Dewitt and within minutes, got a response from his BlackBerry that A9 was indeed planning on releasing OpenSearch 1.1 under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5, the very same license as simple list extensions.

And what have A9 got out of it - other than the not so insignificant point of having a massive validation of their handy little search standard? Well, validating and pushing some of the extra functionality in OpenSerch 1.1 [draft] standard. which includes extensibility around search formats, support for atom based feeds and http POSTs, XML Namespace extensions in the query.

Opensearch 1.1, starts to address some of the issues I mused about back in March:

OpenSearch I fully expect to grow beyond A9. It has a great opportunity to become a de facto simple search interface. With a bit of help from the library community, there is no reason why it couldn’t be built upon to become a suitable alternative for some of our search protocols, that are not so simple. [Do I hear a little cheer from the developers who have ever tried to get their head around implementing Z39.50]

There is an opportunity for our domain to build upon Opensearch to provide easy integration of Library searches in to the world of the Library user. As Lorcan Dempsey also suggests:

it is time for SRU/Metasearch/NISO/somebody to come out with some simple explanatory materials explaining the relationship between MXG, SRU, SRW, and Z39.50; a routemap for the future suggesting who should adopt what and what should go away; and materials explaining the relationship between a hopefully reduced set of these acronyms and OpenSearch.

The two questions that the promoters of SRU, SRW, and Z39.50 must ask themselves are 1. How come Microsoft have managed to influence Opensearch 1.1, but we have not?; and 2. A SRU client is as easy to implement as an Opensearch one so why, despite the fact that the standard has been around far longer, did it not get adopted by Amazon and perhaps more significantly by Microsoft?

Whilst you ponder those, lets all celebrate the the way developments and cooperations, only a few months ago the mere suggestion of which would have brought incredulity, just seem to happen in this Web 2.0 world. Why, because its easy technically and easy commercially.

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In a post on RLG’s blog, hangingtogether.org, Günter writes about the value of cooperation between the public and private sectors, and the difficulty of getting such cooperation off the ground.

As a recent mover from public to private, I can sympathise with his point, and would emphasise the value to both parties when we manage to get it right.

Günter is principally concerned with getting private sector partners to adopt and engage with a range of technical standards related to digital preservation, but his points are more widely applicable.

There are, of course, commercial organisations that engage actively and willingly with the standards process. Talis is one of those, and will become more so, but others such as Sun are also often to be found at the table.

In talking to some of my public sector peers after my intention to change job had been announced, I encountered many of the stereotypes to which Günter refers.

“How can Talis offer a platform upon which we can build? Surely they’re going to charge exhorbitant fees as soon as we’re committed?”, went one line of thought.

“Talis is a vendor. They have no role in shaping future public services. We write the Invitation To Tender. They tender. We award them a contract to build what we tell them to.”, went another.

And, through much of it, “How are they going to make money out of all this? They must know…!”, was a common refrain.

There are many answers to these questions, and none of the serious ones are even remotely sinister. Talis is not out to lure poor unsuspecting libraries, learners and the rest into honey trap-like services that appears too good to be true, only to quickly turn round and apply punitive commercial fees across the board tomorrow.

A company like Talis has an interest in standards. They make our job easier. They make it easier for us to link to content and services provided by other people, in order to build better services for our customers. They make it easier for Talis’ developers to construct the core functions that our customers expect, in order to spend more time on the value-add that differentiates a Talis implementation of standard X from someone else’s. That’s good for us, and good for you.

A company like Talis has an interest in shaping the evolution of standards. This is not so that the standard ends up reflecting what our products can do. It is, however, about making sure that the pure ideals of the standard at least reflect reality… and about making sure that it will be possible to build systems that comply.

A company like Talis has an interest in seeing their technologies used in a wide range of situations, by large numbers of people. We learn from users’ experiences with our technology. We see increased capabilities amongst those users as they become familiar with possibilities, which in turn raises expectations for what the next generation of products should be able to offer. Maybe that is where the money is to be made.

Engaging with a company like Talis, which is thinking about this space, is undoubtedly good for Talis. It is also good for those with whom we cooperate in the public sector, whether they buy from us or not.

And if Günter or any of his colleagues from RLG (Hi Jim, Hi Merrilee!) want a chat, they know where we are… And, rather more usefully, a couple of us will be here next month…

Technorati Tags: Talis

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Richard McManus reports that Populicio.us has ceased operation because Del.icio.us doesn’t serve its homepage as it did

Populicio.us used to gather poopularity statistics about new bookmarks on del.icio.us. It turns out that they were doing it by scraping the HTML from the home page, rather than using or asking for an API. This shows the distinction between content designed for human consumption and that designed for machine consumption. The human format will change for all kinds of reasons often simply as the site matures and its users become familiar with its workings. Machine interfaces change on a completely different timescale and generally stable over the long term.

Del.icio.us deliberately makes the distinction between machine APIs and human interfaces precisely because it wants to be able to experiment and evolve new interaction styles. Populicio.us was a cool remix but fell foul of making assumptions.

I think there’s a lesson here for the microformat community as well. The advantages of intermixed machine and human readable data is compelling but there are often good reasons not to mix them: by separating the two you can evolve each at different rates and for different reasons.

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The Business 2.0 Blog reports on a Google Maps / eBay Motors mashup. Nothing new in mashing together GM’s with another service to create a new application, but thought Eric’s comments were insightful.

But let’s suppose that eBay Motors does eventually incorporate the mashup into its site. What happens when Google starts inserting local text ads into its maps, or requiring that people who use its maps data do so, like Microsoft wants to do? Then what you would have is not just a map mashup but a business mashup. eBay would incorporate Google’s mapping technology on eBay Motors to sell more cars, while Google would sell local search ads that appear on eBay’s site. It will never happen. But if it did, it would be so Web 2.0.

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In this posting, the first of an occasional series, I pose five questions to Otis Gospodnetić, founder of Simpy, a social bookmarking service. I first came across Simpy several months ago and my first thoughts were of how deep the search aspect ran in the service. It underlies all kinds of important features including the highly useful Topics and Topic Filters. A little Googling soon revealed the reason: Otis is a long time member of the Apache Lucene team. As luck would have it our online paths crossed recently and I took the opportunity to interview him on the philosophy behind Simpy, the rise of social bookmarking systems and the future for independent software developers:

What was your motivation for starting Simpy and how did your background in full text search influence its design?

I’ve always been interested in “information”. Yes, “information” is a pretty
broad term and quite vague; for reasons that I don’t fully understand myself,
I find pleasure in gathering information (think web crawling), processing it
in various ways (think classification), and retrieving it (think full-text
search). Perhaps this attraction to information comes from my thirst for
knowledge and the notion that a large and searchable information repository
represents access to that knowledge.

I have also always been intrigued by software that has a human-like
collaborative side to it (think intelligent agents that work together toward
accomplishing a common goal).

I started Simpy back in 2001. It started as a
personal side project, as the result of my frustration with the fact that I
had this nice collection of bookmarks in my browser, but didn’t have access
to the knowledge hidden in it, because I couldn’t search my bookmarks. Sure,
you can find a bookmark by title, if you remember it, but the real knowledge
is in the page itself, and I wanted to have the ability to find it.
Similarly, I’ve always (maybe not always, but for a decade at least)
understood that hierarchies are limited, and that search is king (see
Categories vs. Keywords vs. Labels vs. Tags
). Being one of Lucene’s developers, I built
search into Simpy from the very beginning.

Why are social bookmarking services so interesting right now? After all, backflip has been providing shared bookmarks since 1999.

Sharing:
Backflip and other bookmark services from that era were/are primarily
web-based bookmark managers. Sharing was always implemented in a way that
required a lot of extra work and not built into the flow. It was something
that required an afterthought. The current generation of social bookmarks
makes sharing flawless, and this gives us easier access to more information.

Tags:
Tags are, essentially, user-provided _search_ entry points. Traditional
bookmark managers didn’t provide that - they were busy implementing tools to
let people manage their bookmark hierarchies. Tags give us the ability to
drill deep into the large corpus of knowledge along any one of the N axis.

Feeds:
In the world of traditional bookmark managers you didn’t need feeds - sharing
was an infrequently used feature, and why would you need a feed of your own
bookmarks? Now that more information is being shared through bookmarking
services, feeds let us passively suck in more information.

Searching:
5+ years ago, relatively few people saw that search is a more powerful way to
access a large body of data. Even though we had several Web search engines
before Google, it took Google to educate the masses to the point where nearly
everyone knows how to use search as a way to get to information.

What is the secret to building successful social systems?

Imitate nature. Understand core, raw human behaviour.

We’re seeing islands of data forming across the Web held in services like
Simpy, del.icio.us, Flickr, Blogger and Backpack. All these services have
public APIs and yet none of them intercommunicate. Why do you think this is
and what needs to be done to join all these islands up?

This is nothing specific to the (types of) services you mentioned. You’ll
see the same in any other field. Until somebody doesn’t see an opportunity
in connecting the isolated islands of information, the problem will remain
unsolved. I am sure, though, there are several people thinking and working
hard on this problem at this very moment.

I have passion for (human) knowledge, and a humanistic streak in me. I think
it’s hereditary, because I observed this pattern in my ancestors, too. That
part of me would love to build bridges between those islands of knowledge,
for the benefit of the society at large. Unfortunately, there are only 24
hours in a day.

With the giants of the Web such as Amazon, Google and Yahoo releasing so
many free services, where do you see the future for independent software
developers?

There have always been giants like the ones you mention. When Google ran on
a couple of servers there was this big and powerful search engine called
AltaVista. There was Inktomi. Before that there was WebCrawler. They were
all giants in their own time. Amazon, Google, and Yahoo are simply the
giants of this slice of our time. 100 years from now there will be new
giants. Some of them will rise from those independent software developers.

Thanks to Otis for taking the time to answer my questions. If you have a suggestion for someone you’d like me interview in the same style, drop me a line at ian.davis@talis.com. I know who I’d like to interview, but who would you like to hear air their views on Web 2.0, participation and the future of online services and data.

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