Over the next few days we’re going to see lots of big sites blacked out (I found one this morning) because of objections to the SOPA and PIPA bills making their way through the US House and Senate. If you want to get a better idea of why there’s a lot of opposition, the article by Chris Heald on Why SOPA is Dangerous is a good place to start.
I’ve just finished reading a story on a site that talks about tips to make your website more credible, and then I scrolled down to see the comments. What did I find? A lot of spam. To my mind, not cleaning up the spam in the comments you receive removes much of your site’s credibility. Come on, it’s not hard!
A recent online discussion has caused me to think more about the Open Data movement, especially the segment where government agencies are being urged to release their data resources so that the community can make use of them. The problem is that the community (by and large) has shown remarkably little interest in the concept, even after a series of contests to create apps to exploit the datasets.
The discussion featured a fair bit of pontification about the cleanliness and integrity of the data, the lack of metadata, the relatively small number of datasets and so on. It reminds me of the time when I worked in CSIRO and our team of researchers has some real neat software that would enable people to search through a video library and edit a number of clips to produce a custom video – perhaps the greatest tries of their favourite football player. The problem then was that the potential users weren’t interested in doing that – they’d look at something that someone else had produced but they just didn’t want to put the effort into doing it themselves. So it is, I believe, with open data.
If a bunch of enthusiasts put together an app that merges bus timetables and maps and sells it for a very small price, then people may be interested. But as for doing it themselves: no. They have lives to lead.
A further consideration is how to get the data together in a state to be published. The conversation I mentioned above did raise some good points. There is definitely data available, but it was never meant to see the light of day; it was just intended to be a by-product of other services. No wonder it’s poorly presented and badly described (if described at all). And to bring it up to publication quality takes money, and that’s hard to come by. No amount of pious boosting by people in central organisations will overcome the reluctance to find that extra money by the workers who are custodians of the data (and most don’t realise that they are custodians).
So spare us the hand-waving, and if you’re serious about the topic then why not open up the purse strings and fund the data provision. And while you’re about it, make sure that it’s high on the list of priorities of the services that the community really wants you to spend their money on.
Around five weeks ago I wrote about a talk given by Dr Eef Overgaauw on the history of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, in the context of the National Library’s Handwritten exhibition. I got the chance to see it over the break and it’s certainly worth a trip. The exhibits are excellently presented, with printed notes that you can consult while you’re in there and there are recordings to accompany the musical manuscripts on display. For lovers of technology, they’ve supplied a bank of iPads that you can use to give instant feedback.
Clay Shirky has done it again. In a new post on his blog he’s done some further analysis on the economics of newspapers and paywalls, and still doesn’t think they’ll work in the long run. I particularly liked the NPR analogy, “where sponsors reach all listeners, but direct support only comes from donors.” Neat.
Attitudes to social media are changing - despite a couple of posts that I’ve seen this last week. One optimist wished that it would all go away; one other requested that it be banned. Hmm. What more people are working on is how to manage it, and that’s where the hope lies. The policies that you’ll see coming out of many organisations seem overly complicated, and it does make you wish for something simple like “Don’t be an idiot. Use your judgement”. Unfortunately, the newspapers show us every day that people tend not to use their judgement in the workplace.
This was reinforced yesterday when I read a tweet that said “We trust our staff to talk on the phone, why not trust them to talk on Facebook”. Now, this could be taken two ways. If you’re talking about the staff speaking irresponsibly on behalf of the organisation, you need to acknowledge that your’e talking about two completely different modes of communication. You wouldn’t trust your staff to speak on talkback radio as a representative of your company, so clearly some ground rules must be set out.
If, on the other hand, the discussion is about allowing staff access to social media in the workplace and that they might abuse the privilege, then it’s a fair question. The problem is really one of perception. A passer-by seeing someone talking on the phone is not going to get too upset, but to look over the shoulder of a staffer browsing a Facebook page - well, it doesn’t look very much like work, does it?
The British Library and online publisher brightsolid have released the British Newspaper Archive, building on the Library’s earlier project which was funded by a grant from JISC. Their plans are to digitise up to 40 million pages from the BL’s collection over the next ten years (they’re currently up to around 3 million).
Regular readers will have appreciated that although I’m sometimes critical of services and institutions in these posts, I do try to temper my words to ensure that they’re not (too) offensive. So it was that I took notice of this article that reported that a blogger was liable for a fine of $2.5 M - because she could not claim the sort of defence that’s available to journalists. Many places would protect bloggers from this sort of penalty, but quite a few don’t. As we know that blogs can be read anywhere, there’s plenty of scope for jurisdiction shopping.
ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - has a knack for getting people offside, so you’d think that they’d handle their communications deftly. You see, they have a habit (much to be applauded) of going all over the place and having their meetings in various cities - often in the developing world. Well a couple of months ago, the meeting was in Senegal and it seems that the standard of one of the hotels was not very good - even after an advance party had put the hotel management on alert. Many of the meeting attendees had objected to rats and filth and lack of working facilities, so ICANN’s head of communications wrote to various Senegalese officials complaining about it. And, as they do with official communication, ICANN posted the letter on their website - and then quickly took it down, but not so quickly that alert readers didn’t have time to take a copy. Red faces ensued.
I wonder when people will realise that it’s very hard to keep secrets like that. There’s a lot being written about how to handle communication with your stakeholders in Web 2.0; it looks like Web 1.0 has just as many traps.
I recall the time when I was working at the National Library and we decided to convert the card catalogue to an electronic form. It was a big job - and a courageous one in hindsight - but we were fortunate in being small enough to achieve it. I was thinking about this the other day when listening to a marvellous presentation by Dr Eef Overgaauw on the history of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. He was asked about the progress they were making in digitising their manuscripts collection and he answered by outlining the scope of its card catalogue - much of which is still handwritten. It will be many years, it seems, until the whole catalogue is online. And then they can start on the collection itself.
The move towards an online database is also one of the early topics in the Library of Congress’s new blog on copyright digitisation, noting that their aim is to one day have a complete database of their 70 million historical records. It won’t happen overnight.