Librarian of Fortune

Companies (not) going "green"

Call me jaded, but I'm getting hacked off at hotels' fake efforts at looking green when they're really just cheap. First it was the notes about "we care about the environment, please don't make us wash your towels", despite the fact that housekeeping replaces the towels regardless of what you do.

I'm at a Marriott now that has plastic glasses in the  bathroom, with a nice note saying that they're "made from corn, environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable." Let's look at each of those claims.

• First, keep in mind that a real GLASS would have required no environmental cost after the initial manufacture, besides being run in a dishwasher with 100 other glasses. And there are no transportation costs after the first shipment of glasses, as opposed to the trucking cost of an unending supply of disposable cups.

• Making a plastic cup from corn creates artificially high costs for corn. At a time when we're having food riots around the world, we're using corn to make disposable cups. Our generation will live in infamy.

• It's not environmentally sustainable when compared to a glass. And corn is, in fact, NOT an environmentally sustainable crop. It requires more fertilizer, pesticides and energy to produce than other crops. And, um, it's food, folks, at a time when many countries are losing their ability to feed themselves due to climate change.

• It's compostABLE, which is not to be confused with compostED. This cup will go into the general trash flow, which means it will wind up with all the other garbage, and will in all likelihood NOT compost but, rather, will be there for archeologists to discover.

Oh yeah. Instead of a regular coffee maker, with those little paper packets of coffee, this one uses PLASTIC cartridges of coffee, thus generating more material that will never break down. How green can you get here, Marriott?

Thank you. I feel much better now. And yes, I flew to Baltimore from Denver, so my carbon footprint to get here is 1,013 pounds of CO2. The irony is not lost on me.

right-brained search engines

I'll admit - I'm as left-brained as they come. Give me information in plain text, displayed in a nice linear format, and I'm happy. Search engines that display their results in a more visual format get me twitching.

That said, I've started to appreciate some of these visual search results. One of the latest ones to have emerged is Middlespot.com. The search results page has a narrow column on the left that has the list of hits, just like any other search engine. But the bulk of the page shows thumbnails of the retrieved pages, which makes it easy to skim over and make some snap judgments on the usefulness of the page based on its appearance. What's unusual about Middlespot is that it displays these thumbnails as images, and lets you copy these images to a "Workpad" you can share with others. Given that I do a lot of public speaking, and often have to create a bunch of screen shots of the sources I discuss, this is a really quick way of generating screen shots with a single mouse click.

Some of the other visually-oriented search engines that I've looked at include
Searchme, Snap Search and, to a certain extent, Exalead.

Our Role as Info Revolutionaries

I'm giving a presentation at the annual conference of the Special Libraries Association, on "The Next Information Revolution and Our Role as Revolutionaries."

I'm having a great time developing this workshop -- it's two hours long, so I'm thinking of things that I'd like to see people brainstorm about during the talk. Right now, my issues include:

• Due to abuse and spam, email has ceased to be used as a communication medium. How will you communication with your users? How will you get them on board?
• Your new CTO is enamored of podcasting and wikis. What are the four initiatives you will start that incorporate podcasting and wikis?
• Your company has just bought a Web 2.0 company full of Millennials. In writing a flier to promote the library to these new employees, what are the four bullet points you will use?
• Western Union is in the business of keeping families connected around the world. What business are special librarians in?
• You are asked to develop an RFP to outsource the library.  What would you NOT outsource? What’s the financial justification for that?

I'm really looking forward to this session!

<And insert gripe here that SLA is using "going green" as an excuse for not providing print copies of any presentations to conference attendees. Instead, they're making them available on a web site where people can print them out ahead of time and bring them to the conference. Unless  SLA members are printing stuff off on something other than, you know, paper, this seems like an excuse for being cheap rather than a true effort at going green. And yes, other associations I'm giving talks for are pulling the same stunt.>

Addictomatic - monitoring the live web

Marcy Phelps reminded me the other day about Addictomatic: Inhale the Web, yet another meta-search tool for news, multimedia, blogs, social bookmark sites, and other Web 2.0-ish resources.

It's a great place to start your search if you're looking for the latest buzz on a topic.

Addictomatic was created by David Pell, the guy behind Rollyo (an early version of customized search engines). I love his description as "the victim of internet overuse, a short attention span and a dwindling social life".

California Supreme Court decision

This, of course, completely falls under my blog category of "personal stuff".

The California Supreme Court just recognized that

"an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights."

Yes, that means that my sweetheart and I could get married, if we lived in California instead of Colorado, where our US Representative, Marilyn Musgrave, has led the fight for the execrable Federal Marriage Amendment, that attempted to amend the US Constitution to prevent same-sex marriage from somehow threatening straight people's marriages.

Maybe it's because I'm a 4th-generation Californian, but I'm much more excited about this decision than I was about the similar decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

The latest semantic search engine

Powerset has just launched. It's a search engine for Wikipedia that attempts to extract meaning out of the Wikipedia articles. I'm not convinced of its immediate usefulness, particularly given all the buzz it's gotten, but it's a cool application.

It works best when you aren't just looking for a particular Wikipedia article; for that, you can just use the site search within Wikipedia. It's more useful for subjects that span a number of articles, and for times when you want to quickly extract factual info (who, what, when, where) from a lengthy Wikipedia article.

So, for example, a search for Barack Obama turns up a moderately useful page with the basic facts (date of birth, names of family members) as well as links to all the Wikipeda articles that mention him.

Right below the basic facts is what are called Factz -- the most interesting part of this search engine. This is where the sense-making comes in. They are, according to the help file, "things" connected by a "relationship." So, for example, for Barack Obama we see:

attended:    seminary,  church, school, Occidental College, Islamic school

introduced:   Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007, Response Act, Pandemic Preparedness, Transparency Act, and Federal Funding Accountability

and so on.

An interesting feature is that, instead of showing the usual snippets of text for each search result, you can get full sentences from each retrieved article. And there's a cool "miniviewer" that lets you preview the full Wikipedia article without leaving the search results page. (Kind of like Snap.com in that regard)

One of the reason it works at all is that it's dealing with standardized content and predictable fields.

I'm not sure when it would be all that useful, but it's a cool example of what kind of sense-making is possible.

Yahoo Glue

My friend Susan Doran just pointed me to Yahoo Glue search, an interesting new beta search results page from Yahoo India.  In essence, it's an attempt to provide the same kind of universal / blended search results that Google does now, but it seems a lot more intelligent to me; particularly when you're looking for a topic that has deep content in specialized areas of the web.

In essence, Yahoo Glue splits out the real estate in its search results page to surface various kinds of content. In a search for nanotechnology, for example, there's a column along the left with traditional web search results, but the Wikipedia article on nanotech is featured front and center, as are several HowStuffWorks articles (HSW is, in my opinion, crack for geeks like me), images, articles from Yahoo News, and blog entries (from Google Blog Search, interestingly). Depending on the query, you'd also see links to videos, LastFM, YouTube, WebMD, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Maps, Flickr, etc.

Datawocky has a very good write-up of Yahoo Glue:

The Web today is a far different place from what it was when Google's search paradigm was invented. The web was then a collection of documents; it is now a collection of applications. Applications such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Yelp. Each application has its own deep collection of data, and we tend to think of them as being different information types rather than just "web pages". Yet the search model flattens each of these rich interactive services into a collection of web pages that can be indexed -- that's really putting very new wine in a very old bottle.