I was reminded of that threat very keenly today, after I saw this article from Read Write Web: Google Adds Semantic Search Results with Google Squared.

According to the company’s blog from one year ago today, when Google Squared first launched, “unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.”

…

By clicking “show sources” on the Squared-provided result, a list of sources appears showing you how Google is arriving at this answer.

…

Much of this information, however, relies either on Google’s ability to naturally parse information or for web publishers to begin “adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface”, as the company wrote at launch last year.

This is really quite fantastic for information-seekers. We’ve been heading this way for a while, and I’m happy to see this rolled out on this scale. For most users, they won’t even notice it, but for those of us whose business it is to provide content, what does it mean for us?

First, it means is that we’ve really got to get our collective acts together. When I was writing my master’s thesis four years ago, I posited that soon we would have our collections online and we would be able to move on from public access and onto public interpretation. Unfortunately, my timeline was wrong and many institutions are still at square one.

Looking collectively at the field, there are hundreds (or thousands) of collections, large and small, who still do not have collection information management systems, digital asset management systems, content management systems, SEO optimization, metadata standards, embedded metadata, or a combination of all of the above.  Why is this? Well, for the most part, museums, libraries, and archives are notoriously bad at adopting complex technologies unless significant pressure is applied either internally or externally. And when they do recognize the need, the persons responsible for advocating for adoption find themselves stuck trying to explain something intangible to a board of directors who are more interested in on-site programming and foot traffic. It is incredibly difficult at this time to show hard statistics about SEO increasing foot traffic or even online learning.

For example, here’s my institution, the Magnes’, most well-known work:

Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn (1856) by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim - Magnes Collection

I just performed a search for this piece, using a couple of different search terms. The first result in both image and web search (Google) was the page in Flickr. Second hit was to Wikipedia and then Wikimedia Commons. For the last two, the image had been scanned from a German text Magnes had licensed the image to. There was no link to Magnes, nor anything that suggested that the piece was in our collection. There were zero hits to our website or to our collections online (in my own defense, we’re overhauling our website for precisely this reason, embedding metadata into the images, and I have no control over database SEO right now!).

This isn’t limited to small, underfunded history museums. If you perform a web search for “starry night van gogh”, MoMA is the third hit. Not too bad, actually. But if you perform an image search, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is displayed prominently, but you won’t find MoMA as a source until the bottom of the second page.

Ok. So clearly we all need to do some work with optimizing both our sites and our images. However, those things are really hard for most museums. If I could wave a magic wand, there would be a product that does all of the following (vendors, are you listening? Take notes. DO THIS. We will give you our money!):

• Manages museum, library and archive information in one, federated database, including exhibitions, conservation, provenance, rights, location tracking, etc.
• Exports and imports into a variety of crosswalked metadata standards
• Utilizes controlled vocabularies and standards in order to facilitate pan-institutional linkages
• Serves as a robust digital asset management system, embedding the collection data into EXIF/IPTC/XML fields of the master asset and makes derivatives at will
• Displays collection assets online in a clean, flexible, attractive manner, utilizing sharing and embedding features, optimizing keywords and tagging, and having an available API for online visitors to use

The frustrating thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of systems that do most of this, but not all of them. Institutions who can do this use a variety of systems, bandaged together with bits of programming. Granted, I’m not a programmer, but I know such a system is possible. I’ve seen bits of it work together, but none all at once. Lacking such a system means that institutions can’t fully prepare their assets for the semantic web.

Archives and libraries are likely a bit better off, as they’ve applied easily-computer-readable XML standards to their already happily formatted data. But I have to wonder if the model for siloing data will be a benefit or a curse in the long run. Will these silos be flexible enough to engage with online users expecting to find information with only one or two search terms, in only one location? This leads me to my next point…

Second, we need to take a hard look at how we’re actively sharing our data and with whom. Search engines are not going to find all of our stuff, from us, if we release the assets online without some methods of bringing the user back to home base. Like the Oppenheim painting above, users finding assets online won’t know where its from, and thus, probably, won’t have the benefit of any additional research about the original works. Our authority is threatened because of this. Our ace in the hole is that we have the authentic object, but what happens if no one knows where the authentic object is?

I’m not at all suggesting that we limit our release of assets, but I am recommending that we slow down a moment and take stock. “Just get them online” isn’t good enough. It’s never really been good enough, only a start. Online assets mean very little if they lose their context. A digital file of a painting may be pretty, but without the information we can provide, its only function is ornamental.

The way we use the web is changing. The way the search engines are using the web is changing. We need to respond more quickly to changing search algorithms and use patterns, and we need to try to figure out some easier solutions for linking our data to the rest of the web. A cohesive, easy-to-use product would be a good start. We’re also siloed within our own institutions and consortiums, making connections with our friends while forgetting that we’re also part of the larger world. I fear for those of us who don’t get a handle on these problems soon; if we fail to do so, our role as respected educational resources becomes diminished, if only from lack of exposure.

From Reuters: “While pirate lovers worldwide pay homage to Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket by celebrating “International Talk Like a Pirate Day,” piracy is indeed no laughing matter, suffering a national economic fallout of $58 billion per year…”

Yaaaar.

(By the way, in case you were wondering, Google’s search page has indeed been translated into Pirate Talk.)

Anyway, someone didn’t fall asleep before reaching Section 11 and noticed that it stated that the user gave Google rights to any content “submitted, posted or displayed on or through” the Chrome browser. There was a petite scandale on the blogs and Google, to their credit, immediately fixed the oversite. Their apology and explanation is on the Official Google blog.

As anyone who has to read — or worse, write — licenses for a living knows, the cut-and-paste function was created solely to preserve one’s sanity. I mean, when someone builds a new car, they don’t invent the wheel all over again. So, as someone who has had to say “oops” and do a re-write, I’m kinda sympathetic. On the other hand, I don’t make what Google employees make, and I certainly don’t get free espresso, sushi, video games, and a yoga corner in which to get in touch with my inner self. Or whatever they still get in these hard times. So if I slip up, it’s obviously for lack of yoga, not for lack of attention to the task.

But the point is, this event creates an opportunity to ponder that existential question, who owns what online? Read Google’s explanation carefully. “This section is included because, under copyright law, Google needs what’s called a “license” to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog’s content.” Likewise, to post to this blog, I need to give WordPress a license to transmit my scintillatingly original / crashingly boring scribblings. It’s like giving a publisher rights to publish your writing, except that a publishing contract almost always has a date somewhere out there in the future on which the rights will revert to the author. On the web, it’s …forever?

Now, think about Facebook. Same thing. Feeling uncomfortable yet?

Every two years our organization holds a summer workshop for educators. In our case, these tend to be excellent educators, but not necessarily web-savvy or technologically driven people. Two years ago, in fact, there was nothing in the curriculum that dealt with the web, despite the fact that we are a web-only archive. We created a special website to support the group, who found it too much trouble to use. (Note to self: creating websites with unique logins that will be visited at infrequent intervals is unlikely to work. Who remembers the URL, login, or password? Who wants to be responsible for remembering it?)

We decided that this group would have more web experience up front.

This year, there will be several sessions in which the workshop participants roam our site, getting a feel for what is there, what it looks like, and building up some hand/brain memory.

So, when the workshop presenters rolled the agenda past us this week, they felt like they had made some good progress. Heck, there was even a Facebook group to support the event and group.

"Well, wait," someone offered. "Shouldn’t they be saving their bookmarks on del.icio.us so that they can find them afterwards?" A short discussion about teaching people to use del.icio.us was ended when one of our least tech savvy managers said, "well, it only took me about three minutes! Sheesh!" We subsequently found and passed around the three minute video from common craft about del.icio.us and agreed to use it to help introduce social bookmarking and del.icio.us .

Further discussion raised the question of how participants would find photos and podcasts of the event, and there was a short round of preparation after the walkthrough, uploading a first image onto flickr, and bookmarking some first links on del.icio.us. If we do some video podcasts, as we intend, they will be on both flickr and youtube. The tag, designed for all services, is "jwaeducators2008". Check it out next month and see what’s online!

Events aren’t trapped inside individual people’s memories and accumulated paper, any more. We can stay connected more easily, continue to share more easily, and it doesn’t involve a heap of programming, either. We’re not an entirely web 2.0 organization yet, but I guess we’re making progress.

Now, if we can just figure out this Semantic Web stuff and catch up to the next wave….

There has been some discussion before about government crackdown of these sorts of virtual worlds. Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, have modified their rules to disallow gambling (so that they don’t run afoul of US gambling laws – even though those laws may not apply to SL). The IRS has made some rumblings about the monetary transactions occurring in SL and the eBay transactions of World of Warcraft players. They argue that these transactions should be taxable income.

After the past 7 years, reports such as these make me uneasy – not just for my own personal liberties, but also for the potential uses by educators for such platforms. With the current Administration’s bias against certain types of educational content (e.g. evolution, nude statues), with our work be subject to that same bias? Will our open discussions about the sciences and art and the democratization of access to assets suddenly be called into question? Will my museum, which has a great collection of Jewish Middle Eastern objects, be under scrutiny for displaying representations of these artworks?

It may be far-fetched to think so, but I have to admit to being a bit gun-shy these days. Things I never expected to happen have happened. And I don’t know what the rules are anymore, if by accidentally flying over a certain area in a world will subject me and anyone else I know to increased scrutiny. It’s worthwhile to keep these things in mind, even though it might be uncomfortable to do so.

PDF to the Reynard Project proposal

another article from the Washington Post from February

a perspective in favor of the proposal, but the comments are worth a read, too

“…looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That’s the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000).”

As the article states, “…avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem. They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.”

Worth a read.

Short review: Yes. yes they are.

(more photos from AAM on my Flickr page)

I listen to BBC online a lot, mainly to counter the abuse of the Queen’s English that constantly bombards me in Sunny California – the abuse of the word “like”, my daughters included, is a particular affront.

I like listening to Sir Tim, because he tends to shy away from the media, but also because I have this enormous feeling of sympathy for him – he should be the richest man on the planet given what he did. He’s up there with those two guys who invented the first spreadsheet and forgot to patent it.

Sir Tim is the creator of a very cool map which describes the internet and the web: where it comes from and where its going to. Tributaries from earlier concepts like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu and global identifiers like phone numbers, flow into the World Wide Web lake. Standards and protocols are included and today’s big players are there: Microsoft and Google and also the Tor of Cism in the Wasted Arid Lands which includes areas such as Patent Peaks and Proprietary Pass. Tor of Cism is apparently an anagram of Microsoft, so its mentioned twice. Checkout the Quagmire of ISP Discrimination and the Censorship Swamp, and everything flows into the Sea of Interoperability, so it looks like we’re on the road to nowhere.

Listen to the Queen’s English at I Wish I’d Thought Of That
Study the map at w3.org

More information about the project is available via OKAPI blog

Remixing Catalhoyuk Day
10am to 6pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8)
November 28, 2007
Location: Okapi Island

Join us for Remixing Catalhoyuk Day, a public program sponsored by OKAPI and the Berkeley Archaeologists at Catalhoyuk. Visit OKAPI Island in the 3-D virtual environment of Second Life and explore the past and present of Catalhoyuk, a 9000-year-old village located in present-day Turkey. OKAPI Island features virtual reconstructions of the excavation site and multimedia exhibits of research data. The Island was constructed by a team of undegraduate research apprentices during the Spring and Fall 2007 semester. The Remixing Catalhoyuk program includes lectures, guided tours, games, and much more. Mark your calendars!

Remixing Çatalhöyük Day Activities

(10-10:30 AM, 3-3:30 PM PST)
Guided Tours of OKAPI Island. Tours will be conducted by Ruth Tringham (Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, and Principal Investigator of Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük) and the Remixing Çatalhöyük team.

(1 – 2 PM PST)
Lecture: “Cultural Heritage Interpretive Videowalks: Moving Through Present Past Places Physically and Virtually” Presented by Ruth Tringham to the UC Berkeley Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium and simulcast in Second Life.

(2 – 4 PM PST)
Turkish Music Mix. Visit OKAPI Island, learn about Çatalhöyük and build your own remixes in the OKAPI Island Sandbox while listening to DJ (and UCB Anthro grad) Burcu’s eclectic mix of classical and contemporary Turkish music.

(4-5 PM PST)
Remixing Çatalhöyük Video Festival. Nine video producers will share videos about Çatalhöyük. The Video Festival will be hosted by VJ (and UCB Anthro grad) Colleen Morgan.

(5 – 5:30 PM PST)
Remix Competition. The public is invited to use the OKAPI Island Sandbox or Graffiti Cube to build and share reconstructions of Catalhoyuk or “remixes” of archaeological research data. At 5pm PST, the Berkeley Archaeologists at Catalhoyuk team will review and select top entries for virtual awards and exhibition on OKAPI Island.

Museums have been exploring the use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) for more than a decade. This session will present an overview of the nature, diversity, and evolution of museums and museum-like activities in Second Life (SL). The panelists, representing both researchers and developers in SL, will draw upon their experiences and expertise to explain how museums can use SL to expand their online offerings into 3-D MUVEs. Using detailed examples and illustrations, this session will serve as a guide for museum professionals interested in establishing a virtual presence for their museums in Second Life.

See you in Chicago!