Hidden Peanuts

As I write this, Digg.com is out of service. Slashdot has a bit of info on the situation.

Digg built its brand as a site where users get to pick the top tech news stories, vote, and the leaders get posted on the front page. It’s been very popular, with a user base growing by leaps and bounds.

Earlier today, someone released a string of hexadecimal code online that enables decryption of HD-DVDs. This opens the door for widespread piracy of the films, in the same way that CDs and DVDs are affected now. Naturally, a number of tech-focused sites posted about this, and many were served takedown notices from the MPAA on the grounds that this code violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Digg administrators complied, and removed a story or two about the code from their site.

Users instantly rioted, and the site descended into mob rule. New story submissions were spammed with links and jokes involving the code, reposting it as many times as possible. The site became unusable for casual readers like myself, with absolutely nothing else getting highlighted. Digg admins eventually gave in, saying they wouldn’t take down any more code references. But that didn’t placate the angry users, and now the whole site is down.

I’m not going to go into the right or wrong of Digg giving in to the takedown notice or the original release of the cracked code. That issue aside, I’m still very bothered by this whole scenario. Digg was built on radical trust of users, and today they tore the site apart. There is a fine line to walk when giving average people access to such power. At an earlier date I would have pointed to Digg as a pretty good (but admittedly not perfect) example of this trust in action. But suddenly the site serves equally well as an example of mob rule horribly exploiting this trust. Users could have handled the controversy in a much more civil fashion and had a fascinating discussion of the issues with admins. But instead of sitting down and figuring out where to go from here, the groupthink mob instinct kicked in.

I’m not yet sure what lesson can be taken from all this or what point I’m making, but I do know I certainly need to think about it a lot more.

After almost four years with my last computer (A Dell Inspiron 5100 which held up remarkably well) I finally upgraded! I decided not to mess with success, and bought another Dell laptop - an E1505 this time.

Vista has taken some getting used to. The constant pestering about mundane security issues is really grating on me, for example. But overall I’m quite happy with my purchase. And while it’s probably a minor thing to focus on, I love that having Media Center built into Windows (combined with a USB tv tuner) lets me use the laptop as an HD DVR and stream the recorded shows to my TV via the Xbox 360. I’d been considering buying a Tivo or something similar lately, but really balked at paying yet another monthly subscription fee. Problem solved!

But my absolute favorite thing about this laptop compared to the old one? My computer’s fan no longer sounds like an airplane is buzzing my apartment every time I bring up a youtube video.

I meant to comment about this back when the article first appeared, but let it slip a bit. The Chronicle recently published an article called “Are Reference Desks Dying Out?”

Even with my limited experience working the desk (a bit over 18 months now), there’s a lot in the article I can immediately agree with. Our stats for questions answered are dropping, especially when you look at how many in depth questions are asked. Most that remain are simple yes/no answers, overhead issues like the location of the bathroom, or quick directions to where a certain source is on the shelf. There are still some questions that require full length reference interviews, but it isn’t uncommon for me to go a full desk shift without encountering one.

One place I don’t see this dropoff is in our virtual reference system. Right now we only accept questions via a web form or e-mail. I haven’t analyzed this mathematically, but I have no doubt that a much higher proportion of e-questions involve extensive research than their in-person counterparts. As frustrating as answering questions this way can be (for both librarians and the students), I find it interesting that students do prefer this method for asking in-depth questions. I think it’s mostly a matter of convenience.

An interesting side effect of accepting questions this way is that we tend to get questions from an entirely different set of users than we would otherwise. We were recently able to help a researcher in New Zealand get access to one of our special collections online, for example.

I don’t think the reference desk will completely disappear in our lifetimes. But like anything else, it won’t stay static either - the service is in transition.

Record label EMI just announced that they will sell their music through itunes without DRM! And at twice the sound quality of usual itunes songs! I am a bit disappointed that the DRM-free songs will be more expensive at $1.29, but still - this is huge!

Here’s the press release.

Here’s a list of EMI’s bands.

And here’s live coverage of the announcement.

I’m just glad this wasn’t announced on April 1st, as nobody would have believed it

The new Yahoo Pipes service is something I really want to like, but am pretty frustrated with right now.

The concept of the pipes service isn’t easily explainable. The best I can do is to say it provides an intuitive drag and drop interface for mashing up content from different sites. Ebay searches, flickr photos, rss feeds, etc. In theory, anyway.

I’ve spent the last couple days trying to put together a pipe that would merge all of my online presences into one RSS feed: posts from this site, my flickr photos, updates on what games I’ve played on my 360, etc, all sorted by date with the most recent item at the top. Not the most useful feed in the world to be sure, but it would be handy to be able to give it out to friends and family.

I can get to the step where I mash all the feeds together just fine. But the sorting algorithm does absolutely nothing. The resulting feed shows all my blog posts, then all the blog comments, then all the flickr photos, then all the 360 updates. The date isn’t taken into account for any of them, there’s no actual sorting and merging of the feeds done at all. All four of these feeds have the pubdate attribute in their raw code, so there should be no reason I can’t sort by it.

I think you can see my pipe here, if anybody wants to take a crack at telling me what I’m doing wrong: http://pipes.yahoo.com/people/ZulVVVA1oXWEOpI5loGw

I think there’s a lot of potential in the Pipes concept - lowering the technical barrier to entry on mashups would be a great thing. I just wish I could figure out how it works. Maybe the promised eventual tutorials will help.

I’m also really interested to see any useful library-related projects that have come from Pipes.

Forgive me, I can’t resist a bad pun. Translation: Week in Review.

A little over a week ago I stood in line very early on a cold rainy morning outside Circuit City, and managed to buy one of the thirteen Nintendo Wiis they got in stock that day. Now that I’ve had some serious playtime, here’s my impressions:

Put simply, I love this system. The novel motion sensitive controller works just as advertised - playing tennis feels like tennis, bowling like bowling, etc. Being able to point at the screen to select options makes it much easier to enter text and set options than on previous generations of controllers. The game it comes with, Wii Sports, is an excellent introduction to the Wii. It’s a package of five games: Bowling, Tennis, Boxing, Baseball, and Golf. I haven’t managed to figure out the right timing to hit the baseball reliably, but the other four all work just as advertised. Most game types even let you pass one or two controllers around among players, instead of having to buy more. Boxing is by far the most physically intensive of the five, and can be quite a workout depending on how much you allow yourself to get into it. The Wii controller can be used with multiple intensities - a flick of the wrist, for example, will return a serve just as well as a full arm swing. It’s up to you how you want to play.

The interface of the Wii’s main menu is extremely well laid out. Finding options and starting programs is easy - there are freely downloadable ‘channels’ that let you browse the world’s weather or new by rotating a globe, and another that provides a basic version of the Opera web browser. The console also comes with the ‘Mii Channel’, which is where you design your cartoony avatar. This avatar then shows up in a number of games, primarily as your player in Wii Sports.

Games from previous generations of video game systems are also available to purchase and download (NES, SNES, N64, Sega Genesis, and Turbografix 16 games are all represented). I take a bit of an issue with Nintendo’s pricing on these games - A Super Nintendo game costs $8, and an N64 title is a whopping $10. I won’t buy very many games at these prices. But if they were cut in half, I could convince myself to make the smaller purchase more repeatedly. Logical? Maybe not, but that’s how I feel. As it is, I broke down and bought the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Even after all these years, I still feel surreal playing a Sega game on a Nintendo system. My 10 year old self would never have predicted this day.

Here’s a couple blurbs on the other games I’ve tried:

Rayman: Raving Rabbids

This collection of minigames is the best thing on the Wii so far. There’s something like 75 games available, usually lasting a minute or two to play. Each uses the controller in a novel way - a whack-a-mole style game, swinging a cow over your head before throwing it, and keeping rhythm using the controller like drumsticks are three that come to mind immediately. The single player game is relatively short-lived, but has a very entertaining bizarre sense of humor, and is necessary to unlock the games for multiplayer use anyway. And multiplayer games is where Rayman really shines. Anybody can pick up the controller and play almost instantly. The games are short enough to get everyone in a large group involved, yet still long enough to have some substance.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves

Another collection of minigames, but this time I wasn’t quite so impressed. WarioWare comes up with some more novel ways to use the controller (like holding it to your nose and manipulating an elephant’s trunk), but never really reaches the full potential that Rayman did. Each Wario game can be as short as less than one second, and usually only requires one quick movement of the controller. This makes some of the games frustratingly rely on what feels like blind luck to complete them successfully. It’s fun in the short term, but I managed to complete the single player mode in less than two hours of play over a weekend. Again, like Rayman there’s some extension of the game’s life in multiplayer modes, and WarioWare is definitely worth playing. But something didn’t click for me, and I’m glad I only rented it.

In the end, the success of minigame compilations like WarioWare and Rayman are also the Wii’s biggest weakness. Game developers are still figuring out how to work motion sensing elements into longer, story driven games. With the exception of Zelda (which I have not yet played), none of the attempts so far have been reviewed very well. But the innovation is there, and that’s the key factor. The potential is here, now games just have to follow through. Given time, I have faith that will happen.

The highest praise I have for the Wii is that it has me excited about finding a chance to play the newest version of Madden. Players hike and throw the football with semi-realistic motions, which has me intrigued. And I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a sports game. I think the last one I bought was for the Playstation 1. Nintendo’s plan to reach out to new groups of gamers just might work.

P.S. If anyone has a chance, give the Huntsville Circuit City some business. The manager on duty brought us a big bag of Sausage McMuffins while waiting outside in the rain at 7AM, just because she thought we looked hungry.

As December comes to a close, the web once again gets swarmed with “year’s best” or “most popular” lists. I’ll probably be writing my own annual wrapup post in the near future. Today and yesterday I spent some time looking at Google and Yahoo’s top ten search terms for the year:

Google’s “Top Searches in 2006″ (source):

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

Yahoo’s “Top 10 Overall Searches” (source):

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Shakira
4. Jessica Simpson
5. Paris Hilton
6. American Idol
7. Beyonce Knowles
8. Chris Brown
9. Pamela Anderson
10. Lindsay Lohan

Now, something obviously doesn’t add up here. There’s no way Google’s and Yahoo’s user bases can be that different.

I started looking into just how each search engine calculates and chooses their top results. Google somewhat vaguely states that “To compile these year-end lists and graphs, we reviewed a variety of the most popular search terms that people typed into Google.”

Looking for more specifics, I ran across this interview with a Google VP. It turns out that the top ten is not based on simple popularity. Instead, it is based on ranking the quickest gainers in popularity. This explains why Bebo is ranked higher than Myspace. As a newcomer relative to Myspace, Bebo had more room to grow. If searches for Bebo went from nothing to a huge level this year, that’s a larger change than Myspace going from an already huge to slightly more huge level. And if searches for pornography and other net vices have leveled off, they won’t make the list either no matter how huge their numbers are. The only terms censored from Google’s list are their own product names.

This computer-generated list contrasts sharply with Yahoo’s policy of heavily editing and paring down their list. Based on reading the FAQ about Yahoo’s ‘Buzz’ rankings, the ranking process seems to follow Google’s pretty closely - the list is based on the largest increase, not simple numbers of searches. What’s more revealing is the list of what’s left out: “Company names (such as Yahoo!), utilities and formats (email, MP3), and general terms (movies, downloads, football)…” This alone explains most of the differences between the two companies’ lists - seven of Google’s ten qualify as company names.

Also, “The editors’ goal is to list subjects that are interesting to the broadest possible audience.” It’s hard to be sure, but I’d imagine the real world interpretation of that statement means the focus is on the entertainment world and the listed celebrities.

So what’s really the most-used search term of the year? Of the two lists, I think Google comes closer to answering the question. But there’s a third option: While I couldn’t dig this deeply into AOL’s search rankings, as they provide no background to the selection process, their top ten list rings a little more true to me. ‘Weather’ is number one, and the rest of the list is mostly generic terms like ‘games’ or ‘lyrics’. Not everyone is a power user, after all. But again, how this list was chosen is a mystery. Ultimately, without access to annual raw data the ‘real’ number one term probably can’t be known.

And there are probably a million ways of defining how the ‘real’ one should be calculated anyway. These lists are still useful in trend spotting, just take them with a grain of salt.

Time magazine has decided that each of us is worthy of the Person of the Year award - thanks to the rise of user generated content on the web (and I am of course putting this on my resume :-)).

Read the full article here. I think the ending bit is particularly illuminating:

Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. […] This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.

By no means is this an all-inclusive list.

http://www.pat2pdf.org/ - This site lets you download a whole U.S. patent in one pdf file, as opposed to the official registry’s method of one page at a time. I made a couple of our researching faculty members really happy with this link.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/scout.php - See which of your Flickr photos have been featured on the Explore page. Four of my year in photos project made the cut! (On a related note, I’m going to revive that project for 2007)

This primer/guide has been invaluable as I start to think about getting an HDTV. So many acronyms and numbers! Unlike a lot of more technical tv choice guides, this one is anchored with a dose of reality.

Beth of LibGaming invited me to iLike, a social recommendation engine for iTunes. It takes up a bit more of my screen real estate than I’d like, but otherwise seems pretty useful so far.

I got an iPod Nano! (Just the 2gb version, that’s still far more music than I can listen to while running.) Combined with the Nike pedometer sport kit and an armband, it has completely changed the way I exercise. The online stat tracking and comparisons with friends is really addicting. Plus, I run outdoors more now that I can keep reasonably accurate track of how far I’ve gone. I may write more about this at some point.

Lastly, I recently got to try the Nintendo Wii at a store. Now I’m going to have to buy one. Even a simple driving game is addictive!

A little over a year ago, I ranted and raved against the Xbox 360. Well, I’ll admit I was wrong.

Yes, I finally broke down and bought one recently. Gamestop was offering trade-in bonus credit on the original Xboxen (my new favorite fake plural form of a word) that was simply too good to pass up. I happened to have an extra box sitting around from my experiments with creating Xbox Media Centers, so off it went!

One of my early complaints about the Xbox 360 when it was released last year was the lack of compelling games. Content is still king in the gaming arena. Now that there’s been time for developers to really take advantage of the 360’s offerings, there were simply too many good games to pass up. Dead Rising tipped the scale for me - who wouldn’t want to play an open world “sandbox” style game set in a mall full of zombies? Gears of War has the best cooperative online play I’ve ever seen, and Chromehounds is fun as well.

But I feel like the games themselves are almost tangential to my love of the 360. Microsoft’s killer app for the console is the online Xbox Live service. I can download game demos, video clips, etc, almost always for free. Even if I hadn’t bought a single game, I would still have hours of demos to play through. Then there’s games with online cooperative play. Fighting through a warzone with a friend at your side is always a fun experience. It can elevate even mediocre games to much higher status. And the interface holding all this together is an absolute joy. The menus are easy to navigate, and almost everything Just Works. Even potentially problematic features like video chat are seamless.

Starting next week, Microsoft will begin selling TV shows and movie rentals through Xbox Live. Some of the movie rentals will even be in HD! Now instead of buying an expensive HD-DVD player and movie, 360 owners can rent a movie in the same image quality for a reasonable price. Of course, I don’t have an HDTV to take advantage of this (yet). But I’m still excited about the possibilities.

I do still have a few complaints about some of the games for the 360. In many cases, developers have chosen to shrink text on the screen way down to unreadable font sizes. There is never any option to enlarge the text, which causes a lot of squinting and eye fatigue on anything but the largest televisions. There’s no reason I can tell for this shrinking to take place - there’s still plenty of screen real estate available. Another issue is that not all original Xbox games will work on the 360. I was able to keep an Xbox around to handle this issue, but not everyone has that luxury when upgrading.

In the end I never would have bought the Xbox 360 if I didn’t have friends to play the online games with. Sure I could play against random others, but frankly what many online gamers consider socially acceptable actions and language grates on me. Profanity and casual racism run wild. But I have a group of 15-20 friends I play with semi-regularly, and that makes all the difference. Some of the best times I’ve had on the console so far were simply playing a game of online Uno with three friends while video chatting.

It’s all about community. The Xbox 360 lets me connect with friends, and that’s by far the best feature.

(Plus, I didn’t have to camp out for a week and brave shortage-driven riots like the PS3 purchasers did!)