Hidden Peanuts

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Colorwar on Twitter lately. The most recent event is a scavenger hunt run in Google Street View. GSV is made up of pictures taken from a car driving around various cities, and you can pretend you’re driving around as well. It comes in handy for getting a view of what a storefront looks like before going there, and similar simple tasks. But it also inadvertently captured people on the street and random events around town. Finding some of these events has been a real challenge for the scavenger hunt. For example, we needed to find a crossing guard. The presence of one relies on sheer chance that school was getting out just as a GSV truck drove by. Pretty slim odds, really. But there is absolutely no way to search for something like this other than simply checking every school in existence.

Some third party sites have stepped in and tried to fill that gap a little. Google Street View Gallery allows users to post links to specific images, which they can then tag. The tags and descriptions are then searchable. This system is handy, but still relies on a user randomly stumbling across something, thinking it is interesting, and then taking the effort to post it to the gallery with an adequate description. A very long chain of events, and something most people won’t deal with.

Google Street View represents a massive database of public images. All privacy issues aside, I would love for Google to test out some kind of image-recognition search in it. That would reveal a huge wealth of usable data. Or, with Google Maps’ APIs, maybe it’s possible for someone else to work on this. I don’t know.

But what I do know for sure is that we’ll only see more massive chunks of image data as time goes by. There will simply be too much for human eyes and minds to process - organizing it all will be a big challenge, and not something I’ve heard a lot about currently. I expect development in this area to explode in the near future.

I am still a bit on the fence about Twitter. It has given birth to moments of profound productivity, but also moments of profound time wasting. But either way, one of my favorite things to come out of the service is Zefrank’s Colorwar 2008.

Colorwar is a series of decentralized team games, played via twitter. Some are synchronous, like Bingo called via a Twitter account. Others are asynchronous, like the current YoungMeNowMe challenge - recreate a childhood picture of yourself, then put the two side by side. The best submissions will get prizes.

Sometimes points are awarded by winning (as in Bingo), and other times just for participation. This setup breeds a great mix of competition and camaraderie. My team is the somewhat oddly named GoTeamPants, and we’re in second place right now!

And here’s my YoungMeNowMe submission:

I’m not entirely happy with it, but I still had a blast putting it together. This was the only young picture of myself that I had on hand.

About two months ago, my friend Dave and I noticed that we have a lot of opinions. And, naturally, these opinions should be shared with the world. What better way to do this than a podcast?

http://www.WeLikeStuff.net

We’ve spent time since then ironing out a number of technical kinks, and are finally at a place where we feel comfortable going public beyond a few friends who have provided very valuable feedback. We’re averaging an episode every two weeks or so, which I’m sort of impressed with myself about.

We settled on a generic title that won’t lock us into any one genre or format: We Like Stuff. Mostly we review things. Books, video games, movies, random tech stuff, etc. Whatever stuff we happen to be liking.

If you’d like to subscribe, the podcast’s RSS feed is here. Or our iTunes link (which doesn’t seem to have picked up the new episode yet, but should soon) is here.

I’m having a really good time doing this, and it feels great to be creating something. Extra special thanks go out to my co-conspirator Dave, whose audio editing and general Garageband wizardry has been indispensable.

I sort of miss my picture a day projects, even if I did run out of steam near the end. With the news that Flickr now supports video, I’ve decided to post a video clip of something every day for a month. Could be just a couple of seconds, or maybe the full 90 second limit. Who knows? This will include a week at the beach, so there should at least be some nice scenery involved. Here it is: Month ‘o Video 1

Now I just wish I had a real video camera… all of these will be taken with my trusty Canon A520.

Today’s entry:

Ever wondered what The Final Countdown would sound like as a soundtrack for an NES game? Yeah, I didn’t either. But my keyboard has the right soundset, so I couldn’t resist.

-I’ve been playing with Twitter recently: http://twitter.com/HiddenPeanuts

In addition to just being plain old fun, twitter has been more useful than I expected; I’ve managed to get help with some issues at work very quickly. But even so, I’m fast approaching my limit on how many people I can mentally follow there. There’s a fine line between keeping Twitter a productive tool and letting it become a time waster.

-I’ve got an account listing all my books at GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/901545?view=main

I think I like Librarything better overall, but: Goodreads has the advantage of being better designed to accomodate books you’re reading but don’t own.

-Netvibes, my homepage/RSS reader for the last couple of years, has had too many stability issues lately. Today I took the plunge and dove into Google Reader. I’m pretty happy so far.

-Lastly, on a fun note: the ARG/viral marketing/game promoting this summer’s Batman movie is a lot of fun. Currently, Harvey Dent (he who eventually becomes Two Face) has a site up for his election campaign: http://www.ibelieveinharveydent.com/

And, a random question: Does anybody have experience building iGoogle gadgets? I’m interested in stories dealing with library applications in particular. I’m going to be putting a lot of time into them at work, and would love to have someone to bounce ideas off.

I’ve completed a long, LONG overdue Wordpress upgrade. As a result, most of my customizations no longer work… I’ll get around to making the site pretty again someday soon, but for now it’ll be stuck on the default theme.

(But I’m guessing most people read via RSS anyway)

I’ve come to the realization recently that there is such a thing as too much choice. It is easily possible for too many options to be available. Consumer electronics, web services & protocols, even simple reading material can all fall victim to a sort of tyranny of alternatives. Modern technology has opened a lot of doors, and I find that if I don’t shut a few then I never get anything done.

One example is Sony’s Playstation 3. Back in the earlier days of video gaming, choice really didn’t play a big role. You picked from a small circle of competitors (Nintendo, Sony, Atari, etc), bought their console, set it up, and played their games. Today it is not nearly so simple. The PS3 has had five different hardware configurations so far, each with distinct plusses and minuses. Hard drive sizes differ. The number of USB and card reader ports differ. Wi-fi access differs. Even backwards compatibility with Playstation 2 games radically differs: Some variations can play no PS2 games at all, others can play most PS2 games, and others yet can play almost all of them. To complicate matters even further, not all five configurations are still manufactured. Try explaining all this to the average consumer, someone who just wants a game machine to set up in their living room. But, at least all of these variations are functional. Microsoft has split the Xbox 360 into two very different camps - those that come with a hard drive, and those without. Sure, buying the version with no hard drive will save you about $70. But with no hard drive, you can’t save game progress. You can’t download anything from Xbox Live. Purchasing a memory card to offset this disadvantage, which is the cheapest storage option available, eats up $42 of what you saved. And the comparatively meager storage on it will run out very quickly. It’s a false choice really - the cheaper xbox is near worthless.

The issue of these choices also applies to flooded marketplaces. The rush to create web applications and protocols in the last few years has created a fractured marketplace. Users can only give attention to so many products and services; even the most worthy of new entries has a very real chance of going unnoticed in the mess. Wikipedia lists 17 separate IM protocols. A little over two years ago I tried using a new IM service, Meetro. Their main feature is the ability to see who is logged in physically near you. But nobody near me used it at all, so I quickly gave up and moved on. I wondered then, and I still wonder now: how can a new service break through the established choices and reach the critical mass of users necessary for success? As social applications grow, this question only becomes more and more relevant. The best social service in the world is useless without souls to populate it. The only solution I know of right now is effective marketing with a heavy dose of open standards, but of course that’s a very vague answer.

Meanwhile, I’ve hit complete overload on blogs and websites that I want to read. RSS feeds make pulling giant piles of content into one place possible. Unfortunately, the format does not also provide me with giant piles of time in order to read it all. Or even if I do spend what time I do have reading everything I want to, I’ve still lost serendipity. I don’t stumble across many things that I don’t even know I want to read. For me, magazines fill this gap. I really look forward to getting Wired in the mail every month. Having someone else choose what articles I’ll see for me feels oddly refreshing. Sure, I could replicate most of this experience with the magazine’s website. But I still can’t flip through the pages, quickly seeing what catches my eye.

These choices are harder to make than ever before, and I expect it to only get more complicated as we move forward. Recommendations from trusted peers becomes more and more relevant, even necessary. With so much raw information out there to process, we have to distribute it among social circles and be able to rely on what conclusion gets spit back out. That, or sacrifice needless and countless hours.

So, here’s my recommendations:

• Buy the 60gb PS3, if you can track one down. It’s not made anymore, but has the best mix of features. You can replace the hard drive with a larger one off the shelf if that becomes an issue later.
• Buy the Xbox 360 Elite. It’s the most expensive model, but has a much larger hard drive. Microsoft only allows proprietary hard drives, and upgrading to a larger one later is absurdly expensive.
• Subscribe to a few print magazines. I current get Wired, Newsweek, and Smart Money.

My supervisor, Pam Sessoms, has spent years building up the IM reference service throughout campus at UNC. Up until recently, we’ve been using a combination of a custom Pidgin client and Meebo widgets to make the system run. But recently we swapped out the Meebo widget for a custom javascript-based chat widget that Pam and her husband have coded up on their own.

It’s still pretty early in development, but I think their ‘libraryh3lp’ system is an amazing step forward. For one thing, javascript has a much higher compatibility rate than Meebo, which relies on flash. I even got it to work on my iPod touch’s browser! It is also much better from an accessibility point of view, and plays nicer with screen readers for the visually impaired. Also also, the service runs on a custom Jabber server which gives the library much more internal control than relying on a third party network.

Eventually routing and queueing functions will be added, steering the product much more toward library-based usefulness than any of the IM clients currently out there. I’m really excited to see where this goes!
Here’s the project wiki: http://libraryh3lp.com/wiki/Main_Page

And the Google Code page: http://code.google.com/p/libraryh3lp/

And lastly, you can sign up for an account and get your widget up and running with these instructions:
http://code.google.com/p/libraryh3lp/wiki/WebChat

Some of the most interesting conversations I had at Midwinter were about the need for libraries to understand the culture of a social networking website before trying to market services through it. Here’s a couple of great posts on the topic.

I’ve actually been meaning to post about this for a while. At my previous job, I experimented with creating a basic Facebook application that could search the catalog and a few other information silos. It worked great. Just one problem: nobody used it. Not one person installed the application who wasn’t staff or a student worker.

I didn’t take the culture of Facebook into account when creating that app. Why do people go to the site? Not to do scholarly research, that’s for sure. Or even if they did - why clutter up your profile with yet another application when it adds no value at all? Clicking to a similar search page on the library’s website was a far more convenient process than navigating through Facebook’s interface.

So let’s turn it around - instead of lamenting what students don’t like on Facebook, focus on what they do like. One simple response is that they love widgets. Little profile gadgets that show off some aspect of their personality or daily life. They also love updating status messages, telling the world a little about where they are or what they’re doing. So, why not combine these? Create an application which lets users pick a spot on the library floor plan and display that on their profile. “When I’m studying at the library you can find me here!” Students learn a little bit about the library’s layout while finding their spot, and the presence of the widget reminds their friends that the library exists.

Of course, I’d want to put a lot more thought into a project like this before going ahead with it. With social networking site endeavors, there is a fine line to walk. Some things are worth doing regardless of potential impact, just because they’re so simple. For example: Set up a Facebook Page for your library with a Meebo IM widget. (This has the added bonus of preventing someone else from setting up a Page with your library’s name…) That project would take about fifteen minutes for someone reasonably familiar with how Facebook is set up. Even if only one single person ever takes advantage of the service, it is probably still a worthwhile use of time. But I ultimately threw away a lot of time on my Facebook catalog search widget, an end product which has had absolutely zero impact.

We can’t just wade into the middle of a social networking site and proclaim we know what is best for it. I am extremely disturbed that some librarians are actively working to circumvent anti-spam measures in Facebook (as reported on the PLA Blog). This not only annoys users, but also runs the risk of getting the library booted off of Facebook entirely.

Different libraries can have very different user populations walking through their front doors, and libraries put a lot of effort into understanding those populations’ needs. Why should the online world be any different?

I wanted to post about this while the conference was ongoing, but couldn’t quite fit it in. Staffing the gaming booth kept me much busier than I expected. Along with Jenny Levine and Matt Roach, we demoed and instructed people on the games countless times and answered even more questions about them. And like Jenny mentioned, Nintendo and Sony are missing out big time by not exhibiting at these events. If I could have sold Wiis, Guitar Hero and DDR setups on commission all weekend I could take the rest of the year off - people were constantly asking to buy them from us.

But yes, it all went very well! Some people were a bit skeptical of the validity of gaming in a library setting, but I think we won most of them over after some conversations. And absolutely nobody was outright hostile to the idea, something that has changed dramatically in the last couple of years.

What really struck me was the diversity of people who played a round or two. We had young children of conference attendees, some retirees, and every age in between. Some were hardcore gamers, others completely new to the concept. Some conference center security guards even stopped by for a while, though we didn’t manage to convince them to play.

Being out in the registration hall this time instead of the crowded exhibit floor was a good move. We still had large crowds of passersby, but didn’t have to worry about annoying neighboring vendors. The same games (and probably more) will also be available to play at Annual in Anaheim this summer, so be sure to check it out!

We also got some great press on gaming in libraries from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, including an editorial by ALA President Loriene Roy and some video footage. I’m interviewed a bit in the latter, which is pretty cool but I always hate watching myself on video. I’m just glad they didn’t catch me playing DDR!