Just a quick note to let you know that I've been experiencing some email problems at home for the last week or so. I think I've finally gotten things straightened out, so I'll start responding to the backlog soon. Thanks for your patience!

It's interesting to see the inroads blogs are making in the outside world. So far we've seen official (meaning "official press") but temporary blogs for the Columbia Disaster, The Snowstorm of the Century (anybody have the link handy - I can't find it), and now the Rhode Island Nightclub Fire. Throw in movie bloggers and moblogging getting some press before there's even a tipping point of audio bloggers, and we've got us some real momentum here.

Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

"So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?

One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 gigabytes left over.

To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you’ll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of Congresses on your petabyte drive.

Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.

And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.

What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 gigabytes free on your disk.

The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 years of video....

Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.

Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means of organizing information--is priceless.

The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson’s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.

But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don’t double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can’t keep up." [Mercola.com, via LibraryPlanet.com]

"First, in the example here, the question isn't so much how do you make these workers into knowledge workers. They already are. The question is why don't they view themselves as knowledge workers and does that matter?

I tried the following rules of thumb in a speech I gave last year. I figured you were a knowledge worker if:

• 80% of your job is doing things that 'aren't your job'
• 'It's not my job' is no longer an acceptable excuse
• Your mother doesn't understand what you do
• Your boss doesn't understand what you do
• You don't understand what you do

Flip, but there's some essential truth buried here as well. Robert Reich talks about knowledge workers as "symbolic analysts," which I find marginally helpful at best. At the moment, Peter Drucker has the most useful take on the problem I have found. I tried to capture some of his insight in a recent post I made on knowledge work and productivity....

We all do knowledge work. For some of us, it's virtually all we do. For others, it's a small component. Knowledge work is different mostly because the end products are defined in the doing, not in advance. That demands that we learn how to think about and be mindful of the work as we do it. That runs counter to what we are trained and socialized to do and that makes everyone uncomfortable. After years of getting credit for the answers, we need to learn how to craft better questions first." [McGee's Musings]

When it comes time to stand up in front of our staff and explain where we're heading, I think I've found my introduction to why I'm taking blogging to all levels of my organization.  :-)

"Tarot cards made of pictures of lego people. The Empress is a librarian. [thanks vicky]" [librarian.net]

I just got off the phone with Ray Matthews from the Utah State Library Division. You may recall that the USLD is doing wonderful things with RSS, especially in relation to their Government Information Locator Service (GILS) project. I am ecstatic to announce that Ray will be attending the 5th Annual State GILS Conference in April in nearby Lisle, IL, in order to speak about RSS! We both hope this will be an RSS wake-up call for libraries and government agencies and that it will help put us reach a tipping point.

Ray and I will be giving an hour-long presentation, although he will be doing the heavy lifting since he has all of the practical experience. I'm pretty sure we'll post the presentation online afterwards. What I'd really like to see is the RSS-ification of all library and government news (for starters), plus the creation of a news aggregator that can be branded by each individual library. The library would give away the software (or access to a web site), hand-pick a set of default, localized feeds, and then promote the aggregator to its residents while working with local government to RSS-ify the whole town! Ray and I both think NewsMonster has potential for this type of application since it claims to handle news sites that don't provide their own RSS feeds, but neither of us has had a chance to play with it yet. If nothing suitable has developed by August, I'd like to apply for grant funds to create such a beast (along with the bookmarklets + OPAC search toolbar). Then Art could add in support for virtual reference!

This GILS presentation is a good first step, though. Thanks for doing this, Ray!

Update: And I think I've found a great link to help illustrate our point. The Official site for the Office of the Governor of the State of Texas provides an RSS feed for its press releases, orange XML button and all! [via TVC Alert]

"Tying in with the forthcoming Matrix sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, Samsung is coming out with a Matrix-themed cellphone. Like the sequel itself, Samsung is keeping the phone shrouded in mystery, and so far hasn't released any info about the phone or when or where it might be sold. If the phone is a hit (and there isn't much doubt that the film will be), expect many more cellphones to have some sort of movie tie-in." [Gizmodo]

Update: More on The Matrix Phone. [also via Gizmodo]