 Monday, September 27, 2004
Recognizing A Few New Patterns (emphasis below is mine)
"Today, for example, I received my weekly briefing from Outsell, a company that consults and publishes extensively about trends in the information content industry. Two items caught my eye. First, the briefing quoted a story in The Guardian that says Google is negotiating a revenue sharing agreement with Reed-Elsevier as part of Google's plans to create a premium content service. Reed-Elsevier would allow Google to index its proprietary material, and in return would receive a small royalty each time a Google user clicked through to Reed content. You don't have to be Jerry Fletcher to see this as another example of disaggregation, and, in theory at least, a way around libraries. Miriam Nesbit of ALA's Washington Office is quoted in the 2004 Information Format Trends Report as saying, 'Sooner or later you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no going back.' (Incidentally, in the interest of full disclosure, Miriam's quote originally appeared in The New York Times on January 25, 2004.)
The other item was a description of a presentation by Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Mr. Rainie noted that young people tend to underreport their internet usage, because they don't even think of IM, e-mail, or other tasks as being manifestations of the internet. It's just part of their lives, aways on, always connected. Outsell concluded their all-too-short piece on his presentation by noting, 'The implication...is to focus on the user's tasks and processes, not on the medium or the container.' Hmm, sounds like a report I read recently!" [It's all good]
Because technology is only technology if you didn't grow up with it:
"Another problem with the net is that it’s still 'technology', and 'technology', as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is 'stuff that doesn't work yet.' We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for 'productivity.' " - Douglas Adams, 1999
And it turns out instant messaging (in particular) works really well for NetGens.
There's been some big OCLC news over the past few days:
Both pieces of news are ripe for discussion, but what I find most interesting is that OCLC isn't blogging about either of these stories. It's All Good has given OCLC "voice" for me and made names more concrete in my mind, but it's not that blog's purvue to highlight such big moves. I find it interesting that no one else at OCLC feels the need to give more of their backstory.
Even worse, there's nothing about either story on the Latest OCLC News Releases page on their site, so the RSS feed of which I was going to bemoan the lack wouldn't do any good anyway. I guess I'm just surprised that OCLC hasn't picked up on blogging and RSS in a bigger way. They could be the 500-pound-gorilla-like-Microsoft's-blogs of the library world, which would go a long way towards customer support, reputation, image, and flat-out communication.
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