A cou­ple of years ago, my brother bought me a first gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle for my birth­day. At first I used it quite a bit, but then in 2009 I started read­ing a series of books I knew I’d want to high­light the heck out of and phys­i­cally share with oth­ers (Here Comes Every­body, Com­mu­nity, Groundswell, What Would Google Do, You Are Not a Gad­get, Switch, etc.), so I switched to print reading.

It wasn’t as con­scious a deci­sion as that sum­mary makes it sound. Both of us in the house wanted to read them, so buy­ing for the Kin­dle just wasn’t prac­ti­cal. All of a sud­den, months had gone by and I real­ized I hadn’t used the device in quite a while, so I pulled it back out. I was also feel­ing a pull to go back to using it because of Will Richardson’s post about kindle.amazon.com, explain­ing how I’d finally be able to get my high­lighted text out of an ebook.

One thing that post made me real­ize is how print has become a bar­rier to my blog­ging about books I’m read­ing because I don’t have time to tran­scribe the pas­sages I’d want to refer to in my writ­ing. And like oth­ers, I was wor­ried that buy­ing a book in Kin­dle for­mat meant I’d lose it if I ever stopped using that par­tic­u­lar device. Luck­ily, though, Ama­zon finally fig­ured out it needed to make its books software-based instead of hardware-dependent, so I feel like this is less of an issue now that Kin­dle books live on mul­ti­ple platforms.

I have 347 high­lights from “Hamlet’s Black­berry” that have auto­mat­i­cally been tran­scribed for me!

(Side note to pub­lish­ers and book­stores: you still need to move to a uni­ver­sal for­mat. This doesn’t let you off the hook for work­ing this out.)

This left one major bar­rier to a com­plete con­ver­sion to ebooks, one I thought I was still strug­gling with — the shar­ing. But when I read Clay Shirky’s book Cog­ni­tive Sur­plus and real­ized I’d have to man­u­ally type all of those inter­est­ing quotes… well, that’s when my per­sonal prac­ti­cal­ity started to tip the scale away from print towards elec­tronic. In fact, my desire to share those pas­sages widely has actu­ally trumped my tra­di­tional love of shar­ing phys­i­cal books locally.

This rev­e­la­tion astounded me. I knew my desire to share con­tent was the prime dri­ver of the for­mat I was choos­ing, but I didn’t real­ize how quickly it was shift­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion. I now want to share one-to-many, not one-to-one, and I just don’t have the time or resources to tran­scribe every­thing I want to share. It makes me sad to look at that long list of print books I’ve read over the past year that I likely won’t share here because I can’t copy and paste.

Around this same time, I real­ized I wanted to take a fic­tion break, and I knew exactly what I wanted to read — Ver­nor Vinge’s Rain­bows End — a book Eli Neiburger had rec­om­mended to me as the most real­is­tic pic­ture of libraries and infor­ma­tion in the future (boy was he right, but that’s a dis­cus­sion for another post). I’ve wanted to read it for quite a while, but I’ve been try­ing to move my fic­tion read­ing to ebooks, and this par­tic­u­lar title isn’t avail­able electronically.

I really needed that fic­tion break, though, so I broke down and bought the paper­back. I get in most of my read­ing on the train to and from work, and while hard­cov­ers aren’t exactly a con­ve­nient for­mat, this paper­back was even less so. It’s obvi­ously been a while since I’ve read a paper­back, because I found myself think­ing the for­mat was awk­ward and annoy­ing. If it had been a dif­fer­ent story, I might have even given up on it, but it made me real­ize this was likely my last such pur­chase. I might still buy a print book here and there for the pic­tures or for the tro­phy shelf, but I’m not sure what would make me buy a mass mar­ket paper­back again. (Appar­ently I’m not alone in this opin­ion.)

So I’m back to using my Kin­dle, remem­ber­ing what I loved so much about it at the begin­ning, to the point where I’ve even ordered a new third gen­er­a­tion ver­sion because I love the focused nature of a ded­i­cated ebook reader. That may change in the future, but for now I’m def­i­nitely a spe­cial­ist, enjoy­ing how the device lets me focus on read­ing with­out dis­trac­tions. (That first gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle can’t ever leave the fam­ily, because Cory Doc­torow was kind enough to sign it two years ago, so I’ll be keep­ing it for pretty much ever.)

How­ever, I’m also rec­og­niz­ing new ben­e­fits I hadn’t picked up on before. I’ve had a cou­ple of seri­ous bouts of insom­nia in my life, which I finally cured by read­ing like crazy until I fell asleep. The unfor­tu­nate side effect of this solu­tion was that I trained myself to fall asleep when read­ing books. The rhythm of the train doesn’t help either, and by the end of the week I’m so tired that I usu­ally drift off on the train ride home, regard­less of how much I enjoy the book itself.

Inter­est­ingly, though, I don’t fall asleep on the train quite as often with the Kin­dle, although it does still hap­pen. Appar­ently a book is a print book is an ebook to my brain, but elec­tronic ink seems to keep me awake a tiny bit bet­ter (but not too awake to be a prob­lem at night). I just fin­ished read­ing Hamlet’s Black­berry, and I found that I read more of it at a time because I stayed awake. I’m also read­ing faster on the Kin­dle than I was in print, which I don’t remem­ber notic­ing before. Finally, I tend to high­light more, know­ing that it will all be search­able in the end.

Of course, your mileage may vary, but I think I’ve finally crossed over to the ebook side. I’ll have to go to book­stores and the library just to touch new books for old time’s sake. Only time will tell if there’s a “fea­ture” of print books that can draw me back. My rea­sons for con­vert­ing are def­i­nitely an edge case, and I haven’t been a heavy user of print resources in libraries in quite some time, but I can’t help but won­der how this type of shift will affect libraries. I see more and more eread­ers on my com­mute every day.

Fol­low­ing up on last week’s post about how Face­book is chang­ing the mean­ing of “like” online, I’ve been notic­ing more dis­con­cert­ing behav­ior on Target’s Face­book page.

Until yes­ter­day, Tar­get hadn’t posted any­thing to its wall since July 26th. It wasn’t clear if they were build­ing a strat­egy inter­nally, but the new post makes it obvi­ous that they’ve decided to ride out the storm by ignor­ing it and let­ting their cus­tomers duke it out on their wall. The new post links to spe­cials for col­lege stu­dents and makes absolutely no ref­er­ence to the con­tro­versy. As of this morn­ing, there are 303 com­ments on that post and 367 peo­ple “like” it.

Tar­get clearly isn’t going to men­tion the issues, respond, or engage in a con­ver­sa­tion on Face­book. Inter­est­ing strat­egy, and we’ll see how it plays out. But as I’m watch­ing this case study develop, some themes are emerg­ing and rais­ing some prob­lem­atic flags.

As one might expect after what seems like an eter­nity online, the com­menters are no longer mostly peo­ple upset with Target’s actions. And pre­dictably, as seems to hap­pen with so many dis­cus­sions about pol­i­tics and homo­sex­u­al­ity, the dis­cus­sion is devolv­ing pretty quickly. Some users are flag­ging each other for bad behav­ior, just because they dis­agree with the person’s opin­ions. Some are insult­ing other com­menters, and the whole wall is becom­ing a ref­er­en­dum on a polit­i­cal issue. I haven’t read every com­ment, but I’m con­fi­dent Godwin’s Law is proven there somewhere.

None of this is new behav­ior to be sure, but has this hap­pened before on such a main­stream company’s page, espe­cially while the com­pany itself is ignor­ing it? The fact that it’s Tar­get makes for some inter­est­ing issues.

For exam­ple, if you read a sam­ple of the com­ments closely, you’ll find a poten­tially wor­ri­some infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy prob­lem. If you go back to the begin­ning of the com­ments thread on the August 12 post, there are some users whose entire com­ment con­sists of, “If you don’t like Tar­get, why do you ‘like’ this page?” or “If you don’t like Tar­get, why did you become a fan of them?”

It’s unclear to me whether these folks real­ize that users have to like the page in order to com­ment or if they’re just being snarky about it. Even though these folks had to “like” the page them­selves in order to leave their own ques­tion­ing com­ments, I’m lean­ing towards believ­ing that they truly don’t real­ize that “like” now means “com­ments enabled.” As David Lee King said on my pre­vi­ous post, “it looks like the ‘Like’ but­ton is really an entrance fee/ticket, or the ‘door’ to the event.…” But there’s a large group of peo­ple out there that don’t real­ize that “like” now has sub­text and is loaded with new mean­ings and require­ments. I worry that they truly don’t under­stand that the boy­cotters have no choice but to “like” Tar­get if they want to par­tic­i­pate in the discussion.

Other com­menters hon­estly can’t seem to under­stand why some­one who is upset with Tar­get would be post­ing on the company’s wall in the first place. It seems that there’s still a dis­con­nect between “a company’s web pres­ence” and an inter­ac­tive, com­mu­nity.” Heck, this is true even for Tar­get, which con­tin­ues to ignore the com­mu­nity and treat its page as a one-way announce­ment chan­nel. A lot of folks par­tic­i­pat­ing in this thread haven’t made the men­tal leap from “Just Tar­get” to “Tar­get + Oth­ers” as a new norm, even though they’re able to scratch their heads in the com­ments themselves.

Close read­ing of the threads also makes it clear that quite a few Tar­get fans didn’t know any­thing about the con­tro­versy until they vis­ited the Face­book page and saw the com­ments. This fur­ther con­firms the ongo­ing switch from a small num­ber of “offi­cial,” main­stream news sources to per­sonal news streams on social net­work­ing sites. More and more peo­ple are get­ting their news online from their net­works, not from news­cast­ers. (Inci­den­tally, if you need to make a case for why your library should be on Face­book, this is a pretty good rea­son — in order to be part of your users news stream.)

Over­all, there’s a lot going on here, and I encour­age you to keep tabs on Target’s page to see how it plays out. It can be dif­fi­cult to dip into the emerg­ing inci­vil­ity and dis­re­spect, but it’s edu­ca­tional, espe­cially for any orga­ni­za­tion that has a Face­book pres­ence. These types of cases are illus­trat­ing how the shift from us going out to find infor­ma­tion to it com­ing to us, fil­tered through our net­works, will have an impact on orga­ni­za­tions. They also expose a whole host of other issues, from infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy gaps to pri­vacy con­cerns. For exam­ple, I was going to erase the names of the com­menters in the screen­shots, but tech­ni­cally it’s all pub­lic infor­ma­tion, so why hide it? Do the peo­ple leav­ing rants and invec­tives on the Tar­get post/wall truly under­stand that those com­ments are com­pletely public?

On Face­book, 831 peo­ple “like” con­fu­sion, but I’m not sure any­one really likes it in the Tar­get context.

Sub­ti­tle: Or, Using Like to Tar­get Tar­get

If you’re watch­ing the Tar­get Face­book page right now, you’re see­ing another social media dis­as­ter on par with Nestle’s débâ­cle back in March. It’s like watch­ing a train wreck in slow motion, but it’s another great case study for us about what not to do online.

Hint: don’t set your page to show only your posts first and then aban­don it when con­tro­versy arises. If you’re not famil­iar with the cur­rent con­tro­versy, you can go here to read about Target’s dona­tion to a homo­pho­bic guber­na­to­r­ial can­di­date in Min­nesota. Be sure to click on “just oth­ers” on Target’s wall to see the angry, for­mer cus­tomers and porno­graphic spam.

I’m sure they’ve spent the last few days bring­ing in con­sul­tants to come up with a strat­egy for how to deal with this, but it’s sur­pris­ing that some­one hasn’t already said, “We need to at least post *some­thing* on our Face­book page and acknowl­edge what’s hap­pen­ing.” So far, Tar­get doesn’t seem to be learn­ing from oth­ers’ past mis­takes, so don’t fall into the same trap if this ever hap­pens to you.

I think that’s the biggest, imme­di­ate take­away for libraries and non­prof­its (well, for every­one, really), but per­son­ally I’m more fas­ci­nated right now by how peo­ple have been forced to give the term “like” dif­fer­ent mean­ings in dif­fer­ent con­texts because of the box Face­book has forced them into, which this sit­u­a­tion illus­trates so well.

We first saw this type of attempt to sub­vert the term “is” in Facebook’s early years. Long-time users remem­ber when your sta­tus update auto­mat­i­cally included the word “is” so you were forced to use adjec­tives, present pro­gres­sive tense, or future tense. Noth­ing could hap­pen in your past unless you were cre­ative in your use of lan­guage, which some peo­ple went out of their way to be. Oth­ers just started ignor­ing the “is” and writ­ing what­ever they wanted. You might also remem­ber the peti­tion many of us “signed” ask­ing Face­book to remove the “is.” It all seems so quaint now, but those two let­ters went from being a new way to describe our­selves to being too restric­tive pretty quickly.

Now we’re run­ning into another limit that the Face­book one-size-fits-all box forces on us — “like.” We’ve all seen, and maybe even writ­ten, “dis­like” on a friend’s sta­tus update when they say they have a cold or some­thing bad has hap­pened. And yet we still go ahead and click on “like” in order to sig­nify some type of sol­i­dar­ity, even though the term is wholly inac­cu­rate. Some­times we specif­i­cally go out of our way to add a com­ment “I don’t really ‘like’ this” or “lik­ing even though I don’t like.” But we don’t really have any other options, do we?

And even though Mark Zucker­berg has said Face­book might some­day add a “dis­like” but­ton (which it won’t out of fear users’ “dis­like” of com­pa­nies will drive adver­tis­ers away), that wouldn’t really cover it, would it? My range of emo­tions doesn’t run the gamut from A to B, but instead includes a mil­lion shades of grey in between, just as I don’t always talk solely in the present pro­gres­sive tense.

So when an issue like the Tar­get con­tro­versy comes up and I want to leave a com­ment on Target’s wall say­ing I’m now boy­cotting them and why, I have to first “like” Tar­get in order to leave that com­ment. Talk about cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance. I can then add my thoughts and if I want to show sup­port for other pro­test­ers, I can “like” their com­ments, which I do (some more than oth­ers), but “like” prob­a­bly isn’t the word I would have cho­sen given my shades of grey.

The only sat­is­fac­tion I can really get is when I leave my com­ment and then “unlike” Tar­get, but *that* update doesn’t get posted to my wall — only the “like” does.

“I do not think that word means what you think it means”

I recently read Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gad­get, which for the most part I loved. I wrote a lit­tle about Lanier’s take on the future of author­ship, but it also made me think about the way web­sites force our life­size selves into one-size-fits-all tem­plates. (Sorry I can’t quote a rel­e­vant piece, but I’ve lent my copy out, so I don’t have it handy — a blog post for another day.) At least soft­ware like Word­Press lets blog­gers choose from a vari­ety of tem­plates and even edit them, but it made me glad that I’ve per­son­al­ized my own site to be truly unique, just like me.

How­ever, Face­book now has 500 mil­lion users, most of whom don’t have their own web­sites as a unique pres­ence for them­selves online. Instead, we have hun­dreds of mil­lions of aver­age users who all look the same and con­form to Facebook’s inter­face con­straints as their major rep­re­sen­ta­tion on the web. If it wasn’t for the pic­ture, it would be dif­fi­cult to tell one John Doe FB pro­file from another in Google’s search results.

The low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor used to be a yel­low page list­ing, but now it’s become Facebook’s pro­files. At least a Face­book user can per­son­al­ize the text in her pro­file, but we’re all stuck with “like.” That word is tak­ing on a lot more respon­si­bil­ity since we have to fig­ure out ways to use it to con­vey other mean­ings. How do we indi­cate when “like” means don’t like, favorite, book­mark, agree, dis­agree, sup­port, bum­mer, share, read this later, funny, and more?

Face­book even­tu­ally wised up and removed the “is,” but how will it route around adver­tis­ers to pro­vide the spec­trum beyond “like?” It’s box­ing itself, as well as us, into a cor­ner, which I def­i­nitely don’t like.

You remem­ber your first time, right? The moment you real­ized email was more than just cool? Or the web, or blog­ging, or Face­book, or cell­phones, or or or — take your pick. There’s always that moment where you real­ize that this shiny, new thing actu­ally has value for you, and that’s when you really buy into inte­grat­ing it into your life.

I’ve been using foursquare for a while and hav­ing fun with it, but my “aha” moment finally came last month on a trip to Wash­ing­ton D.C. Foursquare (and ser­vices like it) use GPS built-in to your smart­phone to locate you. They show you venues nearby and let you “check in” at a spe­cific one. Foursquare treats this like a game, and if you check in often enough at a spe­cific loca­tion (and more often than any­one else), you become “the mayor” until some­one else has more check-ins there than you do. Foursquare also allows busi­nesses to offer “spe­cials” to those check­ing in, such as dis­counts or free items. Other ser­vices, like Gowalla, BrightKite, and Loopt, mostly just show you where your friends are, which can be handy if you end up near each other and don’t know it. In gen­eral, you can also broad­cast your loca­tion on Twit­ter or Face­book, and some­time this year Face­book is sup­posed to imple­ment its own location-based check-in service.

Sure, it was fun when I was the orig­i­nal mayor of MPOW, and I got a glimpse of how use­ful a location-based ser­vice could be dur­ing ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing in Boston in Jan­u­ary, when I could see friends checked in at the con­ven­tion cen­ter or a nearby restau­rant. But let’s face it — it wasn’t dif­fi­cult to become the first mayor of ALA, and you expect to see spe­cific types of check­ins at a con­fer­ence. It’s really the unex­pected moments that result in a “whoa” or “aha.”

I had two of those on the D.C. trip. The first hap­pened when I checked in at the National Build­ing Museum and foursquare showed me that “Fiesta Asia Street Fair” was a nearby trend­ing place. This piqued my inter­est, so I looked it up on the web and found out it was actu­ally the National Asian Her­itage Fes­ti­val, which was hap­pen­ing just a few blocks away on Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue. I changed my plans, headed down there, and found music, food, ven­dors, and more. I had a great time, and I wouldn’t even have known about the Fes­ti­val if I hadn’t checked in on foursquare at the right time in the right-ish place.

I caught another glimpse of the power of infor­ma­tion plus loca­tion when we went to din­ner that night. I checked in at Rosa Mex­i­cano and got a lit­tle popup with his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion about where we were cour­tesy of The His­tory Chan­nel. I’d read about THC’s cam­paign using foursquare, but sur­pris­ingly I only ran into two fac­toids twice while in D.C. This first one noted we were at the spot where Samuel Morse opened the world’s first tele­graph office.

The sec­ond one popped up when I checked in at the National Por­trait Gallery. Unfor­tu­nately, we’re still at a point where “loca­tion” can be a lit­tle geographically-challenged, so even though I was pre­cise about where I was check­ing in, the fac­toid that dis­played was for the nearby Inter­na­tional Spy Museum. It was also worded in a way that implied the infor­ma­tion was about the Por­trait Gallery, which is unfor­tu­nate. It’s a good heads up that if you end up writ­ing these kinds of descrip­tions for a local his­tory tour or other ori­en­ta­tion to your town, be sure to be explicit in nam­ing places in the descrip­tion.

Still, it was pretty cool to have infor­ma­tion dis­played to me based on my loca­tion with very lit­tle effort on my part. And while I’m call­ing this my “foursquare moment,” it’s really my location-based ser­vices one. It could have hap­pened on any of them, although foursquare seems to have the most crit­i­cal mass (I very rarely have to enter a venue any­more) and the “trend­ing places” fea­ture has been unique for me so far.

That said, I’m very inter­ested in Gowalla’s trips fea­ture, which lets you cre­ate a tour or itin­er­ary for friends. I’m very intrigued by this, and I believe it could be a great oppor­tu­nity for libraries to offer local infor­ma­tion, but Gowalla didn’t click for me on this trip the way foursquare did. I did dual check­ins to both ser­vices, and while I think I picked up a cou­ple of ran­dom “items” on Gowalla, I also had to enter a cou­ple of venues myself, a sign that it doesn’t have the same adop­tion rate. I had hoped to find some good D.C. “trips” to con­sider fol­low­ing, but unfor­tu­nately the Gowalla app doesn’t show nearby trips, which sorely lim­its the util­ity of the ser­vice. Every time I checked nearby trips, I got the same list of national ones, even though the Wash­ing­ton Post recently cre­ated one specif­i­cally for D.C., as did National Geo­graphic.

I expect to see a lot more use of both ser­vices dur­ing ALA’s Annual Con­fer­ence in a few weeks. If you’re attend­ing, make a note of the Gowalla trips ahead of time, because you won’t find them serendip­i­tously via the app. If you’re using foursquare, help us make the con­fer­ence hotspots trend­ing places. And if you have a smart­phone and aren’t using either of these ser­vices, you might want to give them a try onsite to see if you have your own aha moment.

This has been one of those weeks in which every­thing I’m read­ing seems related and is click­ing for me. It’s got my mind churn­ing, and I’m still not sure what to think of it all.

The first is from Will Richard­son and is titled The End of Books (At Least, For Me?), a provoca­tive state­ment to be sure. Don’t panic — it’s not really about the end of books, just print books for his own use.

“Turns out my iPad Kin­dle app syncs up all of my high­lights and notes to my Ama­zon account. Who knew? When I finally got to the page Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every high­light and every note that I had taken on my Kin­dle ver­sion of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sud­den, by read­ing the book elec­tron­i­cally as opposed to in print, I now have:

• all of the most rel­e­vant, thought-provoking pas­sages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own con­densed ver­sion of just the best pieces
• all of my notes and reflec­tions attached to those indi­vid­ual notes
• the abil­ity to copy and paste all of those notes and high­lights into Ever­note which makes them search­able, editable, orga­ni­z­able, con­nectable and remixable
• the abil­ity to access my book notes and high­lights from any­where I have an Inter­net connection.

Game. Changer.

I keep think­ing, what if I had every note and high­light that I had ever taken in a paper book avail­able to search through, to con­nect with other sim­i­lar ideas from other books, to syn­the­size electronically?…”

Hon­estly, I didn’t know about this, either, and I’m now seri­ously con­sid­er­ing going back to read­ing non­fic­tion on my Kin­dle, some­thing I had stopped doing when I couldn’t get at my high­lights and free them. As far as I was con­cerned, they were bricked text. But I logged in at http://kindle.amazon.com and sure enough, there were the high­lights from the three non­fic­tion books I’d read on my Kindle.

On the one hand, this is incred­i­bly appeal­ing, to have all of the excerpts I’ve high­lighted as inter­est­ing to me acces­si­ble, search­able, and remix­able. Really appeal­ing, and the fact that I can now get text out of Kin­dle books makes it a plat­form I may be more will­ing to deal with again, although the inabil­ity to share a book with a friend is still caus­ing some hesitation.

As I began con­tem­plat­ing this, I read Steven Johnson’s recent post, The Glass Box and Com­mon­place Book. It really res­onated with me on a num­ber of lev­els. First, John­son revives the idea of the “com­mon­place book.”

“Schol­ars, ama­teur sci­en­tists, aspir­ing men of letters—just about any­one with intel­lec­tual ambi­tion in the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies was likely to keep a com­mon­place book. In its most cus­tom­ary form, ‘com­mon­plac­ing,’ as it was called, involved tran­scrib­ing inter­est­ing or inspi­ra­tional pas­sages from one’s read­ing, assem­bling a per­son­al­ized ency­clo­pe­dia of quo­ta­tions. It was a kind of soli­tary ver­sion of the orig­i­nal web logs: an archive of inter­est­ing tid­bits that one encoun­tered dur­ing one’s tex­tual browsing.”

He then goes on to talk about a major prob­lem with the iPad, the way it locks down text (includ­ing pub­lic domain works) in a way that pre­vents users from cre­at­ing their own com­mon­place books.

“[when you try to copy a para­graph of text] …you get the famil­iar iPhone-style clip­ping han­dles, and you get two options ‘High­light’ and’“Bookmark.’ But you can’t actu­ally copy the text, to paste it into your own pri­vate com­mon­place book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in ques­tion is Penguin’s edi­tion of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the pub­lic domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them.”

John­son then goes on to describe (in a much more artic­u­late way than I’ve been able to) what both­ers me so much about the iPhone and iPad.

“We can try to put a pro­tec­tive layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all bet­ter off when words are allowed to net­work with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trou­ble to build machines capa­ble of dis­play­ing dig­i­tal text if we can’t exploit the basic inter­ac­tiv­ity of that text?… Yes, the iPad makes it eas­ier to carry around a dozen books and mag­a­zines, but that’s not the only promise of the tech­nol­ogy. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forg­ing new links of asso­ci­a­tion, remix­ing them. We have all the tools at our dis­posal to cre­ate com­mon­place books that would astound Locke and Jef­fer­son. And yet we are, delib­er­ately, try­ing to crawl back into the glass box.

…When your dig­i­tal news feed doesn’t con­tain links, when it can­not be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a para­graph and paste it into another appli­ca­tion: when this hap­pens your news feed is not flawed or back­wards look­ing or frus­trat­ing. It is bro­ken.

The force that enables these unlikely encoun­ters between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent per­sua­sions, the force that makes the web a space of serendip­ity and dis­cov­ery, is pre­cisely the open, com­bi­na­to­r­ial, con­nec­tive nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic con­se­quences that are not to be taken lightly.”

And that’s a huge deal­breaker for me. Make no mis­take — apps are just soft­ware. I’m lucky enough to have the entire inter­net at my fin­ger­tips, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy an inter­face to it for which one com­pany con­trols what soft­ware I can use to access the great, big, beau­ti­ful web (in this case, Apple, but there are other prod­ucts with this same prob­lem). I don’t take that lightly at all, espe­cially when I read things like David Lankes’ bril­liant take on what net­worked text could be like. Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may not have the prob­lem with these closed sys­tems that I do (and it’s not just with Apple), but that’s my per­sonal value. John­son would fully sup­port Will Richardson’s right to cre­ate his com­mon­place book, as do I.

While syn­the­siz­ing my reac­tions to both of these posts, I started read­ing Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gad­get. I’m only a few chap­ters into it, but it’s already extend­ing how I think about Face­book (a sub­ject for another post) and the iPhone/iPad.

One of Lanier’s con­cerns is how deci­sions made in the design of our dig­i­tal tools lock us in to behav­iors that reduce — and even remove — our human­ity. For the ebook con­text, an alter­na­tive title for his book could have been “You Are Not an App.” It’s really tough to quote excerpts from the book with­out los­ing a lot of con­text and his sup­port­ing argu­ments, but the fol­low­ing excerpts are a glimpse.

“We shouldn’t seek to make the pack men­tal­ity as effi­cient as pos­si­ble. We should instead seek to inspire the phe­nom­e­non of indi­vid­ual intel­li­gence. (p.5)

Lock-in makes us for­get the lost free­doms we had in the dig­i­tal past. That can make it harder to see the free­doms we have in the dig­i­tal present. For­tu­nately, dif­fi­cult as it is, we can still try to change some expres­sions of phi­los­o­phy that are on the verge of becom­ing locked in place in the tools we use to under­stand one another and the world.” (p.14)

Lanier takes an oppo­site approach to where Richard­son is headed. Will is going to end up with Johnson’s com­mon­place book in dig­i­tal form, and that’s extremely appeal­ing to him. I totally under­stand why, and it’s great if that works well for him. How­ever, it’s inter­est­ing to read how Lanier wor­ries about this kind of future and the impact it will have on all of us and our very human­ity. What might we lose in the process of dig­i­tiz­ing every book and mak­ing the con­tent avail­able as unan­chored bytes?

“If the books in the cloud are accessed via user inter­faces that encour­age mashups of frag­ments that obscure the con­text and author­ship of each frag­ment, there will be only one book. (p.46)”

It’s not an argu­ment for a closed sys­tem, just bet­ter and more thought­ful options, inter­ac­tions, delin­eation of author­ship, etc., and I can’t dis­agree with that. What will the civic con­se­quences be of Richardson’s com­mon­place book (or mine, if I go down that path)? Can text be too net­worked? Are there any clues to this in how we cur­rently use our full text data­bases, where we’ve already dig­i­tized every bit and made it remixable?

Over­all, I don’t agree with 100% of any­thing any of these gen­tle­man have writ­ten (although I come pretty close with John­son). They’ve all con­tributed to a very thought-provoking week for me and I really appre­ci­ate that. I’m still try­ing to work through a lot of this in my own mind, and other than the fact that I’m against devices that lock me in to their vision of the inter­net, I’m still not sure where I really come down in this whole thing.

And what’s the sig­nif­i­cance for libraries? I’m not sure how much Will Richard­son uses libraries now, but what does it mean when he can net­work the text from his Kin­dle but his library can’t cir­cu­late any con­tent to it? That’s also a design deci­sion (made by pub­lish­ers) with very spe­cific civic consequences.

John­son ends his post by call­ing on jour­nal­ists, edu­ca­tors, pub­lish­ers, and soft­ware devel­op­ers to fight for com­mon places (not glass boxes) and con­nec­tions. What respon­si­bil­i­ties do libraries have to pre­vent the civic con­se­quences he describes? In the pages I’ve read so far, Lanier encour­ages devel­op­ers to think care­fully about the behav­iors their prod­ucts lock peo­ple into — does that include libraries? How can we help main­tain com­mon­place books in a world of dig­i­tal text while still main­tain­ing the edges of author­ship? Do we as librar­i­ans really want to pro­mote the iPad’s lock-in, espe­cially if we’re not explain­ing those civic con­se­quences to the next gen­er­a­tion of read­ers and con­tent generators?

At this point, I have a lot more ques­tions than answers.

I’m one of the many peo­ple who doesn’t like some of the recent changes to Facebook’s default pri­vacy set­tings, and I agree com­pletely with Anil Dash that if those defaults aren’t good enough for Mark Zucker­berg, then maybe they should be changed.

How­ever, I think I’ve dis­cov­ered a way to par­tic­i­pate on Face­book with my friends and still be com­pletely hid­den from the web, even more so than in the past, but I need your help to fig­ure out what’s going on.

A cou­ple of days ago, by pure chance I noticed that the pub­lic ver­sion of my Face­book pro­file had dis­ap­peared from Google’s search results com­pletely. If you’d searched for me in the past, you would have got­ten a link to my pub­lic pro­file, which dis­played my name, pic­ture, friends list, some groups I belong to, and (I think) some pages I’ve fanned.

After this week’s changes to Facebook’s defaults, how­ever, that pro­file no longer comes up at all in a search on Google or Bing. In fact, if you’re not logged in to Face­book and you click on a link to my pro­file with my per­sonal URL (which I assure you does still exist), you’ll get a “page not found” error.

I’ve con­firmed this with oth­ers, even peo­ple who I’m friends with on Face­book. If you’re logged out, there’s no way to get to my pro­file. My the­ory is that one of two things is caus­ing this to happen.

1. I’ve always been wary of pro­vid­ing Face­book with too much infor­ma­tion, so I never filled out any interests.
2. A cou­ple of days ago, I went to Face­book to read my feed and got a popup win­dow ask­ing me to link my pro­file to one of the pages for my high school, col­lege, grad­u­ate school, and my city net­work. I didn’t want to do that, so I clicked on the “ask me later” but­ton, which should mean I’m not part of any net­works right now.

I’m sure Face­book thinks it’s pun­ish­ing me for not par­tic­i­pat­ing in its new adver­tis­ing sys­tem, but this is a pretty sweet spot for me to be in because my Face­book account is one of the very few that I truly keep pri­vate and where I’m only adding “friends” now (as opposed to any­one who friends me). I get to par­tic­i­pate with my friends the way I always have and don’t have to deal with all of the new “like” crud and pri­vacy issues. And I think any true friends can still find me, as I believe that any­one logged in to Face­book can still find my pro­file. In fact, I think I’m still show­ing up on other peo­ples’ “rec­om­men­da­tions” side­bar, because I’m still get­ting friend requests from peo­ple I don’t really know.

This is great, and I’m very happy with this setup, inad­ver­tent as I think Face­book meant it to be. I’m also not will­ing to change it to test what’s caus­ing it, so this is where I need your help. I don’t want to add any inter­ests or link my pro­file to a net­work in order to find out if that changes any­thing, because I may not be able to undo the change. So I’m ask­ing for your help in answer­ing the fol­low­ing ques­tions so that we can all fig­ure out what’s going on. Hope­fully those of us who want to be pri­vate on Face­book can truly do that now. It would also be help­ful to have this infor­ma­tion so that we know if/when Face­book fig­ures this out and changes it.

Please leave answers in the com­ments, and thanks for your help!

1. If you’re logged out of Face­book, can you see my pro­file? http://facebook.com/shifted
2. If you’re logged in to Face­book, can you see my profile?
3. If you’re not friends with me in Face­book and you can see my pro­file, what do you see? Please be spe­cific in list­ing which pieces (eg, name, pic­ture, groups, etc.)
4. Does your pub­lic pro­file dis­play in search results?
5. If your pub­lic pro­file dis­plays, either when oth­ers click on it or in search results, do you have inter­ests listed in your profile?
6. Can you com­pletely remove your inter­ests from your profile?
7. Have you seen the popup win­dow ask­ing you to link your pro­file to spe­cific pages/networks?
8. If your pub­lic pro­file dis­plays, is your pro­file linked to any of these pages/networks?
9. Can you remove your pro­file from being linked to any of these pages/networks?
10. If you go through these steps of remov­ing inter­ests and links to pages/networks, does that remove your pub­lic pro­file alto­gether, the way it did mine?
11. I’ve also unchecked the box to allow per­son­al­iza­tion in my pri­vacy set­tings. If your pub­lic pro­file isn’t dis­play­ing, have you done that?

Adden­dum: I think Polly found the actual answer (noted in the com­ments below). There’s a set­ting in the pri­vacy –> search set­tings that may finally remove your pro­file com­pletely from pub­lic view.

Make sure you uncheck the “allow” box, and if you want even more pri­vacy, change the “Face­book search results” set­ting to “friends only.” I should also note that I know for a fact this set­ting either wasn’t there or wasn’t work­ing prop­erly last month, as I had a debate with some­one about pri­vacy and looked at my pub­lic pro­file while not logged in, so some­thing def­i­nitely changed recently to allow for this level of pri­vacy. What I’m unsure of now is whether that “allow” box is checked by default or not (ques­tion #12?). I have to say that if that box is not checked by default, I’m pretty impressed with Facebook’s new stance.

And as Phil noted in his com­ment, make sure you change the pri­vacy –> pro­file infor­ma­tion set­tings to man­age what your friends can share about you. That’s a really impor­tant one.

The big deal: It looks like Face­book has indeed changed its stance on pri­vacy and has defaulted the “allow” in the search set­tings to opt-in, rather than opt-out. I think this is new, and it’s very wel­come in my opin­ion, espe­cially since you can fur­ther nar­row the “Face­book search results” set­ting. Has any­one seen that “allow” box checked by default?

If this is true, pro­files have dis­ap­peared from Google, right? Is this a pre­emp­tive move on Facebook’s part to take over peo­ple search from Google? I don’t know, but it seems like some­thing has changed.

This week­end, I did some­thing really cool (for me). I got to watch a March Mad­ness game on my TV that CBS wasn’t show­ing in my local mar­ket on my TV, with­out pay­ing the cable com­pany. Life is full of short vic­to­ries, and this is one of mine. More impor­tantly, I real­ized I’m liv­ing in the heav­enly juke­box I used to talk about in my pre­sen­ta­tions years ago.

I’ve been actively build­ing my cloud for the last six months, but I’ve been build­ing towards this for the last ten years. The caveat is that the way I’ve built this setup works for me, and one-size def­i­nitely doesn’t fit all. I’m lucky to have the resources to build my cloud, and I know most peo­ple won’t go to these lengths to get more media. It should all be eas­ier and work bet­ter than it does in 2010, but there’s no one really great solu­tion yet (that I know of).

Why a cloud?

It started last August when I decided it was time to inves­ti­gate a cen­tral­ized backup solu­tion, a way to lis­ten to our music col­lec­tion from any­where, and the abil­ity to lis­ten to dif­fer­ent music in dif­fer­ent rooms of the house. In my ideal world, I also wanted sim­i­lar access for video, a way to eas­ily watch inter­net video (eg, YouTube, Hulu) on my TV, and the abil­ity to stream Net­flix to my TV. The off­site stor­age is impor­tant to me (I used to backup to Mozy, but I also want to own my data, and the idea of repli­cat­ing sen­si­tive doc­u­ments on servers owned by com­pa­nies focused on the bot­tom line (Drop­box, Microsoft Live, etc.) wasn’t very appeal­ing to me.

I did a lot of research and couldn’t find any­thing that let me do every­thing, but Win­dows Home Server soft­ware came close, so I pur­chased an HP Medi­as­mart EX485 server. As the name implies, the Medi­as­mart series is designed to give con­sumers access to their media from any­where. It comes with Win­dows Home Server soft­ware pre-installed and out of the box, it’s sup­posed to do the fol­low­ing things:

• Backup all of the com­put­ers on your net­work auto­mat­i­cally on a sched­ule you set. This includes dif­fer­en­tial back­ups and restores.
• Peri­od­i­cally grab media from all of those com­put­ers and copy it to the server.
• Main­tain your router and DNS set­tings so that your server is acces­si­ble from out­side of your network.
• Give you access to all of your doc­u­ments, files, music, and video from anywhere.

I say “sup­pos­edly,” because I’ve never been able to get the media col­lec­tor to work con­sis­tently, and the inter­face to the music col­lec­tion is under-described by the term “sucks.” I had to rip most of my CDs for the first time at a higher bitrate, so I just ended up copy­ing files to the server man­u­ally in big chunks. I’m also the main per­son in the house who pur­chases music, so I can main­tain that rou­tine pretty easily.

My Juke­box in the Cloud (so named by Deanna)

The inter­face prob­lems and lack of func­tion­al­ity were big­ger issues, though. For exam­ple, there’s no way to get details about songs, rate them, or cre­ate playlists, all of which is pretty unfor­giv­able in a prod­uct designed specif­i­cally for con­sumers. After fur­ther research, I installed Orb, which is some pretty cool, free soft­ware that does a big piece of what Win­dows Home Server does. It gives you remote access to files, music, pic­tures, and video on the com­puter where it’s installed, plus you can man­age inter­net radio sta­tions, favorite songs, rate songs, cre­ate playlists, and cre­ate a dash­board view. Did I men­tion it’s free? If you have a com­puter you always leave on, you can emu­late some of my setup for free using this software.

My music library in Orb

Where Win­dows Home Server beats Orb is in its abil­ity to update port for­ward­ing on the router auto­mat­i­cally, backup all of the com­put­ers on your net­work, and offer a RAID solu­tion for that stor­age. I have 400GB+ of files, music, pic­tures, and video on one 750GB drive, but I was able to drop in a sec­ond drive, and the soft­ware auto­mat­i­cally started mir­ror­ing files to it for redun­dancy. That part was pretty amaz­ing, and I can access all of those files remotely, whether that means at work or in dif­fer­ent rooms in the house. Pretty sweet.

Con­nect­ing the server to the home system

That was all well and good, but I also wanted to play music with­out hav­ing to queue it up on a lap­top first, which meant we needed a way to get the server con­tent to play through the home the­ater sys­tem. Plus, we wanted to start stream­ing Net­flix videos to watch on the TV, as opposed to our com­put­ers. I again started doing research, which led me to the dis­cov­ery that the Xbox 360 that was just sit­ting on the shelf (we play more Wii than Xbox) was actu­ally a solu­tion wait­ing for us to rec­og­nize it.

Because the server and Xbox are both Microsoft prod­ucts, they talk to each other pretty eas­ily. This opened up a whole new world for us, because now we could show any pic­ture and play any music or video from the server on the big HDTV and the sound through the audio receiver and 5.1 surround-sound sys­tem with­out the need for a com­puter in between. In addi­tion, the Xbox gives us that desired access to Net­flix, Pan­dora, and even Last.FM through the exist­ing sys­tem. I can also cre­ate my playlists in Orb via a web browser and play them through the Xbox. More sweetness.

Watch­ing “Bat­tlestar Galac­tica” via Netflix’s stream­ing ser­vice through the Xbox on the HDTV

My biggest com­plaint about this setup is that the Xbox isn’t designed to be a media cen­ter, even though it has all of that func­tion­al­ity built into it. This means the inter­face isn’t very good here, either (no playlists, incom­plete dis­play of meta­data, long lists to scroll through), but I didn’t have to buy any addi­tional equip­ment, so that was a big plus. If Microsoft ever decides to spend time work­ing on inter­faces, it would have some killer prod­ucts for the con­sumer market.

More video

This setup does almost every­thing on my orig­i­nal list, but I still wanted to be able to watch Hulu through the exist­ing sys­tem, and I didn’t want to have to man­u­ally down­load YouTube videos to watch them on the TV. Look­ing around, I came across the amaz­ing PlayOn soft­ware ($40), which was the final piece of our puz­zle. By load­ing this soft­ware on the server, we gained the abil­ity to watch Hulu, YouTube, and some cus­tom PlayOn chan­nels for The Daily Show, The Col­bert Report, and NCAA March Mad­ness games on demand. Really sweet! This piece was a lit­tle bit more dif­fi­cult, but it all works if you fol­low the instruc­tions.

Pick­ing an episode of “Mod­ern Fam­ily” to watch from Hulu via PlayOn through the Xbox to the HDTV

Mak­ing it all eas­ier to use

I then tied every­thing together with a hand-me-down Log­itech Har­mony remote to make it easy to man­age all of the var­i­ous pieces. The “watch TV” but­ton turns on the TV to the right input, the audio receiver to the right input, and con­trols the cable box. The “watch a movie” but­ton turns every­thing on with the right set­tings to watch a DVD, but pretty much every­thing else except the Wii runs through the “lis­ten to music” but­ton, because that’s what starts up the Xbox. This is espe­cially help­ful because with­out the uni­ver­sal remote, I’d prob­a­bly be the only one in the house who’d be able to turn things on and off for dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties. Another big plus is that we can con­trol the Xbox with easy-to-understand but­tons, rather the game con­troller that came with the con­sole. I can’t rec­om­mend a Log­itech uni­veral remote highly enough.

Con­clu­sion

For the most part, this is all work­ing very well for us. We lis­ten to our music a lot more, includ­ing at work, and some­times the inter­net video piece really comes in handy (like dur­ing March Mad­ness). We espe­cially like stream­ing Net­flix (which can also be done through the PlayOn soft­ware if you don’t have an Xbox). At this point, the biggest issue is that I still need a way to backup the server off­site, but I can’t find a rea­son­ably priced ser­vice for this (most com­pa­nies charge business-level prices because they haven’t yet rec­og­nized there’s a grow­ing con­sumer mar­ket). Someone’s going to make a killing offer­ing a con­sumer backup ser­vice for media, but that day hasn’t arrived yet. I’m look­ing at other workarounds right now, but I haven’t found an ideal solu­tion. (Have you? Leave a comment!)

It’s been a long road to get to this point, but it’s excit­ing to have all of this geeky func­tion­al­ity work­ing. In the future, I hope to get rid of a lot of paper by scan­ning it to the server, and I may inves­ti­gate adding a TV tuner to record pro­grams directly to the server and set­ting up print­ing over the inter­net to our home printer.

How you can do some of this

This is pretty geeky stuff, although most of the process was eas­ier than I thought it would be. It’s also a Microsoft-centric approach, some­what by acci­dent. I still think Microsoft needs to do a bet­ter job with its inter­faces before its home server/media cen­ter prod­ucts could go main­stream. How­ever, there are ways to do pieces of all of this eas­ily, with­out Microsoft prod­ucts, and some­times even for free.

• If you have a com­puter that you leave on all the time, you can stream music and video or access files from it for free by installing Orb. You can even hook up an exter­nal drive to that com­puter if you need more stor­age. (It works on Macs, too.)
• If you have an old com­puter lying around or can pick one up cheap, you can pur­chase Win­dows Home Server for $99 and con­vert that machine into a home server. I only paid the $500 for the HP Medi­as­mart server for the con­ve­nience fac­tor of hav­ing it pre-installed with the soft­ware and a 750GB hard drive. If I’d had more time, I might have built it myself.
• You don’t need an Xbox to get con­tent from the server to the TV/home the­ater sys­tem. Inter­net TVs and DVD play­ers are on the mar­ket (every­thing will have access to the inter­net built-in even­tu­ally), and there’s mid­dle­ware like the Roku. Because I was able to get the Xbox work­ing in about 10 min­utes, I didn’t inves­ti­gate which of the other options might be best. Inter­est­ingly, TiVO is enter­ing this mar­ket with its new TiVO Pre­mière box, but it’ll still require a monthly fee, which I wasn’t will­ing to pay. I don’t think it pro­vides access to the user’s col­lec­tion, although it does bring in all of that inter­net content.
• There are also other ways to stream sites like Hulu and Net­flix to your TV. You can install the PlayOn soft­ware on a reg­u­lar com­puter (as opposed to a server) to watch those chan­nels, but you’ll still need the mid­dle­ware to get the stream to the TV. Of course, you can also just install PlayOn on a com­puter and watch the chan­nels on that com­puter, or hook it up to a TV using an A/V cable. That’s what I used to do, but I wanted to be able to use my lap­top while watch­ing “TV.” Note that PlayOn will also work with a Nin­tendo Wii or Playsta­tion 3.
• Jason Grif­fey has writ­ten about using the Drobo sys­tem for back­ups. I prob­a­bly would have gone this route if I didn’t also want the remote access to my media files. How­ever, if you’re look­ing strictly for a backup solu­tion or if you aren’t backup up your data, this is an excel­lent option.

What else have you tried? How are you build­ing your cloud?