Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Creating Passionate Users: The Concept Carification effect by Kathy Sierra on October 21, 2005.

Kathy Sierra is one of the strongest advocates
for users of anyone I know. Her “Head First” books from O’Reilly are best sellers because she knows how to write and create books that connect to people.

Although her website Creating Passionate Users isn’t aimed at libraries, many of her posts address issues that affect libraries.

I recommend this article as an example. In it
she addresses one of her favorite themes: why
good, creative ideas never get implemented.
When she talks about “competition,” we in libraries should be thinking about whether or not users will
find libraries relevant if we are not creative.

Obviously there are a zillion reasons why wild-ass concepts can’t (and shouldn’t) find their way into final production, but how many of those reasons are truly valid? When people say, “We can’t afford to do it that way…” we should always ask, “Can’t… or Don’t Want To?” followed by, “Can we afford not to?”

If being remarkable is one of the only ways we can hope to compete in a world where everything has a ton of competition…

We have to keep fighting the Concept Carification effect, to keep at least some of our ideas alive, sharp edges intact. This is not an easy battle, since it involves separating the crap ideas from the brilliant concepts, with NO evidence. After all, most revolutionary concepts do NOT come directly from what users ask for.

When you’re really really on to something magical, you can guarantee there will be devil’s advocates, naysayers, and viscious critics every step of the way. Yes, sometimes those critics will be right, but if we aren’t brave enough to fight through it when nobody knows for certain, then everything good will be stuck in the concept stage, and we’ll be left with… all of the boring, undifferentiated, or lame products we have now.

XML.com: Screenscraping the Senate

This is interesting. Paul Ford, as a proof of concept of the semantic web, has scraped the US Senate website for HTML, combined it with a CVS list of Senators, and generated the data in RDF. “After years of reading and writing about the Semantic Web, I still can’t tell you how to build a complete Semantic Web application from scratch. At first that was because the Semantic Web was only a vague set of half-finished specifications. But now, with publicly available triple stores like Redland and Kowari, and well-established specifications for ontology development and the like, it seems like a good time to start thinking in triples.”

He makes mention of another worthy project called the Open Government Information Awareness Project. Boinboing, from where I got the link to the xml.com article, also mentioned a project that I hadn’t heard of before called the They Work For You Project. This project evidently does the same thing for the UK Parliament as Mr Ford is attempting with the US Senate site.

oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Hackers & Painters.

A new book from O’Reilly the best technical publisher in the world.
Hackers & Painters
Big Ideas from the Computer Age,
By Paul Graham,
May 2004.
ISBN: 0-596-00662-4
271 pages, $22.95 US, $33.95 CA, £15.95 UK.

Written in clear, narrative style, Hackers & Painters examines issues such as the rightness of web-based applications, the programming language renaissance, spam filtering, the Open Source Movement, Internet startups and more. In each essay, Graham moves beyond widely held beliefs about the way that programmers work as he tells important stories about the kinds of people behind tech innovations, revealing distinctions about their characters and their craft. No hackers reading this book will fail to recognize themselves within these pages. No programmer will put it down without new thoughts actively percolating.

There is more at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hackpaint/index.html
including a sample chapter, table of contents, reviews, and more.

Also see the review,
Embracing the Art of Hacking
By Michelle Delio. Wired
May. 19, 2004, which says “The chapters on general rules of good design as they apply to
programming, painting and any creative endeavor are by far the best in
the book.”

John Markoff, NY Times, May 10: European researchers at a security conference in Switzerland last week demonstrated computer-based techniques that can identify blacked-out words and phrases in confidential documents.

The researchers showed their software at the conference, the Eurocrypt, by analyzing a presidential briefing memorandum released in April to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. After analyzing the document, they said they had high confidence the word “Egyptian” had been blacked out in a passage describing the source of an intelligence report stating that Osama Bin Ladin was planning an attack in the United States.

The technique doesn’t work on monospace fonts like Courier, but the US State Department’s recent font guidelines require that all docs be published in Times New Roman, which decodes like a charm.

(I’m only linking to CNet news.com because you have to register to read the NYT).

[Thanks boing boing!]

itsas: Web Services

Library Groups Urge Patent & Trademark Office To Rethink ‘Open Source’ Stance [password/proxy server required if off-campus]. Seems that the PTO doesn’t understand the open-source issue very well.

“The difference is not whether we rely on copyright but for what purpose,” Mogelin said. Proprietary software uses copyright to seek profits, he said, but “we use copyright for a purpose more fully in keeping with the intentions underlying the copyright system in the first place — to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” (Eban Mogelin, general counsel of the Free Software Foundation).