Information is a Conversation, not a Lecture

I stole the title from Karen's Free Range Librarian post from yesterday "Pensees from WebCred" in which she muses "out loud" on things informational in a most effective and elegant way. Jenny Levine also clipped a sentence or two for The Shifted Librarian. Go read Karen's whole (longish) post. Karen mused in an earlier post that she feels she has regained her (writing) groove and I agree. Lots to chew on.

And I do like to know Karen relishes red sweaters!

Two pensees particularly resonated. One on metadata and one on what Jenny called being part of information seekers' "trusted circles" when I interviewed her for the Scan.

"Metadata should be firmly lashed to information at the beginning of its journey and if possible added to along the way, over the Donner Pass and through cordones sanitaire, so that information becomes less "lossy" and in fact richer in meaning."

"Anne Lipow, a great librarian, innovator, educator, and publisher, often said that the user is not remote from the librarian, the librarian is remote from the user. This is true for all information communities. Our users (readers, patrons) are right there, where they should be; we are the ones who need to close the distance."

There was another Blog conference going on almost the same time as WebCred in Boston...Blog Business Summit happened on the opposite coast--Seattle. Tom Peters' blog has several posts on this.

And in other news....hardly worth commenting on due to the vast coverage but Google Video has debuted as a beta--just as was predicted a few short weeks ago, and which we faithfully reported. I tested it by searching "Donald Trump" although given the vast coverage of that non-event (although I am sure it was a meaningful event to The Donald and Melania) perhaps that was too easy. And it's the 'in' thing to do. Blinkx and Yahoo also released video search engines.

Another interesting Pew study was released, also commented on in many places: Search Engine Users "Users paint a very rosy picture of their online search experiences. They feel in control as searchers; nearly all express confidence in their searching skills. They are happy with the results they find; again, nearly all report that they are usually successful in finding what they’re looking for. And searchers are very trusting of search engines, the vast majority declaring that search engines are a fair and unbiased source of information. " This is, of course, an extension of the research we reported on in the Environmental Scan--that people are generally satisfied looking for things on their own. A must-read for librarians.

And noted in Wired News, "Information Wants to Be Liquid." "Frode Hegland, a researcher at University College London, wants to change the basic structure of information on the net." There's a demo. And no mention of the Semantic Web.

And that's just a few of the information conversations happening "out there".