Author: David Churbuck

Library Journal – Revenge of the Blog People!

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People."

That’s Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, writing in the  Library Journal in response to the blogger critics who slagged him for writing an op-ed in the LA Times in December which criticized Google’s avowed plan to digitize library collections.

This is an important piece and I recommend clicking through to read it in its entirety. [clicks to Chris Locke for the alert to its existence]

The topic of digitization and open access to the "stacks" has roiled the professional librarian/research world since ASCII was invented. A story I wrote about WAIS and Gopher and Brewster Kahle in the early 90s sparked a bit of a "s**t-storm" due to its rhetorical prediction that the digitization of the world’s information and easy access to such tools would make the librarian profession as secure as stablehands and paddock boys were the year Henry Ford rolled the first horseless carriage out of a Michigan garage.

 Well, of course that is not the case, and the role of the librarian/searcher will doubtless persist and perhaps intensify over time as the mechanics of the information space continue to explode beyond our capacity to tame the output [sort of Ithiel de Sola Pool meets I Love Lucy on the assembly line of bits]. Librarians have displayed some scorn over the democratization of data access, mostly on the misassumption by laymen that online search tools are comprehensive, but also on the difficulty to verify data sources in an age when any fool can forge an earnings report, release it, and play the options.

 Gorman, and other librarians, aren’t opposed to digitization per se, but to the danger of laymen assuming that if it isn’t in Google, it doesn’t exist. The sin of omission through ignorance of existence.

This tendency is particularly dangerous for amateur searchers when their favorite search tool can’t penetrate the "costwalls"  [ack. to Jim Thompson for my favorite word-of-the-day"] that hide newspaper archives, etc. (costwalls have their own perils for those erect them, per Penenberg’s wirednews piece about the loss of relevance for the WSJ per his Google search to see where the world’s best newspaper ranked on results for the term "Enron." Net result — it didn’t, ergo irrelevance].

Wired News: Whither The Wall Street Journal? Penenberg on the WSJ and his recommendation they drop the subscription model and open their doors to the traffic.

Two points he touches on, but deserve development. He cites the Battelle meme of irrelevancy due to the walled-garden model which prohibits bloggers from deep linking inside the archive. Same could be said of the NYT. Sites that permit a permalink into their articles will reap what they sow by letting we bloggers funnel scads of traffic into their pages. Highbeam (not another Highbeam reference!) takes it even a step further and lets bloggers deep link into the archives (which could actually end run the newspaper industry’s precious rev. stream from their morgues.

The killer in the open-site model such as the one followed at Forbes (Adam misstates Forbes "…got rid of registration requirements when it discovered they drove away traffic.") Forbes never required registration for access. It was a founding principle to counter the Journal’s model with an open one and make cash from the traffic [CORRECTION: Adam writes: "You are mistaken. Not in your day, though. But a few years ago the site did require registration. I know this for two reasons. Number one, I had to register just to read old friends like Penelope Patsuris. Number two, Michael Noer recently came to the graduate seminar I teach at NYU and reminded me about Forbes.com’s former registration requirement.]) was pointed out yesterday by Forbes.com’s editor, Paul Maidment.

Online operations need coal in the form of stories, articles, content, bus plunge stories, to meet their inventory needs. As long as online arms like Forbes, Businessweek, NYT are dependent on print parents feeding them, they’ll never stand on their own two feet. Force them to build their own editorial capabilities and they sink under the overhead. 

I sense some very interesting days ahead in big print media as they come to terms with their online offspring. The place with the best prospects, imho, is Reuters, which has no print parent and could easily become the arms merchant of linked news by embracing bloggers.

Sorry, but after swatting down at least a dozen online-poker spams every day, and now a wave of trackback spams from “tigerspice.com” I have to ask:

WTF is it with poker?

My teen-aged son is obsessed with watching it on television — louche men wearing bug sunglasses — and it seems to have encroached into nearly every channel with celebrity poker, world series of poker, dogs playing poker.

I have a dark fantasy of inventing the email equivalent of a neutron bomb and replying to the online poker spammers with some sort of digital missile missive that will cause faces to rot off.

Forbes.com: Stopping The Presses
Good commentary by Paul Maidment, editor at Forbes.com, on the state of affairs in the newspaper industry. Thanks to Mark Cahill at Atex for the pointer.