May 01, 2003
Blogs and librarians
This is one of these lovely days of the year, it's a national holiday in Belgium, and upon yearly habit I raised very early this morning to have a full day of uninterupted infoglut consumption, fixing long outstanding non-critical things and basically thinking I'm getting my life organized. No phone, no significant business email, just _me_ and my computer. 13 tabs open in Mozilla, radio on, RSS feedsurfing and a full day dedicated to discoveries. Very similar to "Matthew's day":http://radio.weblogs.com/0103021/2003/05/01.html#a1007, so it seems. ;-)
Then comes "a post of Sam":http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1371.html which makes me wonder. Is it right to say that great minds excel in expressing simple facts as thought-provoking food for pondering? I find a nice disruption in "the article he refers to":http://www.wirelessnewsfactor.com/perl/story/21389.html, between its title and its content. The article (go read it, it ain't that bad) is about the lack of solid, interchangeable infrastructure and interchangeability in the world of blogging, hence its failure to succeed in a business context.
What the author fails to see is the human factor of all this. I remember reading a book about knowledge management, that categorized people into information producers, consumers and _librarians_. I definitely fall in the last category: there's much more that I'm able to locate, than I'm able to grasp or create myself. Yet, I do have some strange capability to pinpoint _authorative_ information sources and forward these pointers to people who have the brains to consume and make use of it. And this is only one human aspect in the blogging phenomenon.
My pet peeve in blogging is that it provides anyone who cares with a voice and the power to use it. The author of that article is correct in stating that this won't help with the amount of uncategorized information being spawned onto the information super highway (heh), but I'm not sure whether any IT solution will bring structure into this chaos. The great thing about blogging and crossblogging is that it very much reflects the way we think: in associations or hyperlinks. While the quality of associations might differ from individual to individual, I'm pretty sure all AI specialists would go crazy when finally being presented with an authorative and realistic computational model of this associative capability. We call this affectionally _shared neurons_, and it explains (to me, at least) how intangible associations in thoughtspace might be. A certain association that is important to somebody, won't necesseraly be of any importance to others. No automated means will ever attach a truthful value to a large collection of associations without the risk of fraud.
Enter the _librarians_. Better than others, they are capable of sifting through the glut, transscribing associations of global importance. Funny enough, while this has been done using extensive thesauri in the past, we now see the importance of temporary, instant associations emerging: a simple hyperlink in a rolling weblog. While the authors of that post might still know about the temporary synapse, many won't remember the connection since it has been transscribed on a fading transport medium. Which brings the _circle of knowledge_ back to my mind, where "Marc":http://radio.weblogs.com/0116284/ and "Tom":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/tomk/archives/000745.html were trying to fit a conceptual form onto this ongoing enumeration of thought links. While I admire their efforts in defining a scientifical model, I doubt whether better infrastructure, better feed aggregation, better autodiscovery, better autoclassification and better whatnot will help us in codifying the neural network laid out into the brain of librarians.
And since most of this will not likely be achieved anytime soon (because of many business-related reasons such as cost, competition and possible benefits), I'm pretty sure the librarian will still be there for some time to come. Related: any automated system which attaches a possible value to a synapse is subject to abuse. Hence email spam, hence optimizing your website for search engine result ranking, hence weblogs.com update ping spamming, ...
Comments
Excellent comment - I like to think that I am also more of a "librarian" type :-)
Perhaps you also need to make the distinction between "librarian" - someone who organizes, indexes and cross-references information - versus 'editor' - someone who makes a (value) judgement as to the useful of the information. While there is some overlap, in general, I suspect that librarians try not to make such judgements, preferring that the user be able to find the information and make their own decision. Given the infoglut (where *everyone* has a blog!), we need the skills of both!
Posted by: Mark at May 4, 2003 08:41 PM