Wow! Something I should have known about — Worldcat.
WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.
I’ve just used it to look up a rare book and it told me which libraries in my part of the world have a copy.
Here we go. As I envisaged in my column on Sunday, MySpace is being sued for allowing minors to wander into a dangerous space.
A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.
The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 “utterly ineffective.”
“MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online,” said Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, parent company News Corp. and Pete Solis, the 19-year-old accused of sexually assaulting the girl.
Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace.com, said in a written statement: “We take aggressive measures to protect our members. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.”
Founded in 2003, MySpace has more than 80 million registered users worldwide and is the world’s third most-viewed Web site, according to the lawsuit.
Loewy said the lawsuit is the first of its kind in the nation against MySpace.
Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit.
In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.
The lawsuit includes news reports of other assault cases in which girls were contacted through MySpace. They include a 22-year-old Wisconsin man charged with six counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a 27-year-old Connecticut man accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl.
MySpace says on a “Tips for Parents” page that users must be 14 or older. The Web site does nothing to verify the age of the user, such as requiring a driver’s license or credit card number, Loewy said…
I was offline yesterday because I was giving the Beishon Memorial Lecture at the OU and needed to focus on important matters like logistics and car parking for guests. The title of the lecture was “The Social Life of Networks” and there’s a pdf here if you’re having trouble sleeping. There will also be a webcast, but it hasn’t emerged from editing yet.
Thanks to James Miller, eagle-eyed as ever, who spotted several typos and a glaring error in a calculation!
The user-generated content bandwagon rolls on. Jumpcut is a web service which enables you to edit small movies (add soundtracks, efffects, etc) in your browser. According to this New York Times report, there are lots of workalike services on the way:
Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.
Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.
“We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing,” said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. “We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail.”
Mr. Kaskade refers to the process as “mixing,” however, saying he believes that the term “editing” may sound labor-intensive to the amateur videographer. Previously, putting together a multishot video like Mr. Moore’s would have involved installing and learning to use a piece of software like iMovie from Apple, Adobe Premiere or Studio from Pinnacle Systems. Some of that software is packaged free with new computers or sold for about $100.
The analyst firm Parks Associates estimated last year that only about four million people regularly use such software for video editing — far fewer than the number who capture video using camcorders, Webcams, digital still cameras and cellphones.
But with more videos of soccer games, weddings and cruise vacations being posted online — and potentially being seen by people who have not been dragooned into the living room for a showing — editing gains in importance, Mr. Kaskade says, even if it involves trimming only the dizzying camera whirls at the beginning of a shot, or the inevitable question, “Are you taping right now?”
The bandwidth implications of this are interesting. All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)
Grouper users have to download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in conjunction with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their PC and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.
From today’s New York Times…
a nice illustration of a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix’s inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day? The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?
Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That’s right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. “Americans’ tastes are really broad,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process…
Here’s an interesting echo of Jason Lanier’s rant about the stupidity of crowds — an intriguing NYT story about online vigilantism in China.
SHANGHAI, June 2 — It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country’s most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack.
“Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,” one person wrote, “to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.”
Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home. It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.
Interesting essay by Jason Lanier challenging the “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis.
The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It’s been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it’s a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that’s actually interesting information.
No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…
Thoughtful essay by Bill Thompson. It was prompted by a column by William McKeen arguing that online reading precluded the serendipity that one experiences in reading offline newspapers.
Perhaps the best argument in favour of the argument that today’s richly interlinked web is as much a promoter of serendipity as the library, the bookstore or the radio is simply that the discussion is happening at all.
I came across Steven Johnson’s first post, a response to McKeen’s article, because I subscribe to the feed from Johnson’s blog through the Bloglines service. I can see whenever he writes something new, and because I like his style I generally read his stuff.
He linked to the original article so I read that, but there were also a range of comments already posted on Johnson’s website, so I followed them up too.
My serendipitous discovery of McKeen’s piece demonstrates clearly not only that he is wrong but that the potential for accidental discovery is greatly enhanced by the net and the web. The chance of me stumbling across the St Petersburg Times in my local library is rather small, since it doesn’t actually keep copies of it.
Once I came across the argument about serendipity I focused on it, searched specifically for people engaged in the debate, and ignored many interesting sidelines – like an old post from Jason Kottke about why Macs used to be rubbish – as a result….
Lorcan Dempsey, whose Blog is a thing of wonder, pointed me to this riveting Conversation with Werner Vogels – Amazon’s CTO on the thinking which led to the company’s transformation from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut. The conversation is with Jim Gray, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and should be required reading for anyone responsible for scaling up online services.
Lorcan also spotted an important aspect of the Amazon S3 storage service that I’d missed when I blogged it.
One interesting feature was the absence of a feature – the user interface. It did not have its own user interface: it is available only through machine interfaces. One of these is BitTorrent. So it is built from the start as a network service, a service that other applications communicate with.
Kevin Kelly published an interesting paen to Google Books in the New York Times recently. Sample:
When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?
Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” he shouts. “It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.”
And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.
But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its “books” will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine….
This is typical Kelly hyperbole, and it attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Including some perceptive criticism from here.
Of course, the difference between now and then is that doing gives a single company – Google – enormous market power.
And if history is any guide, not once has a firm with absolute power – Standard Oil, Microsoft, you know the score – been anything less than evil.
Google is, in a very real sense, profiting enormously from the utopian naivete of the Valley. And though Kevin’s article is a great read – and I’m a huge fan of his new work – this flaw makes his conclusion – a utopian vision of ubiquitous, “free”, information totally invalid.
Has Kevin used Google Scholar? If you haven’t, try a simple query like this.
That screen is the polar opposite of ubiquitous, free information – it is a set of links which send you to walled gardens built by academic publishers who want to charge $20, $50, or $100 or more for a single article.
But it is the future the Googleverse leads to. It’s the inevitable result of handing informational market power over to Google – just like physical distribution economies (and price hypersensitive consumers) inevitably lead to Wal-Mart. Either one is just as evil as far as consumers are concerned.
Kevin argues that we should scan books because there is a “moral imperative to scan” – a moral imperative to make information free, essentially.
Are you kidding? That’s like saying there’s a moral imperative to buy gas, or to buy the cheapest goods possible – because this so-called moral imperative has a single economic effect: to line Google’s pockets, handing market power over to it.
Take books – what we’re talking about here. The so-called moral imperative is only valid if there’s a level playing field for scanning; if the scanning market can be made competitive.
Of course, it can’t – it’s a natural monopoly; who scans the most wins, because the average cost is always falling.
And this – profiting from the natural monopoly dynamics of information – is, make no mistake about it, exactly Google’s game – not creating some kind of Gutopia.
The Google Scholar example is very compelling. This guy is sharp.