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there is an almost insatiable interest in factual information made available online

rbitrarily restricting access to factual information simply directs the flow around the institution restricting access. Britannica could be earning over a hundred million dollars a year from advertising revenue – that’s what it is projected that Wikipedia could earn, just from banner advertisements, if it ever accepted advertising. But Britannica chose to lock itself away from its audience.

under no circumstances do you take yourself off the network.

t seems as though many of our institutions are mired in older ways of thinking, where selfishness and protecting the collection are seen as a cardinal virtues. There’s a new logic operating: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

In a landmark settlement of a long-running copyright dispute with book publishers in the United States, Google agreed to pay a license fee to those publishers for their copyrights – even for books out of print. In return, the publishers are allowing Google to index, search and display all of the books they hold under copyright.

Each of these texts is indexed and searchable – just as with the books under copyright, but, in this case, the full text is available through Google’s book reader tool. For works under copyright but out-of-print, Google is now acting as the sales agent, translating document searches into book sales for the publishers, who may now see huge “long tail” revenues generated from their catalogues.

Since Google is available from every computer connected to the Internet (given that it is available on most mobile handsets, it’s available to nearly every one of the four billion mobile subscribers on the planet), this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.

When CD-ROM was introduced, twenty years ago, it was hailed as the “new papyrus,” capable of storing vast amounts of information in a richly hyperlinked format. As the limits of CD-ROM became apparent, the Web became the repository of the hopes of all the archivists and bibliophiles who dreamed of a new Library of Alexandria, a universal library with every text in every tongue freely available to all.

We have now gotten as close to that ideal as copyright law will allow;

For libraries, Google has established subscription-based fees for access to books covered by copyright.

Within another few years, every book within arm’s length of Google (and Google has many, many arms) will be scanned, indexed and accessible through books.google.com. This library can be brought to bear everywhere anyone sits down before a networked screen. This librar

The library has been obsolesced because it has become universal; the stacks have gone virtual, sitting behind every screen. Because the idea of the library has become so successful, so universal, it no longer means anything at all. We are all within the library.

The central task of the librarian – if I can be so bold as to state something categorically – is to bring order to chaos. The librarian takes a raw pile of information and makes it useful.

At its most visible, the book cataloging systems used in all libraries represents the librarian’s best efforts to keep an overwhelming amount of information well-managed and well-ordered.

Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project. I can’t tell you why this is, I can only tell you that it looks very foolish and naïve.

because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this. We have become a data-centric culture, and are presently drowning in data. It’s difficult enough for us to keep our collections of music and movies well organized; how can we propose to deal with collections that are a hundred thousand times larger?

All in all, the aim is to engage the students with "real" Japanese. Have them create written pieces that are useful, relevant & easily expanded upon later on if they choose - as further revision, extension work or simply to use the language somewhere that it can be seen and recognized; not simply written in an exercise or workbook, marked and forgotten.

The project involved 8,200 photographs taken between May and July last year, which were then combined with Google Earth's zoom-in technology.

"With the digital image we’re seeing the body of the paintings with almost scientific detail," Zugaza said. "What we don’t see is the soul. The soul will always only be seen by contemplating the original."

fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.

micromarkets

Flickr, YouTube

multiple demographics

Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.

Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.

Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity

a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.

Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.

Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"

Google

Google

if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.

Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.

It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.

Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.

ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.

In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers

As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."

That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.

user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance

They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.

the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

cholarly publishers

They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.

Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:

Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.

Now it has become a phenomenon especially in poorer and smaller communities, where computers and broadband connection are beyond the reach of the population.

“lan houses are places of intense sociability, and are occupying an important place in the life of the favelas”.

Research published in 2008 by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) shows that in Brazil 48% of all users access the Internet from commercial premises like lan houses. When it comes to people from the poorest classes D and E, this number jumps to 79% - a 60% increase from the 48.08% in 2006.

Playing video games is the main activity at lan houses for 42% of respondents, but an equal proportion access websites, culture, news and entertainment. Social networks, especially Orkut, and online chat are also very popular. In addition, the lan houses are also used for various research, school work and job searches.

the lan houses assert both their power to bring digital inclusion by providing access to the Internet for people with low-incomes and their unique characteristics: they provide a source of income for those who manage them and meeting points for youngsters.

The headline of the piece of news circulating on the Internet, and that almost certainly will be in the newspapers, is Alleged paedophile arrested in lan house with pictures of children, as you can see in this link from Terra [pt] and from the search on the topic on Google News. It is the lan house that is made infamous, shown in a bad light. Like a den of mismanagement and of corruption for teenagers. This is not the real picture [pt]. The lan houses suffer from the same dangers faced by any other sector of the economy. Lan houses, cyber cafes, telecentres and whatever, have a fundamental role to play in the process of inclusion in the knowledge infrastructure, from digital inclusion to innovation, as is demonstrated by this statistical presentation of the Brazilian market [of lan houses].

these laws want to hold them accountable for a problem whose main culprits are authorities and society itself.

As of now, there are more than 90,000 lan houses in Brazil, whereas the country has 2,000 movie theatres and 2,600 bookstores. Can they be a place for more than just playing games or updating orkut, or even to use citizenship and e-government services? Pedagogue Rita Guarezi says that lan houses already play a key role in distance learning [pt]: