Experiencing Information

Kevin Kelly has a very interesting post in his book in progress The Technium. Victor tipped me off to this (thanks Victor). Check out Better Than Free.

The internet allows for easily made and distributed copies: copies of documents, music, photos, whatever. Kelly asks some good questions:

“If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?”
[...]

why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing? “

He then identified eight values that can’t be easily copied or cloned, which he calls generatives:

• Immediacy - How quickly do you get the copy of the thing you need?
• Personalization - To what degree is the copy customized to your tastes and needs?
• Interpretation - What services help you better understand or enjoy the copy?
• Authenticity - Is the copy what it says it is?
• Accessibility - How do I access the copy?
• Embodiment - How is the copy represented and presented?
• Patronage - Can I support the creator of the copy even if I can get it for free?
• Findability - How hard or easy is it for me to find the copy?

The recalls a recent talk I saw online of Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, speaking about the Abundance Ecomony. (Sorry - can’t find the video right now). If everything is moving towards being free or virtually free, how do businesses monetize their services? Advertising..yes, OK. But it looks like Kevin Kelly has given us a more robust framework to consider yet different ways.

I know Kelly mentions Authenticity, but I’d like to see more about credibility and authority too. Given the recent boom of credibility with the work of BJ Fogg, for one, that seems important enough to be a high-level generative. I guess Experience would come under Embodiment, but I’d have liked to have seem that more prominent or explicit.

Just came across GoLexa. The interesting thing about this is the search results. They provide quite a bit of context, including links to bookmarking sites, page data, page previews, etc. And there are also plenty of other tools, like direct links to analyze keywords and refine your search.

This brings up the point of the Navigation Layer that I made in my presentation at the Euro IA conference in Barcelona. Navigating the long tail of online information isn’t necessarily about having content or even just finding it. It’s about making sense of it and understanding it. In order to do that, you have to provide structure to both the tools and the content, which is what GoLexa does. There is a lot of hand-crafted IA work on the search results page for GoLexa, even though the content is all dynamically populated.

Check it out–it’s quite interesting.

I wrote a brief summary of my talk at the Euro IA 2007 conference on “Navigating the Long Tail” in the Dec 2007-Jan 2008 issue of the ASIST Bulletin with the same title. See the full article online here. A PDF version is also available.

It doesn’t include all of the points made in the talk, but it gets at the basic jist. Here are a couple of quotes:

“If this new online, long-tail economy is to work, people have to be able to navigate to the markets that interest them and filter the information quickly and efficiently. This is really the value of information architecture (IA). IA not only helps people find the information they need, but it also helps them makes sense of it by providing context.”

“The point is that designing navigation for the long tail calls for any and all types of sources of metadata and all types of structure to provide context. It’s not about one or the other, but about what’s right for the situation. In some situations, a traditional taxonomy may be the best thing; in others, tagging works great. A mix is needed, and those practicing IA will have to experts in them all.”

My ex-LexisNexis colleague Kevin Simons tipped me off to a new news service. David Winer created a way to browse the New York Times by topic. See his announcement of this serivce and the topic tree (i.e., an outline) for the NYT.

This outline isn’t really a taxonomy, but rather a list of keywords. I’m not sure where the keywords come from, however. Are they extracted for the stories algorithmically, or did Mr Winer set up queries behind each keyword ahead of time? Looks more like the former to me.

There are three things interesting with this that point to where I think online news content is going in the future:

1. Merely aggregating content will become less and less important as more and more of it becomes available on the web. The FT recently announced they will be making some its content available for free. This, on the heals of similar announcements from the NYT and even the WSJ.

2. With access to content essential equal, being alerted and making sense of information will both become more and more important. Different forms of text analytics will proliferate, as well as alerting services. And things like categories, taxonomy, and other IA artefacts help in both respects. Post-coordinated (pre-determined) structures will help make sense of it all. And you’ll pick a topic–perhaps a hand-crafted topic–within a meta-RSS feed mashup to be alerted on.

3. News for mobile devices makes a lot of sense. People read the morning news on the go. Executives get more information from their Blackberrys than from their laptops. And the NYT outline works great on normal cell phones.

Not sure if anyone has ever made this connection before, but I’m going to give a try. Let me know if you’ve heard this already. Here goes:

If we consider all published information in the world, we can assume it takes on a long tail curve. The most people sources are read by only a small percentage of people. Librarianship is really about organizing information in the head of the long tail curve. Sure, there are special libraries, like science libraries and music libraries, but even those are concerned with organizing the hits.

After the advent of the web, IA arose out the need to organize information in the long tail. At some point the long tail of information spaces got so fat, someone realized that we need special, dedicated people to take care of our informatoin problems. IA is about finding custom solutions in a niche market for a particular business or client.

My point is that attacks on things like the Dewey Decimal System by people like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger are irrelevant to IA. IAs aren’t concerned about organizing all of human knowledge. We tend to work in niche markets. And it’s in niche markets that things like taxonomy and controlled vocabularies make most sense because they are bounded domains. Even Mr Shirky admits that himself in his polemic article on ontology:

“Ontological classification works well in some places, of course. You need a card catalog if you are managing a physical library. You need a hierarchy to manage a file system. So what you want to know, when thinking about how to organize anything, is whether that kind of classification is a good strategy.”

Of course.

On the other side of the coin, things like tagging might be better when organizing the hits. There you’ll get a critical mass of tags to make them worthwhile. But tagging in niche markets might have holes. You might not even get all of your content tag if the user population is too small. And users in a niche market tend to have a common terminology and structure of the inforamtion space, so a controlled vocabularly could actually help them find, use, and make sense of information.

OK, the above is really a half baked idea and had lots of problems. But blogs let anybody say anything they want anytime, so there you have it.

Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, has this post on his blog about free chapters from a new book called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers by Mike Banks.

The idea from the publisher (Wiley)  is that each of the 30 interviewees gets to give away his or her chapter. Interesting marketing scheme. Sure, the entire book is now available for free on the web, but you’d have to do some scavagering to it all. And along the way you’d be exposed to messages from the authors about their work and about the book. So there may be a powerful marketing effect here.

Others who are promoting their own chapter include Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing, David Rothman at TeleBlog and Steve Garfield.

Not sure if I’m going to buy the book. It’s only $17 on Amazon.com, but €26 on Amazon.de.