Anything you quote from Twitter is always out of context

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Brian Kelly posted Twitter Can Pimp Up Your Stuff – But Should It? a while ago. This post has caused me to think about courtesy and good practice. The aspect I want to talk about is Brian’s reporting of a conversation which took place on Twitter. I’m writing this to make a general point, not as a personal criticism of Brian who has well-established credentials as an experimenter with these technologies and who I know, from talking to him directly, is interested in these issues.

The point is this: I tend to think that the quoting of Twitter exchanges in blog posts is something to be done sparingly, if at all, and has all kinds of potential for misunderstanding. I think there is some evidence of this occurring in Brian’s post.

Twitter has a very basic model for threaded discussions and this is not honoured by many clients (many users I follow clearly use more than one client, as do I). Importantly, as a user, you do not necessarily know who else is involved in the exchange – other users may be responding to remarks made by still more users about whom you are unaware.

When a Twitter dialogue is presented out of the context of Twitter, this is potentially misleading. The conversation which the person posting the dialogue reports is not the same as the dialogue whcih each individual contributer has participated in. And, importantly, they may be responding to a point which has been made but which the blogger, and the readers, never see. We are reporting our version of a conversation conducted in a crowded pub, involving people we half know and people we don’t know at all.

In the comments, Paul Boag says:

I think the problem is that because twitter is new, we all see it as playing a different role. You could argue twitter is a place for sharing personal experience. You could argue it is the place where you post ‘what you are doing’ (the original intention). Or you could argue it is a place to have a dialogue with your followers. All are valid as are many other uses. Ultimately it comes down to personal choice.

Quite so. Paul goes on to say:

People should use twitter as they want and others should stop criticising them for it. If they don’t like it they should stop following.

This is in the context of a response to a tweet by someone else, reported in the main body of his post. I don’t imagine the person who made this short comment to their network on Twitter did so in the expectation that their words might be used in this way. Now that people in my particular peer-network realise that anything they say in that wonderful, peculiar space that is Twitter might be lifted and repeated, very likely out of context, on a blog, I wonder if this will gradually stifle the free-flowing, relaxed conversations which spring up there. It is almost inevitable that people would be misrepresented in this way. Going back to that pub, would we, for example, speak as freely if someone was standing there with an audio recorder, waiting for something juicy to copy and paste into their podcast? Going back to Paul’s comment, I think he misunderstood the reported remark – but the lifting out of context has probably been partly responsible for this, and has left no obvious channel for a response.

‘Exchanges’ of Tweets can start and finish in a matter of minutes. I tend to take time over a blog post, marshalling arguments, checking references, re-reading for tone to avoid offending people unnecessarily etc. I take much less care with tweets, because I expect them to be taken much less seriously. Now I do understand that tweets are, for the most part, on public record, on the Web. I think this is mostly beside the point. It’s how we use the thing which counts, and how we expect it to be used. I think a Twitter which consisted only of quotable statements of verifiable fact or carefully thought through arguments would become, in Brian’s own words:

a sterile environment [which] could well lead to a killing of the golden goose

People may not expect their Tweets to be taken as seriously as something they might write in a blog. I certainly don’t. Of course, we know that most of our Twitter output is public – that’s part of the point of it. Many conversations happen in near-real-time: this gives Twitter a dynamic ‘edge’, where people can respond to topics with an off-the-cuff response. Of course not every Twitter exchange is like this – the point is the expectations about how seriously one’s Tweets will be taken is difficult to anticipate but should, I suggest, default to ‘not necessarily’. Clearly, we have different levels of discourse. We probably wouldn’t want to quote ‘tweets’ in academic papers…. would we? And yet I wouldn’t hesitate to quote a blog post in a paper.

There are some who do use Twitter as a micro-blogging platform. For example, Paul Boag is a highly successful broadcaster, with many followers in several media-spaces (Twitter, blog, podcast). Gaining and expanding an audience is important to him, as it is for many people. (Paul has even written a guide to broadcasting and responding to followers in Twitter). However, I suggest, tentatively, that a predilection for gaining followers obscures the fact that others don’t really think this way, and value Twitter for very different reasons. Where one person welcomes any exposure on any platform, another might be disconcerted by suddenly finding their throw-away 140 characters appearing on someone’s blog.

I note today that Brian has used a set of Twitter exchanges on another post. I would suggest that at least one of the tweets featured there was not something the author would necessarily have wanted to be broadcast more widely.

As a matter of courtesy I would ask believe people should consider carefully before quoting tweets in their blog. I hope it doesn’t become common practice for bloggers to treat Twitter as a cheap and easy source of (sometimes provocative) material.

Again, I want to make it clear that this should not be viewed as a personal criticism of Brian, or his blog. It is only by doing these things that such issues can be revealed and discussed. However, we have to be able to realise what doesn’t work, and to recognise the possible consequences of the practices we necessarily are evolving through trial and error.

Smoke and mirrors, or good intentions?

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Update: Karen’s presentation has now been made available.

Yesterday, despite the best intentions of Worst Great Western, I travelled to the British Library in London to hear Karen Calhoun, Vice President WorldCat and Metadata Services at OCLC presenting on Working collectively – the way forward in an academic environment (not available online as far as I can tell).

While Karen’s presentation was interesting it was, inevitably, mainly a sales-pitch for WorldCat, OCLC’s global-scale union catalogue of bibliographic records. Based on a fee-paying, membership business model, WorldCat provides value to member libraries mainly through the economy of scale to be derived from processing such data centrally, and through the expectation that concentration, as Lorcan Dempsey has characterised it, will provide greater traction on the Web and, consequently, more discovery and use. Karen used an array of metaphors to convey this idea: WorldCat was variously described as a ‘switch’ (as opposed to a ‘destination’), a bicycle wheel, and (bafflingly) a funnel.

I get the ‘switch’ idea, although I’m not sure that I entirely buy into it. WorldCat is positioned as a service which switches the user from a generic search engine (where they begin their typical enquiry) to the member library system. OCLC are clear that they do not intend WorldCat to be the destination site. From a systems architecture perspective, I recognise the value in this. What I don’t yet see is the business model.

A little over a year ago, Richard Wallis commented:

OCLC are trapped in an increasingly inappropriate business model. A model based upon the value in the creation and control of data. Increasingly, in this interconnected world, the value is in making data openly available and building services upon it. When people get charged for one thing, but gain value from another, they will become increasingly uncomfortable with the old status quo.

Now Richard is employed by Talis, who might be considered to be competing with OCLC to some extent in the library domain. And, it has to be said, there are some of us who aren’t entirely convinced that Talis will be able to build a viable business out of their undeniably interesting Talis Platform initiative.

Karen, in her presentation offered a rebuttal to Richard’s comment, which led to more about the ‘switch’ idea. During the Q&A at yesterday’s event I suggested that I didn’t feel that Richard’s comment had been answered. Again, invoking the benefits of concentration, Karen suggested that if all the world’s libraries made a record about every single copy of every book available as a URI on the Web then this would present scaling problems which even Google would balk at. I’m afraid I just can’t believe that this is problem of scale. It has also been suggested to me that concentration is necessary to allow the user to cope with the massive amounts of potential duplication – i.e. if I search for a book on a search engine like Google then I want one or two results, not one result for every copy in every library. Well, I think there are other strategies for dealing with this issue. Personalisation is one. Google seem to agree anyhow.

Recently, OCLC became embroiled in a controversy surrounding changes it made to its Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records. (See also an FAQ). I won’t revisit the arguments here – there was significant commentary criticising the changes (e.g 1 2 3 4 5) and a response from Karen Calhoun: essentially the concerns revolved around the perception that OCLC was seeking to reduce the control which member libraries can exert over the use of the data which they have contributed. OCLC withdrew the changed policy shortly afterwards and have launched a process for engaging the community in reviewing its policy.

In the course of the presentation yesterday, I was very struck by the similarities between this situation and that of Facebook’s recent attempt to change its terms of use. Both OCLC and Facebook:

tried to introduce these changes quietly
were hauled up immediately by an outcry from users and others in the general domain, especially in the blogosphere
quickly withdrew the changes
have engaged with the community directly in an attempt to create a mutually acceptable arrangement

They have other things in common. Both require what is, in its broadest sense, a monopoly, to be useful. Facebook is a walled garden, while WorldCat is certainly more open, but both need to be the dominant player or their value-proposition of concentration just doesn’t work. And I was fascinated to hear Karen talk about the community using norms, or socially-enforced rules. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has started to talk about ‘philosophy’ in a similar vein.

It seems to me that both OCLC/WorldCat and Facebook are trying to figure out how to make the best use of their position. One is driven by the search for profit, the other by delivering the best value to fee-paying members. Both have a monopoly of sorts, and both are seeking to exploit the Web, albeit in very different ways. They have custody of a huge amount of content, which has potential value but which is also an expensive burden. Because of their dominant position they are generally the first to expose some of the absurdities in user-expectations (witness the widespread belief by users of Facebook that they could really ‘delete’ their content from a distributed system), but they are also under constant, close scrutiny, which is A Good Thing.

I’m grateful to Karen for her clear presentation yesterday, and for her part in this process. When I put the comparison to Facebook to her yesterday, she didn’t recoil from this as she might have done. I think there has been a significant advance in recent months, in that communities are beginning to glimpse the complexities behind what were imagined to be more simple issues of rights, ownership and control. Both OCLC and Facebook have responded gracefully to having been called out by their respective communities and, crucially, have invited those communities to participate in solving the knotty problem of reconciling the desire for useful services with the expectations of ownership and control.

Facebook wants your attention, not your photos

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There has been something of a furore over a recent change to Facebook‘s terms of service (ToS). The Consumerist reported this as Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”.

The change in question was the removal of a clause stating:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

[my emphasis]

So, even if I delete my account, any content I have uploaded to Facebook may remain. On the face of it, this sounds unreasonable. And the fact that this alteration to the ToS was made rather quietly is enough to raise a little suspicion. Objections to this change were swift and many. Fittingly, the largest concerted protest was organised within Facebook itself by the group called People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS) (ironically, if you want to read about the risks associated with the new ToS in this Facebook group then you will have to join Facebook as it remains a walled garden). The members of this group (claimed to be 60,000 in number) identified ’3 Big Questions for Facebook’, which boil down to seeking reassurance that Facebook will not, at some future point, exploit user-generated content for its own profit.

Now, I think it is good that this change in ToS was picked up, challenged, and has now been reversed. Facebook were clearly mistaken if they thought that they could just make this change quietly without an ensuing protest. However I, for one, believe their rationale for making this change in the first place. On the Facebook blog, Mark Zuckerberg justified the change to the ToS:

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

His comparison to email is, I think, bogus – for this to hold water the world’s email would have to reside in one system owned by one company, which it clearly does not. However Facebook is, by dint of its huge user-base if not technical innovation, raising all kinds of issues to do with user-generated content, rights, management etc. It has chosen to try to deal with these issues through a trial-and-error approach which may realistically, be the only way to do so. There is a lot of grey area to be explored here and a change, for example, which allowed users to delete all content which they had ever uploaded to Facebook would have a serious impact on Facebook’s architecture and functionality.

Now, I’m certainly not a fan of Facebook. I have yet to find a use for it in my professional life and have criticised before the assumption that, for example, Higher Education should be embracing it as a service because it is widely popular. But I will say that I think the furore about Facebook’s ‘ownership’ of user-generated-content has, by and large, slightly missed the point. There has been wide-spread concern about how Facebook might sell the rights to users’ photos for advertising purposes for example. The idea that Facebook would risk the public wrath of users for this kind of business model seems, to me, to be highly unlikely. Frankly, I don’t think that Facebook has any business model which revolves around individual user’s content. There is only one thing of potential, unproven, value to Facebook and that is the aggregate of users’ attention data. Typically, this would cover the data which a system logs about everything the user has visited and/or clicked on. Attention data can be exploited within a system to seed recommendation algorithms, tailoring a user’s experience and delivering personalised content to them. In the case of Facebook, attention data could also be derived from user-generated-content (i.e. status updates, news, mail, even other media such as photos) which can be mined for clues about trends in interest and behaviour. We know already that Facebook has sought to monetise this – witness the Beacon debacle of November 2007.

There are certainly some interesting issues to be wrestled with regarding user content in the special context of social networking sites like Facebook. We should be vigilant, as Facebook and the like are by no means clear themselves about how best to manage these issues, and some of their aborted experiments will be harmful to users and their rights. However, in being vigilant, we must ensure that we focus on the real issue. We flatter ourselves if we think Facebook is interested in our uploaded photos from the office party. What they really want is to know what we think, what we like and don’t like, what we buy, how we plan to vote….. People will pay large amounts of money for this kind of data.

And I won’t even mention the CIA….

Making developers happy

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Since I joined UKOLN two years ago, I have frequently claimed that we (JISC, the sector, our community) don’t do enough to support and listen to developers. Well, I’m just back from The Developers Happiness Days (dev8D) in London and I can certainly no longer say this. A solid week of developer happiness! A week of ideas generated, geeks networking with users, competitive and yet collaborative development, knowledge being exchanged…. followed by fun and, yes, a bit of drinking.

The brain-child of David Flanders and Ben O’Steen, with support and ideas from several others and funding from the JISC, dev8D has been a fantastic success, and has managed the difficult task of appealing to, and being successful for, a range of people with varying levels of experience and technical chops. The inexperienced developer looking to be exposed to new ideas and to the wisdom of more experienced folk was well served. Julian Cheal of UKOLN fitted this description and he embraced the opportunities dev8D presented to him, engaging at all levels with the event to the extent that he was rewarded with both a prize for his helpfulness and a special mention at the awards dinner for ‘best newcomer’. But the older hands were fully engaged nonetheless – presenting on their areas of expertise in ‘lightning talks’ in the true barcamp style which geeks have embraced as their own way of conducting conference sessions. It was great to see so many familiar faces together at one event, being unashamedly techie, exchanging ideas and help.

Although, like some others, I was forced to miss some of the event due to a deadline for bids to a JISC call falling on the Wednesday, I still managed to sit in on some sessions, and I learned plenty, especially in a talk on agile development about which I’ll blog more, separately.

One of the things which stood out at dev8D was the way in which users (or UberUsers) were invited to engage with developers. There’s an important, non-obvious distinction here. Users were invited to come into the developers’ environment. Brave users, you might say! Normally, developers are invited into the users’ environment…. for just long enough to explain to them what the users require. Users would often rather not have to deal with developers all that much. To step into an environment of happy, busy developers must have been an eye-opening experience for those users who were brave enough, and open-minded enough to try it. Although I wasn’t on the ‘dragons den’ panel looking at the prototypes being developed in the Developer Decathlon, it was remarked to me several times that the quality of submissions was better than in previous events – and that this was attributed to the fact that users had been involved in the prototyping process. I’m one of the judges who’ll be marking these submissions and I’m really looking forward to seeing what was produced.

With these events, there are little things which can make a difference. The use of Wordle to produce personalised name badges for each delegate was inspired, as was the use of happiness tokens to reward help or ideas. The Twitter back-channel was used to tremendous effect – the ‘#dev8D’ tag made the top ten Twitter ‘trends’ worldwide. Sam Easterby Smith even built a Twitter-powered developer-happiness meter!

I’d like to go on record thanking David Flanders in particular for driving this event – the guy must be utterly exhausted after working 18 hour days for a week. I think we should also recognise the vision of those in the JISC (and especially Rachel Bruce) who were prepared to back what must have looked like a risky proposition. There was value in the event itself – the networking, and the capacity building which went with this and I have good reason to believe there will be value in the prototypes and ideas generated as a result. But, perhaps most importantly, the sector has just shown the world that it values its developers, and is prepared to invest in them, and even spend a little to make them happy. I believe this will have been a wise investment. As I said on Twitter, there’s a community developing which I’m proud to be associated with.

If you want to know more, the tag ‘dev8D’ has been used extensively in various systems. Some examples:

Image by Dave Pattern (http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/3274205523/sizes/m/)

OpenID and name authority

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In his Science in the Open blog Cameron Neylon has written an interesting post, A Specialist OpenID Service to Provide Unique Researcher IDs? in which he asks:

Good citation practice lies at the core of good science. The value of research data is not so much in the data itself but its context, its connection with other data and ideas. How then is it that we have no way of citing a person?

Cameron suggests that OpenID might offer a solution to this.

I have been very interested in OpenID for some time. I like the relatively agile way in the which the standard has evolved. I like the fact that it has been responsive to the developer community. I agree with Andy Powell when he talks about the importance of the capacity for the delegation of the service providing your OpenID – I’ve maintained an OpenID for myself at http://paulwalk.net despite having changed the underlying OpenID identity provider service twice. However, I’ve become frustrated by the way in which OpenID has been deployed and couched almost entirely in terms of it’s potential to solve the often-exaggerated problem of users needing to maintain too many user accounts (although I confess that I have contributed to this). Personally I maintain a small handful of username/password combinations for accessing hundreds of web services – it’s a minor inconvenience. And as Mike Ellis pointed out in a great post, OpenID: fail:

In a technical sense, OpenID works. But from a usability perspective, it’s absolutely horrible.

I blogged about OpenID a while ago, saying:

I’ve thought for a while that the introduction of URIs for people was the often overlooked yet potentially most interesting aspect of OpenID. In a resource-oriented-architecture, it would seem plausible to suppose that a reliable pointer to a representation of a person would be a useful thing. But when I try to sketch out a useful application for this, I struggle….

The idea of using OpenID as an ‘author identifier’ in scholarly communications has occurred to me before too – specifically in the context of repositories. I agree it could play a part here. At one level this could be seen as an extension of the ongoing persistent identifier issue in the context of web-resources, being applied to people. However, as an OpenID is a URL, it is open to the same criticisms levelled against the use of URLs for papers in an institutional repository for instance (the delegation feature does mitigate this, albeit only slightly).

One aspect of OpenID, which I think might become relevant if OpenID reaches any kind of critical mass as a public identifier system will be the way in which a given OpenID could gain authority over time. The only thing you can trust about a newly minted OpenID is that you can interrogate the ‘user’ of the OpenID and verify that they are the agent which ‘controls’ or ‘owns’ it. However, an OpenID will rarely be surfaced without other metadata about the agent – there will be a context in which it is used. In a community of researchers for example, as a particular OpenID is used more and more by a researcher in various contexts and systems, a level of trust will build around the association of that OpenID with an actual person.

For a long while I thought that OpenID might be the answer to a problem arising out of the need for a different user-account in every system we use – not the bogus issue of needing to remember lots of passwords, but the fact that this creates an immediate obstacle to joining up those systems at the level of the user. This issue has become more visible with the systems underpinning social networks. I see all kinds of potential in being able to conclude that while I might not know the person identified here in this system, I can be sure that they are the same person in this other system, because they have the same OpenID. Of course there is all kinds of potential for abuse of such join-up, but I would still like to be able to control such arrangements myself.

Increasingly, I’m annoyed by my social-web activities being constrained unnecessarily by really prosaic limitations in the systems I use. As I said in another post back in September 2007:

Now, it’s certainly not unusual to maintain more than one, unconnected circle of contacts. Many people prefer to keep their professional and their social networks separate. But, and this is the important point, I really don’t want my social networks to be constrained by particular software choices. As I can connect resources across the web in a uniform way to form a network of resources, I want to be able to connect people to form my social network. Perhaps OpenID or something similar could provide the solution.

Imagine a Web where everything you did publicly was linked by the very fact that you were represented by a URL exactly like your blog post, or your photo on Flickr, or your post on Twitter, or your correction to that Wikipedia entry, or your research paper in your institutional repository for that matter…. think of the possibilities.

Consumption and ownership

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I just read a really good post from Martin Weller on Ed Techie called Ownership ain’t what it used to be. Talking about web-based music sharing services such as LastFM, and having just signed up to Spotify, Martin says:

It brought back to me some considerations I’d had about the nature of ownership. My generation will have a distinctly different concept of ownership to that of my daughter’s generation. For my generation you partly constructed your identity around what you owned – your bookshelf, record collection and DVD archive were important aspects of who you were (as anyone who has read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity will appreciate). But for the digital generation this strong link with ownership has been broken.

It took time and money to build up any of those collections. Therefore they demonstrated a commitment which was worth exhibiting. In a digital world this effort is greatly reduced, and as a result so is the emotional attachment one feels towards them.

This rings very true to me. I’m also interested in a slightly different aspect to this. When I first bought an iPod for myself (about 3-4 years ago), I went for the small ‘Nano’ model knowing that it had limited capacity (around 2GB if memory serves). My CD collection could not possibly fit on this device – but I did not mind. I didn’t see the iPod as a replacement for the media I owned, I saw it as a convenient way to get access to my favourite music – where ‘favourite’ could be a flexible category. I distinctly remember an argument with a colleague who was horrified that I would extract just one or two songs from a particular album – I think he saw this as a kind of desecration of an artwork. I realised at the time that I might be more of a consumer than a connoisseur of popular music (I definitely preferred the ‘punk single’ to the ‘concept album’). However, it was only when I started to buy the odd tune from iTunes that I realised something more profound had changed. I could now buy a single tune, from an album, without needing to own, or even know or care, what ever else might be on that album. In the last three years I have only bought one album for myself (a CD from Amazon), because it was cheaper than buying the 6 songs I wanted from iTunes. I don’t take any particular pride in my CD collection: for some time I have had a vague plan to archive it all to disk (quicker than being selective), make sure I have a good backup, and dispose of the CDs. But as Martin points out:

Imagine a service like Spotify greatly increased so you could find any artist, and with mobile devices, get access anywhere. Why do I need to own any of these tracks then? I can get them whenever I want, and isn’t that the point of ownership, to have access under your control?

We’d certainly need to closely examine the ‘access under your control’ part of such an arrangement but this is, nonetheless, an attractive proposition to me. Will I feel the same way about books, I wonder, once, or indeed if, devices for reading eBooks become so good that I no longer need the paper format?

Martin talks about this in the context of identity – and how ownership of music was a major signifier in how certain generations (mine included) of young people constructed their identities. He speculates that this will now change with current generation of young people. But I’m also interested in a more prosaic matter: If you stripped my house of CDs (not forgetting vinyl records and cassette-tapes) and, more significantly, books, then my home environment would be changed dramatically. I already think twice before buying reference books – knowing that there is a wealth of good reference material on the web.

Clearly, aesthetics matter also. There is pleasure to be had in handling a nicely formed book. Album covers on vinyl LPs can be beautiful (something which was lost with the move to CD). Bearing this in mind I predict that, ten years from now, I will have disposed of:

100% of my cassette-tapes
99% of my CDs
99% of my DVDs
99% of my vinyl singles
70% of my vinyl albums
50% of my books

Instead, I will have access to massive amounts of data storage – not necessarily owned by me, and access to huge libraries of music, film, text etc. via excellent client hardware and software.

Now, what will I do with all that shelf space?

N.B. I realise that my views on music may be partly a product of age – I certainly care a little less passionately about specific pieces of music now than I did when I was much younger. (I once stopped talking to a friend for a while at school because they said the Smiths were rubbish, when they were clearly supreme at the time)

Developer happiness

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Are you a developer of software? Could you be happier? If so, come along to the JISC Developer Happiness Days event!

From the website:

Over four intensive days we’re bringing together the cream of the crop of educational software developers along with coders from other sectors, users, and technological tinkerers in an exciting new forum.

Share your skills and knowledge with the coding community in a stimulating and fun environment and come away with new skills, fresh contacts – and you might even win a prize.

The top ideas generated at the event will be documented, publicised and made available to the community.

This innovative event includes:

Pre-event workshops with code labs to share knowledge and develop skills

The ‘developer decathlon’: a two-day team coding session with prizes for the best code

A community-building day bringing together developers based around software platforms

Roll-your-own-event: space and time for your own community-specific event or workshop

I think this will be an excellent opportunity for developers from the education sector especially, but also from beyond this, to get together and share ideas and experience. And drink beer.

It’s all happening in London, in and around the Birkbeck College, between the 9th-13th February.

The tag for this event is ‘dev8d’.

Push or pull?

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A brief comment, as I hop across the North Sea back to Bristol.

With the news that arXiv will now accept deposits from institutional repositories, Dorothea Salo continues her theme about a deposit flow which goes from author, to institutional repository, to subject/discipline repository. Dorothea offers some scenarios, including:

Achaea University adopts a Harvard-style open-access mandate. If she wants her articles in arXiv as well, Dr. Troia must rather annoyingly dual-deposit… unless Achaea’s IR implements a deposit pipeline to arXiv, in which case the most she has to do is tick a ticky-box (and I can imagine ways to abstract away the ticky-box).

In an abstract sense I appreciate the notion of the ‘deposit pipeline’. I also agree with the main point which is about the direction of the flow. Indeed, I have previously characterized the institutional repository as being, or more usually containing, the source repository. However, I remain slightly doubtful about the need for the flow to be initiated by the source. If there were some mechanism by which the subject/discipline repository could be alerted to the appearance of relevant materials in the institutional repository, then doesn’t it make sense for the subject repository to fetch the record/artefact, rather than wait to have it sent. Well, we already have the mechanism, it’s called RSS (or Atom) and it’s already supported by some of our most popular repository software.

Come to think of it, an even better approach might be for the subject repository, having been alerted to a new & relevant deposit in the institutional repository, to simply maintain a pointer to the original (optionally creating new and related resources)

In other words, as a certain generation of programmers would put it, pass by reference, not by copy.

Macs and fast hibernation

I think I might be allergic to lists and awards

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Warning: highly subjective opinion-piece and a plea for enlightenment follows: no useful information imparted here….

A little while ago, my blog got nominated for an award. A single nomination was enough to put it onto a shortlist, made available for public voting. I have been thinking about what this means…. or doesn’t mean. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about those lists of ‘must read’ blogs which I come across from time to time – (inevitably, a more recent trend is for lists of ‘Twitterers you should follow’). I would also include ‘blogrolls’ in this category. I think all of these things are related, and I think I have broadly the same misgivings about them.

Take this whole business of awards for blogs. At one level it just doesn’t interest me at all – I would no more read a blog because it was given an award than I would go see a movie because it won an ‘Oscar’. Having said that, I don’t have anything against the Oscars. I think what bothers me slightly about awards for blogs, is that the perceived benefit, presumably, is to give more exposure to popular (or ‘good’) blogs. Essentially, it is another way of creating a list of ‘must-read blogs’ only this time it’s as voted for by you, the public.

I’m not the only one a little bothered by this. Doug Johnson says:

But I just don’t get it. What is the purpose of awards and rankings? Do we really need them in this long-tailed communication medium of blogging? In fact, might they even be counter productive? [...] But comparing the size (popularity) of mine to the size (popularity) of yours seems the antithesis of the “I’ll share mine if you share yours” world of personal learning networks.

But then again, there are others who are clearly very pleased to be nominated and seem to relish the competition, reminding and urging their readers to vote for them.

I think that the reason I don’t like the idea of such lists is the way in which they seem to embody a process of ‘received wisdom’. The marvelous thing about the blogosphere for me is the way in which the playing-field has been leveled. If you write compellingly about something in which people are interested then they will tend to find it. The opportunity for diversity of thinking and discourse on such a scale is still new – we should cherish this. The chance to make new connections, have new conversations with people with new points of view, is something that the blogosphere seems to almost uniquely afford us.

I am very interested in knowing who reads my blog, rather than how many. Writing this particular blog is an ‘extra-curricular’ activity for me, so metrics about how many hits I get etc. are not very relevant. When I discovered that someone had nominated my blog for an award, I was pleased that they had done so and, more importantly, was interested to read what they said in their nomination. I would have been equally pleased with this if it had been a random comment, out of any context of competition, about my blog. Perhaps the superstructure of a competition/award is necessary to bring out such comments?

This is not something I feel terribly strongly about – it doesn’t affect me much and until recently, I had been able to largely ignore it. I feel compelled to say something here mostly because hardly anyone else seems to feel this way. I feel slightly out-of-step with people with whom I normally have much in common. So I would welcome comments: what am I missing here?

paul walk's weblog

professional reflections