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Google Squared
Ars Technica has a good evaluation of Google Lab's new product Google Squared.
- Google squares the Web, hilarity ensues, By John Timmer, Ars Technica, June 4, 2009.
White House summary of open government brainstorming
The White House Blog has a nice summary of Open Government Brainstorm sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). It says the brainstorm generated more than 1000 ideas.
- Wrap-Up of the Open Government Brainstorming: Transparency, White House Blog, June 2, 2009.
- Convert Depository Libraries around the country into Regional Data Centers
- Use Data.gov as a repository of newly declassified information
- Make contributed data subject to a waiver of copyright and database rights
- Government should create permalinks on the paragraph level to make documents easier to cite
- Digitize all government research reports and make them available free
Doctorow on why search is too important to leave to one company
Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google, by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian, 2 June 2009.
It's a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It's too much power for a handful of companies to wield. The question of what we can and can't see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There's no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.Continue reading
State Dept. Hosts TED Talk
State Dept. Hosts TED Talk, Tech Daily Dose, June 2, 2009.
The State Department on Wednesday afternoon will host the first ever U.S. government-sponsored Technology, Entertainment, Design, or TED, event. Speakers include social-media analyst Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody; philanthropist Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the Acumen Fund; futurist Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog; economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion; and data visionary Hans Rosling, Karolinska Institutet Professor of International Health.... Video from the State Department event will be posted on the TED Web site, www.TED.com.Continue reading
REALLY Special Libraries
Resource Shelf has a great posting in honor of the 2009 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference coming up June 14-17 in Washington, DC: Resources of the Week: REALLY Special Libraries, By Shirl Kennedy. These are not government information collections, per se, but some clearly are related and have government information. Lately, friends and colleagues have been reminding me that many library directors don't understand the value of having local copies of digital government information when "everything is on the web." Really. That's what some library directors say. This attitude has at least two big problems, one of which is highlighted by this feature on special libraries. The first problem is the one we at FGI write about a lot: the problem of relying on someone else to provide long-term access and preservation to something that your users value. This is the problem of giving up control because you no longer actually have a collection, just pointers. The other problem is the one that this special libraries feature implies. That is the important role libraries can have (yes, even in the digital age!) of selecting, acquiring, and organizing information from disparate sources into a cohesive collection for a (not necessarily geographically-based) community. I recently read something a user wrote complaining about having to rely on "searching" to find everything. Search works when you know what you are looking for, but when you don't know something exists, or its relationship something you do know exists, you can't search for it. (To some extent this is the problem of undiscovered public knowledge. See Don R. Swanson, "Undiscovered Public Knowledge," Library Quarterly 56, April 1986: 103-118.) Libraries can build collections that are more usable than random searching of "everything" (that's searchable and still available) by keyword. Continue reading
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