Students’ trust in Google “strongly biased towards links higher in position”
In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance by Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke, Thorsten Joachims, Lori Lorigo, Geri Gay, and Laura Granka. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), article 3. (2007)
Abstract
An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.
Thanks to Library Journal Academic Newswire
Continue readingDMCA’s convoluted absurdities in unusually stark relief
The iPhone is locked so that it has to be used with AT&T's cellphone network. This article about software that allows users to unlock the phones asks "Would computer owners pick up an iMac that only worked with AT&T's DSL service?"
- Unlocked iPhones highlight DMCA absurdities, By Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica (August 28, 2007)
While cell phone unlocking is now legal under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because of a decision last year by the Library of Congress, this article speculates that AT&T will attempt to block sale of software allowing users to do so.
Allowing consumers to unlock their own property but not allowing them to purchase the tools to do so is the sort of situation that belongs only in Kafka, not in modern rulemaking.Continue reading
NASA digitization of photos and videos
NASA photo, video collection to be digitized, Digital Silence (August 27, 2007)
NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers.
NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives using no NASA funds.
"We're dedicated to making all human knowledge available in the digital realm," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet Archive.
More interesting details at the above link.
Continue readingPresidential Candidates: Who Will Stand Up and Be Transparent?
Calling All Presidential Candidates: Who Will Stand Up and Be Transparent?
Meet the only three would-be chief execs who will dare to tell you how the government spends your money.
by Nick Gillespie, Reason Online (August 24, 2007)
Continue reading
Book Review: Made to Stick – Info advocates must read
The book discussed below doesn't have much to do with government information, but I think it can be a powerful guide to those of us who our passionate about the cause of freely available government information.
Crossposted from Alaskan Librarian:
I feel fortunate that my library participates in a downloadable audiobook project called Listen Alaska through Overdrive, inc. It's given me the chance to do try out books on my mp3 player that I might not have picked up to read but turned out to be great books.
Such is the case with Made to stick : why some ideas some ideas survive and others die by Chip and Dan Heath. I downloaded the audiobook version from Listen Alaska, and was so impressed I ordered the paper copy for my library. If you're a librarian, you should too. Then read it. You can read the introduction right now by going to the companion web site at http://www.madetostick.com/.
Why do I think this book should be read by every librarian? Because the authors carefully lay out the elements needed to convey a compelling message and provide many examples of messages that work. Many well-intentioned people tell us librarians to "tell our stories." The Heath brothers show us HOW to tell our stories. Consultants tell libraries it is important to have a mission statement, but the Heath brothers demonstrate how to generate a "core value" that can actually guide decision making.
The authors start the book with a common and unforgettable urban legend and dissect the "stickiness" aspects that keep the legend in circulation. They suggest that every successful message has characteristics that spell out SUCES:
Simple
Unexpected
Credible
Emotions
Stories
The rest of the book examines how to make messages simple, unexpected, credible, have emotional content and how to tell stories. This is both simpler and more complex than it sounds. The books messages are made clearer by frequent "message clinics" where the brothers provide several ways of getting a message across and let the choose the one that seems most compelling.
Authors Chip and Dan Heath are the first to tell you that this isn't a cookbook. It's not a matter of following SUCES and having success every time. But they and I say that if you do put these elements into your messages, they'll have a fighting chance of being heard and remembered.
One of the things I regret about Library school is that there were no courses in communication or public relations. This is a particularly glaring deficiency because as a group librarians tend to be introverted and self-effacing. We don't have much experience in getting our stories out and tend to lapse into jargon and statistics, two things guaranteed to lose our audience. Made to Stick could help turn that around and make us effective advocates for our libraries and other causes in our lives.