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Category: culture

WorldCat: The Way to Find that Book you were looking for

Published October 26, 2007 by cgerrish

Library Catalog

Listening to a Jon Udell podcast is a real pleasure. I usually listen while walking around downtown San Francisco on my lunch hour. Jon takes the most obscure corners of the technology world and makes them engaging. He’s very good at connecting things. His conversation with Stuart Weibel is a great example. He starts with metadata issues around catagorizing books and ends up with WorldCat, the best possible way to find a book in a library— and possibly my new favorite search engine.

Yes, I know. It’s easy to find any book on Amazon, but sometimes you don’t need to buy a book, you just need to read it. And with WorldCat you can find any book held in any participating library. And because we’re talking about libraries, most are participating. Unlike the world of commerce where incompatible proprietary standards are considered a competitive advantage, libraries just want to help people find books. It’s a beautiful thing.

As a side note, my favorite library doesn’t participate in WorldCat. It’s a membership library in Downtown San Francisco called The Mechanics’ Institute Library. It was established in 1854 and has one of the most beautiful chess rooms you’ll ever set eyes on.

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Mahalo and Searching for Healthcare

Published October 25, 2007 by cgerrish

Red Cross

Microsoft has launched “Healthvault,” a private archive for personal medical data. Google, sans Bosworth, is trying to figure out how to connect people searching for health information with quality results. Both of these are very serious approaches to a serious issue.

I’m wondering if it’s Mahalo that has the right approach. Calacanis is focusing on the top 20,000 searches— which fills the front page of Mahalo with celebrity gossip, gadgets, music, television, movies, etc. Stuff that’s obviously popular. It’s a little like the People Magazine of search. “People” started as a single page in Time Magazine, it was like dessert. Time realized some people like dessert all the time.

Mahalo does some nice “How to” pages, for instance How to speak French, or How to play the Guitar. Mahalo is mostly for searching and finding the fun part of the internet, elective studies. But what about serious things like health? Well there’s more in the Mahalo health category than I would have thought. The Cancer category has decent set of pages. Currently you can search and find information a large number of healthcare topics, from autism to West Nile Virus. The topic of healthcare is particularly suited to Calacanis’s idea of search results shaped by a smart person. When an individual searches for health information, they’re not looking for a list of links. They’re looking for answers.

Note to Jason: let’s see some more “How to” pages in your healthcare category. The concept and format of your SERPs gives you an order of magnitude advantage over Google’s method of delivering information. The key here is the emotional charge of the search. Of course there’s a charge when people search for gossip about their favorite celebrity, but there’s also a very serious emotional charge when you search for information when you, or someone you love, has an illness and you need guidance.

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The In-Between Moments Transcribed

Published October 25, 2007 by cgerrish

Travel and airports seem to show up on Twitter all the time. The in-between times that were private moments of boredom and pain become a kind of blues refrain echoing through Twitter and the other microblogging venues.

It’s Dave Winer stuck in the Lone Star State, Jeremy Keith boarding a plane to San Francisco, Hugh Macleod picking up his baggage, or Steve Gillmor interviewing someone walking through an airport terminal. We work in the off hours, and now we transcribe our private moments of boredom and wedge a conversation into walk to the security gate.

Perhaps it’s Ev Williams fault, asking us what we’re doing— when we’re doing something very boring. But because it’s boring, we need an outlet for our pain. Twitter beckons.

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Why Marketing is Broken

Published October 16, 2007 by cgerrish

Allen Stern claims that RSS is broken because it doesn’t deliver customers to him on a plate. Of course, he then explains that RSS was never designed to rat out it’s subscribers to marketers. Gee, people can anonymously subscribe to my feed. If you think about it, I do know that the subscriber is the kind of person who would subscribe to my particular feed. So that tells me something. Although it doesn’t tell me when they’ve lost interest, or if they intended to unsubscribe, but were too lazy to do so.

But the idea that marketers have any claim on the kind of data that Stern is asking for shows a real lack of understanding. Perhaps Mr. Stern needs to have a long conversation with Doc Searls about Vendor Relationship Management. Yes, traditionally marketers put potential customers into their sights using the kind of stats Stern wants RSS to collect. But the equation isn’t the same on the internet, it isn’t a “one to many” broadcast medium. It’s “many to many” where there’s a democratization of the participants in the network. People are starting to understand that their interest in, and even their raw attention toward a product has a value. And deciding to expose any data to a potential vendor is a customer choice, not a marketers right.

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