Late Night Pondering
This was posted by me to
LISNews on Wednesday:
A Vice President for Engineering at Google
announced that the Dodgeball service is being terminated in the
next couple of months and Jaiku is to be no longer developed
actively as a Google product. Jaiku was acquired
by Google in
October 2007. While mashups have been popular in the library
realm, Google's Mashup Editor is being terminated in favor of App
Engine with existing applications ceasing to receive data in six
months.
Google also announced that development of Google Notebook will
be terminated
next week and that they are focusing on integrating similar
features instead into SearchWiki, Google Docs, Tasks in Gmail, and
Google Bookmarks. At the Google Book Search project, the effort to
provide searching of product catalogs
is being terminated effective January 15th. Google Video
announced that no further uploads to the service will be allowed
at an undefined point in the next two months.
(h/t Ariel
Waldman)
Later on that day the following tweets showed up from Jason
Calacanis:
#1,
#2,
#3,
#4.
Jason's tweets were not optimistic about the plans of Google and
Yahoo!. He was optimistic for start-ups, though. Jason pointed out
reporting at
Search Engine Land in the matter.
We're working on putting the next episode of LISTen together. Such
flows during a week and can change. A conundrum right now is how to
respond to news like this. Simple reporting for librarians in
LISTen isn't enough. LISTen is a news magazine that is geared
towards professional development. The problem is how to do
such.
At this point, preparing HOWTO content is possibly going to get
very important. Libraries unfortunately are heavily invested in
using these "free" tools. What sort of a memory hole is created,
though, when the tools disappear? I fear that this is merely the
beginning of service closures since December saw Pownce and Podango
disappear.
Since there is plenty of library content on Flickr, a priority is
going to have to be putting together a HOWTO relative to preventive
archiving of what you posted. Such is not impossible. A tool called
FlickrFS
would allow libraries to archive their pictures in batches. While
there is an
Ubuntu
package available, nothing presently appears pre-built in
openSUSE Build Service or through
RPMFind. A Java-based tool for Windows would be
FlickrEdit although that
does not make pictures addressable as files like FlickrFS does via
FUSE.
A ton of change is coming in the Web 2.0 realm. Are events like
Computers in Libraries nimble enough to adapt? Do alternative
measures need to be taken to keep librarians in the loop?
I have no easy answer to that one. This is a conundrum ill-suited
for this time of night.