Seeing the picture

Google Magazines – Top 20 Titles

November 17, 2009 – 1:53 pm

This is a subset of my list that has all titles as of November, 2009, when Google announced that they would provide their own list. The titles below are my subjective picks, based on generality of interest and/or length of availability.

• American Motorcyclist, Feb 1955 – July 2005
• Backpacker, Spring 1973 – Dec 2004
• Baseball digest, July, 1945 – Oct 2007
• Billboard, Jan 1942 – Nov 2008
• Black Belt, 1962 – 2004
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dec 1945 – Nov 1998
• The Crisis, 1911-2009
• Cruise travel, Jan 1980 – Dec 2007
• Ebony, Mar 1962 – Nov 2008
• InfoWorld Dec 11, 1978 – Mar 26, 2007
  
• Jet, Nov 1951 – Oct 20, 2008
• Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, 1947-2007
• Life Magazine, 1936 – 1972
• Mother Jones, 1976 – Jan 2000
• New York magazine, Apr 29, 1968 – Dec 22, 1997
• Popular mechanics, Jan 1905 – Dec 2005
• Popular science, May 1872 – Feb 2008
• The Rotarian, 1912-2008
• Vegetarian times, March 1981 – Nov 2004

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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Keep the Ball Rolling: Twitter & Blogging Together

November 12, 2009 – 1:36 pm

I recently fell into a nice little example of how tweets “accumulate wisdom” as they get retweeted — Starting with a simple “link to a good site” sort of tweet, then someone finds an especially good specific page down inside the good site and retweets that, then the next retweeter sees an interesting angle on that page and adds a hashtag for it … The ball just rolls along … Until it eventually leads to a series of good comments on my blog … all because of that simple little tweet that started the ball rolling …

The ball started rolling when I saw this tweet, that links to the Genetic Science Learning Center home page at Univ of Utah …

I found a cool specific page at the Utah site that I thought would be more likely to draw interest than just linking to the home page …

Hugo Buriel (@BurielWebwerx) found my tweet, and in retweeting it, he made the perceptive connection to Seadragon (see my words about it below), which I hadn’t thought of  …

The Slider tool at Utah does indeed look like pages viewed with Seadragon, an innovative Microsoft technology for seamless zooming. I became interested in Seadragon a year ago, and even wrote a posting about it, so I wrote a tweet to link to that posting …

This was (I assume) seen by Graham Storrs (@graywave) on Twitter, and so he sent in his useful comments to the blog article.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Posted in PicsNo, Twitter, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Steve Jobs’ Legacy: To Save Publishing with the Tablet?

November 6, 2009 – 2:56 pm

John C. Abell, in his recent Wired article Steve Jobs’ Legacy Is the Missing Clue to the Apple Tablet, suggests that in the same way that he invigorated animated film with Pixar, the music industry with iTunes, and the mobile phone market with the iPhone, Jobs’ next mission is to invigorate the publishing industry with the Tablet. Abell talks specifically about the newspaper and magazine publishing industry, but his comments, I think, can easily be broadened to books also, as he talks about making readers forget about the printed page. I’m excerpting here because the words about publishing may be missed by many readers — Short excerpts, but with considerably more valuable nuggets than will fit into a 140-char Tweet:

If he is looking for One Last Thing, saving journalism would be the Holy Grail. … The device will have to make readers forget — really forget — the printed page. E-readers, for all that they do, don’t do this yet.

After detailing Jobs’ accomplishments in invigorating other industries, as mentioned above, Abell concludes with these words:

Even given this track record — and what we choose to believe is the all-trumping motivator of perfecting his legacy — a device-centric initiative that saves newspapers and magazines that seem to be in perpetual, some say irretrievable, decline, sounds next to impossible.

But is anybody seriously willing to bet against the house — of Jobs?

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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Roy Tennant & the Onion on Weeding the Internet

November 6, 2009 – 1:47 pm

I love serendipity — I happened to see these two pieces on the same day recently, and couldn’t help putting them together. Is there a meaning somewhere here? ….

Information on the Internet That Should Go Away, Roy Tennant

This is the kind of information I wish would disappear: old, outdated, in many cases downright misleading or incorrect. Now to only find the algorithm for determining these characteristics and nuking this dreck off the net! (boldface added here and below)

A case of great minds thinking alike? …

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index, The Onion

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to “organize the world’s information,” announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index. … “Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. “Soon, it will be.”

Fun Kicker — My first idea for a title for this article was “… Trimming the Internet.” Then I thought differently, and googled for “weeding the Internet” to see what might turn up – Sure enough, one of a handful of retrievals with that phrase is a library handout from libraries.uc.edu on The Library vs The Internet, sounding just like Roy: “No one’s weeding the Internet, and sites with seriously outdated information are still available.”

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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Google Books Integrated into Google Search Results

October 30, 2009 – 2:50 pm

The recent controversy about the Google Book Search Settlement seems to have taken up peoples’ Google-watching attention so much that advances in the way GBS actually works have been getting overlooked. Several notable improvements were made during the summer, for example, that got very little recognition. Another change that seems to have gotten little recognition is that Google web searches have begun to include links to books in GBS in the last 1-2 years (as in the example at left). Particularly in searching for historical topics, I’ve been seeing searches recently in which the majority of the first 10 hits are from GBS — A great advance, I think, for historical research. Up to now, my experience has been that history has been a fairly weak subject on the Web — Locked away in books, not on Web pages.

I had occasion to take advantage of the newly accessible books from GBS recently, when I was least expecting it, while having a discussion with my son David, who’s a long-distance runner, about track runners of the past at the University of Iowa. I remembered that one particular runner on the team, Ted Wheeler, ran on the US Olympic team in the 1950’s, and that he later went on to become the coach for the UI track team (I especially knew about him because while he was the coach he married Sheila Creth, the University Librarian at the University of Iowa Libraries, where I work). David knew that Wheeler had been in the Olympics, and thought that he had been an assistant coach at Iowa, rather than the head coach. So … of course I turned to Google to settle the “discussion.” It turned out to be a surprisingly difficult search. I assumed that it would be fairly easy to find records of recent track coaches at a large, Big Ten program like Iowa. But it wasn’t — I tried several search terms without success before — Bingo! — I finally hit upon the combination that turned up the page shown here, establishing that Wheeler was, indeed, the UI track coach from 1978 to 1996 — with the added benefit of a great picture!

The point of this little story: I think integrating GBS links into Google web search is a great advance, and deserves more attention. As I said above, there’s been so much negative press for Google in recent discussions of the Settlement that everything they do is interpreted negatively — I saw a link in the last couple of weeks, that I unfortunately didn’t keep track of, decrying Google’s putting GBS links in Web search results because someone thought Google was trying to unfairly boost their own content. Really?? I think there’s such a treasure in old books that the world will benefit from Google’s making them more accessible. There are questions, certainly, about the algorithm used by Google to determine which books are included in Web search results, and I hope Google will say more about that. But it’s not only Google that’s saying little on the subject — I haven’t seen much discussion at all by anybody on the integration of GBS books in Google web search results –  If anyone can find it, please add a comment or contact me by Twitter or Email.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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Google Book Search a Hot Topic? NOT!

October 28, 2009 – 5:06 pm

Searching for talk on Google Books and the Settlement since Judge Denny Chin delayed the decision on October 7, I’ve been finding very little — What had been a stream of chatter in Twitter searches has turned into a trickle. I found a little example reflecting this today that I think is worth recording — The first seven hits in a Twitter search for #GBS, going back a day, are in German. … You can pretty much tell when NO ONE in the US is talking about a subject when you search in Twitter and find that the last day’s tweets are NOT IN ENGLISH! … I’d predict that in a couple of weeks there WILL be a bit of discussion in English!

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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Why Apple & Google Win – And Libraries Don’t

October 22, 2009 – 2:46 pm

Many possible takes on this picture. What comes to my mind first is the idea of the Attention Economy –The idea that in the days of the traditional library, before the Internet, information was a limited resource. Libraries could afford to work under the assumption that “we’ve got the good stuff, and our users have to to come to us to get it.” There was little motivation to improve overly-complicated search interfaces like the picture on the right above, because users had no choice. In the new environment of the Internet, however, the limiting factor is not information, but attention. The problem of users now is not finding information, but being flooded by too much information. In this environment, users naturally gravitate to the easiest information to find, which, of course, Apple, Google et al are glad to provide.

Another take on this is the high cost of Simplicity –The simple interfaces of Apple and Google are just the tip of the iceberg, built upon the costly labor of armies of engineers. Libraries just can’t afford to compete with this sort of juggernaut. Personally, I consider myself lucky, as a librarian, to be working in a medical library — Medical libraries have a long history of generous federal support, in the interests of the country’s health, which has enabled the creation of tools to streamline access to medical information, from Index Medicus to PubMed. For libraries generally, however, it’s still hard to compete with the resources of dotcom information providers. To end on a hopeful note — It’s encouraging to see that libraries are increasingly realizing the importance of providing Google-like interfaces for their catalogs, to gain back the attention from users that they’ve lost in recent few years.

The picture above, and the title of this post, are adapted from an article by Scott Monty — Thanks!

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Posted in Google, Libraries, Library Catalog, PicsYes, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

MedlinePlus Needs a New Name

October 21, 2009 – 9:36 am

Google Health OneBox is a boost for NLM’s MedlinePlus — As discussed previously, though, a few tweaks could make it an even bigger boost. A problem not discussed in the previous article is the “MedlinePlus” name — It has little user recognition, and therefore gets considerably less traffic than it might with a better name. In the NLM Update at the recent Midwest Chapter/Medical Library Association meeting, NLM staffer Paula Kitendaugh said some people at NLM are aware of this, and that a different name would likely do better in Google OneBox, but that so far bureaucratic inertia has prevented a name-change.

Realizing how slowly the wheels turn in a large organization like NLM, then, a better name for MedlinPlus is probably unlikely to happen soon. But how about a quick fix for the name of the link in Google OneBox, to take advantage of the fire-hose of potential traffic from Google? My idea for a simple change, that I think would draw more traffic, as shown in the enhanced screen shot here, is to change the link name from “Medline Plus” to “Natl Lib Med.” I think this simple abbreviation would be recognized and respected by users, and boost clicks to NLM.

As far as a new name for MedlinePlus, I don’t have any ideas so far. If anyone else does, please make a comment, or send to me via email or Twitter.

Accompanying article: MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox

October 15, 2009 – 1:15 pm

In August, Google launched Google Health OneBox (left). This puts the National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus right at the top of the search results, and is potentially a valuable new source of traffic for NLM.

There are factors, however, that work against MLP — The three prominent links on the left, which are likely to get the bulk of OneBox clicks (Asthma, Google Health, & thumbnail) go to the Google Health Topics page (below). This has the same text and pictures as the MLP Encyclopedia/ADAM page that’s linked from the OneBox Medline Plus link. But there’s an important difference — The Google Health version of ADAM has Symptoms as the first section after Overview. The MLP version of ADAM, on the other hand (see further down on this page) has Causes as the first section. …

This may seem to be a minor difference. But I’ve learned — through long experience with Hardin MD and brief experience with the short-lived Medical Library Association-Google Health Coop project — that symptoms are a very popular, heavily searched topic for users (which Google certainly knows!). So I suspect that users who try out the Google Health and Medline Plus OneBox links will quickly learn to prefer Google Health because it features the symptoms information they’re looking for. It IS a positive for NLM that the Google Health page has a prominent link to MLP. But it’s rather surprising that there’s no clear credit given to ADAM as the original provider of the information — ADAM is credited only at the bottom of the page, where few users will see it (and I suspect many will consider it copyright-free, since they’ll presume that it’s from a government site.)

MedlinePlus & Google Health OneBox — How NLM can boost traffic

Change the order of sections on ADAM Encyclopedia pages, to put Symptoms at the top, as Google does. This would make the pages more interesting to most users.

Surprisingly, MLP Encyclopedia pages, which is what Google OneBox links to, have no links to equivalent MLP Health Topic pages (Example: there is no link between the Asthma pages in the Encyclopedia and in Health Topics) — After all, it’s the MLP Health Topic pages that NLM staff creates and maintains, so how about making links to them from Encyclopedia pages, so the surging clickers from Google OneBox can find them!

See follow-up article: MedlinePlus Needs a New Name

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

Posted in Google, MedlinePlus, PicsYes, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Tagging in Hardin MD — History

October 15, 2009 – 1:09 pm

[This article accompanies previous article: Tagging in Hardin MD]

Soon after the launching of Hardin MD, in 1996, we began adding keywords in the hidden META keyword field (The first pages for HMD in Internet Archive [Dec, 1998] show them on all pages checked.) We began checking to see if HMD pages were appearing in search engine results in about 2000, and found that meta keywords didn’t seem to have much effect.

So, in late 2000, we began experimenting with putting keywords (aka tags*) at the bottom of the page, where most users wouldn’t notice them. At first we didn’t see much effect in search engine results, when using the tags mostly for variant spellings or terminology (e.g. on the Hematology page: blood diseases, haematology).

In 2001, as Google rose to prominence, and Search improved, we began using tools that gave the ability to see the popularity of specific words (HitBox, ExtremeTracking, WordTracker). We learned that using mis-spelled word variants as tags worked very well in drawing SE traffic. It was also during this time that links to pictures were being added to HMD, and we discovered the power of the word “pictures” in drawing SE traffic.

Time-line of tagging in Hardin MD

Based on invaluable help from Internet Archive — Starting from here: Internet Archive for Hardin MD, 1999+

The first HMD pages in Internet Archive in Dec, 1998 have meta keywords, but not tags on the page. Example of meta keywords (Hardin MD: Cardiology): health, medicine, medical, nursing, nurses, nurse, disease, diseases, best, list, lists, consumer, cardiology, cardiac, heart, stroke, cardiovascular, cardiothoracic, pacemaker, defibrillator, attack, arrest

Tagging for misspellings – Ophthalmology, I’m sure, would have been one of the first pages on which misspellings would have been used. Internet Archive pages show clearly that the first implementation was in early November, 2000. …

Ophthalmology, Nov 7, 2000 – No misspellings in meta keywords. There are no tags on page.
Ophthalmology, Nov 15, 2000 – Has misspellings in meta keywords and on page: [ophthamology]

This fits my memory of events — I was especially motivated to look for ways to draw Web traffic, because Google was just becoming prominent, rationalizing the search process, and making it easier to predict the effects of changes on page traffic.

Other examples of pages with tags on the page, with variant spellings, from about the same time: Orthopedics Nov 16, 2000 [orthopaedics] and Hematology Nov 29, 2000 [blood diseases, haematology]

Use of the word “pictures,” in tagging and in page titles

First use: Genital Warts Jun 10, 2002

First widespread use – Several pages linked on Hardin MD Index page Sept 30, 2002

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Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumsey

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