• 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

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

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

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

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

.

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

The effort to correlate treatments and results has not yet triumphed. A “new” movement called “evidence-based medicine” [boldface added] has emerged recently, which continues to try to determine the best treatments and communicate them to physicians. No good physician today would discard the value of statistics, of evidence accumulated systematically in careful studies. But individual doctors, convinced either by anecdotal evidence from their own personal experience or by tradition, still criticize the use of statistics and probabilities to determine treatments and accept conclusions only reluctantly. Despite convincing studies, for example, it took years before cancer surgeons stopped doing radical mastectomies for all breast cancers.*

From my college training in History of Science & Medicine, I learned the subversive nature of the discipline — Subversive because it forces us to realize that sometimes we’re not as far beyond ancient methods and ideas as we think we are. How much is there in contemporary medicine that’s still a vestige of the relatively recent past that Barry describes?

*Radical mastectomies for breast cancers: The definitive study that disproved the value of this is here.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

The Copyright Office has been following the Google Library Project since 2003 with great interest. We first learned about it when Google approached the Library of Congress, seeking to scan all of the Library’s books. At that time, we advised the Library on the copyright issues relevant to mass scanning, and the Library offered Google the more limited ability to scan books that are in the public domain. An agreement did not come to fruition because Google could not accept the terms.

As discussed in my article in June, it seems surprising that the Library of Congress has not taken a more active role in the mass-scanning project that Google is doing. Peters’ words explain why — The copyright mess! If copyright gets fixed, LC might be doing the project instead of Google.

It’s encouraging that Peters has finally been given a platform to talk about the mess. She did talk about it at a Columbia University meeting in March, although it was not widely reported, and was apparently only recorded on a video which was not transcribed (see my transcription of a key passage here). At that conference, she’s reported to have said that Congress had shown no interest in hearing her testimony. Hopefully they’re ready to listen now.

Peters stresses in her testimony yesterday, and in her talk at Columbia, that Congress needs to be the one to fix copyright law. Letting the judiciary branch speak through the Settlement, she says, is making an “end run around the legislative process” — her words in yesterday’s testimony. Brewster Kahle used the same words in April.

With the GBS settlement discussion heating up, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the root of the problem is US Copyright law. As Peters suggests, until copyright is fixed, mass-scanning of books is going to be problematic.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Reading Nunbergs blog post corresponding to the talk is very entertaining in a juvenile sort of way. The poor guy has been trying to use Google Books as a linguistic research corpus, and has discovered to his professed horror that there are all sorts of errors, many of them humorous, in its metadata.

I must now let you in on a closely held secret among library metadata technologists which due to the Google Books metadata fiasco must now be revealed to the general public. There is some crappy data in library catalogs. How much is an interesting question, and my ability to comment on how much is limited by confidentiality obligations. However, I am free to observe that studies have been published on the error rate in OpenURL linking. OpenURL linking usually depends on matching of metadata between a source metadata file and a target metadata file; errors in either file can cause a linking error. Reported error rates are in excess of 1%. In his response to Nunberg blog post, Jon Orwant points out that a one in a million error occurs a million times if you have a trillion metadata items; my guess is that an error rate of one part per million may be overly optimistic by four orders of magnitude when applied to library metadata.

In my post on “collecting too much data”, I wrote that a huge challenge of maintaining a large metadata database is battling entropy as the collection grows. I’ve observed that most people trying to collect metadata go through an early period of thinking it’s easy, and then gradually gain understanding of the real challenges. Google has certainly been no exception to this pattern. When they first started dealing with book metadata, they were oblivious to the difficulties of maintaining a large metadata database. As Orwant’s response to Nunberg shows, they are currently in the phase of understanding the true difficulties of what they need to do. They have most certainly become attuned to the importance of keeping track of the source (provenance) of their metadata, if for no other reason than to have someone to blame for the inevitable metadata stupidities. Much of the “Linked Data” crowd has yet to digest this lesson fully.

Nunberg’s thesis is that Google Books will be the “Last Library” and that it would be a disaster for society if Google does a bad job of it. He does not consider the converse possibility. What if Google manages to do a better job of it than libraries have done? If that happens, all of the library world could be turned upside down. Existing metadata maintenance cooperatives would vanish overnight and libraries around the world would become dependent on Google’s metadata prowess. Google would acquire a legal metadata monopoly through technical merit rather than through class action maneuvering. What if Google, with pseudo-monopoly funding and the smartest engineers anywhere, manages to figure out new ways to separate the bird shit from the valuable metadata in thousands of metadata feeds, thereby revolutionizing the library world without even intending to do so? Is it this even conceivable?

Context: Recent articles by Geoff Nunberg:
Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck, Language Log blog (Hellman’s comments above refer to this article)
Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars, Chronicle of Higher Education

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Google as Burglar of One Million books? – #GBS settlement, Steve Pociask, Amer Consumer Inst (Forbes) http://bit.ly/MqovK
10:55 AM Aug 28th from web

I also added the name of the author and his connection with the Amer Consumer Inst, which I think added interest to the tweet, and which had gotten little attention in previous tweets on the article.

So, the simple lesson — When tweeting a link to an article, remember there’s no rule that you have to use the title that the author used. If it’s boring and unexciting and you think your followers’ eyes will gloss over reading it, use something else! READ THE ARTICLE and see if it has an interesting theme that’s not brought out by the title, and base your tweet on that instead.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey

Beyond the categories and sub-cats though — The most striking thing about this random sample of Wikipedia articles is the narrow, limited nature of the articles — Almost all of them are about things that No One Has Heard Of! — A great example of the Long Tail effect. Only in this case, it seems to be almost all Tail, and very little Head. Obviously, there are thousands of Wikipedia articles on well-known subjects, which we read every day. But in terms of numbers, the articles on minor, unheard-of subjects vastly outnumber the popular ones.

[There's more commentary below following the list]

Culture

• Oscuros Rinocerontes Enjaulados
  A 1990 short Cuban film, 1 screen, Stub
• Zoo in Budapest
  Film (1933) directed by Rowland V. Lee, 1 screen, Stub
• Yoga for You
  Indian television series, 1 screen, Stub
• The Dingees
  Band formed in Orange County, California in 1996, 2 screens
• RTZ
  American rock band in the late 1980s, 2 screens
• I Ribelli
  Italian rock group formed in 1959, 2 screens
• The Family Values 2001 Tour
  Music Album, 1 screen
• Citizen Fish
  A ska punk band that have been together since 1990, 3 screens
• List of Boston Celtics head coaches
  3 screens
• 2009 AEGON International – Women’s Doubles (Tennis)
  2screens
• American Sportsman’s Library
  Series of 16 volumes, from an American perspective, published 1902-1905, 2 screens
• Close Combat: First to Fight
  Squad-based military first-person shooter video game, 2 screens
• Tightening Key (Painting)
  Small wedge inserted into the corners of a canvas stretcher frame, 1 screen, Stub
• Switch (BDSM)
  BDSM is a compound acronym from the terms bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism, 2 screens

People

• Brigadier General Anthony Stack
  Currently a Brigadier General in service of the Canadian Forces, 1 screen
• Roy Orchard Woodruff
  Politician, soldier, printer and dentist from Michigan (1876 – 1953), 1 screen
• Ed Bryant
  Former Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Tennessee, 1948- , 3 screens
• Missy Higgins
  Australian singer-songwriter, 1983 – , 7 screens
• Răzvan Sabău
  Romanian tennis player, 1977- , 1 screen
• Mirza Rizvanović
  Bosnian football defender, 1 screen, Stub
• Steve Byrne
  American stand-up comedian, 1974- , 1 screen, Stub
• Joan Hambidge
  Afrikaans poet, literary theorist and academic, 1956- , 2 screens
• Agim Kaba
  American-Albanian actor, writer, director, sound editor, dancer, and film producer, 1980- , 1 screen
• Verda Welcome
  African-American teacher, civil rights leader, and Maryland state senator, 1907 – 1990, 2 screens
• Harolyn Blackwell
  African-American lyric coloratura soprano, 1955- , 7 screens
• Ron Sobieszczyk
  Retired American professional basketball player, 1 screen
• John Cumberland
  Former Major League Baseball player and coach, 1947- , 1 screen, Stub

Geography

• Cwmcarn Forest Drive
  Tourist attraction and scenic route in Cwmcarn, Crosskeys, Wales, 1 screen, Stub
• Vila Chã
  Portuguese parish with 2,957 inhabitants and a total area of 5.49 km², 1 screen, Stub
• Chojnowo
  Village in Krosno Odrzańskie County, Lubusz Voivodeship, western Poland, 1 screen, Stub
• Interstate 17
  5 screens
• Withee (Town) Wisconsin
  Town in Clark County in the US state of Wisconsin, with population of 885 at the 2000 census, 1 screen
• Edson, Wisconsin
  Town in Chippewa County in the US state of Wisconsin, with population of 966 at the 2000 census, 1 screen

Society

• Supercarrier
  Unofficial descriptive term for the largest type of aircraft carrier, 3 screens
• RAAF Base Curtin
  Royal Australian Air Force base located on the north coast of Western Australia, 1 screen, Stub
• Massachusetts House of Representatives
  16 screens
• List of all the United States Supreme Court cases from volume 211 of the United States Reports
  2screens

History

• Alexander Stewart, Duke of Rothesay (ca 1430)
  1 screen
• Redwood Castle
  Norman castle in Lorrha, County Tipperary, Ireland, 1 screen
• Friedrich Wilhelm Niepelt
  German entomologist, 1862 – 1936, 1 screen, Stub
• Nattal Sahu
  Earliest known Agrawal merchant-prince, who lived ca 1189, 1 screen
• Jayaprakash Narayan
  Indian freedom fighter and political leader, 1902 – 1979, 4 screens

Science

• Swannia
  Genus of moth in the family Geometridae, 1 screen, Stub
• Proflazepam
  Drug which is a benzodiazepine derivative, 1 screen, Stub

Technology

• Collaborative Application Markup Language
  XML based markup language, 2 screens
• Plant Reliability Analyst (Profession?)
  1 screen
• Scissors-glasses
  Eyeglasses mounted on scissoring stems rather than on temple stems, 1 screen

Math

• Adjunction space
  A common construction in topology, 1 screen

Disambiguation

• Blue collar (disambiguation)
  1 screen
• Tiga (Disambiguation)
  1 screen

I’m assuming that the Random Article link used to derive these links is truly random, that it does give a good sample of all Wikipedia articles. Surprisingly, I have not been able to find a Wikipedia article on “Wikipedia Random Article,” or any other commentary on it that might give an idea about this. I also have found no indication that anyone else has attempted to make a list of random Wikipedia articles, as presented here. Please let me know in a Comment if I’m missing something!

The purpose of the Kittur, Chi & Suh paper (PDF) mentioned above was to map all Wikipedia articles to one of the top level Wikipedia categories. The articles in the list above fit their results fairly well for most of the categories. Here are their results and mine (in parentheses):

Culture: 30% (28%)
People: 15% (26%)
Geography: 14% (12%)
Society: 12% (8%)
History: 11% (10%)
Science: 9% (4%)
Technology: 4% (6%)
Religion: 2% (0%)
Health: 2% (0%)
Math: 1% (2%)
Philosophy: 1% (0%)

The assigning of categories by me is imprecise at best, so it’s not surprising that there’s not complete agreement between my findings and those of KCS. It’s also possible that the real division of categories has changed since KCS collected data for their study, in Jan, 2008. Finally, one more bit on KCS – Their paper has the same base title as this article (What’s in Wikipedia?) — I actually thought of this title before I found their paper — In fact I found their paper because I searched for the title after I thought of it for this article! So I don’t feel like I’m stealing their title

Acknowledgement to my son David: The writing of this article is a long tale in itself! It arose from a (rather hair-brained, I now see) question I pondered — whether there’s a way to generate a “random Web page” from anywhere (The answer, I think is No, but that’s a separate discussion). As I discussed this idea with David, he mentioned the Random Article link on Wikipedia articles. I had actually never noticed this before, and found it quite interesting, which led to this article. Also David confirmed from his younger perspective that the links in the sample above are indeed obscure!

Note: These random links were generated over three separate days in the last week.

Eric Rumsey is on Twitter @ericrumsey