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

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumsey AttSign uiowa dott edu and 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

Facebook, of course, has similar pictures in its status updates. It’s interesting to follow how the use of pictures has progressed — In Facebook the status update pictures are relatively small. In Twitter, they grow larger, and now, in Google Wave, there are multiple pictures. This increasing reliance on pictures is smart. With the brain’s highly-developed facial recognition skills, we’re able to take in a large amount of information very quickly.

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. … The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness. … Perhaps the best example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter and other microblogging systems including the new Facebook. These services are visibly streamlike — they are literally streams of thinking and conversation.

The Web has always been a stream. In fact it has been a stream of streams. … with the advent of blogs, feeds, and microblogs, the streamlike nature of the Web is becoming more readily visible.

The Web is changing faster than ever, and as this happens, it’s becoming more fluid. Sites no longer change in weeks or days, but hours, minutes or even seconds. if we are offline even for a few minutes we may risk falling behind, or even missing something absolutely critical. The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our “now” is getting shorter.

The era of the Web was mostly about the past — pages that were published months, weeks, days or at least hours before we looked for them. … But in the era of the Stream, everything is shifting to the present — we can see new posts as they appear and conversations emerge around them, live, while we watch. … The unit of change is getting more granular. … Our attention is mainly focused on right now: the last few minutes or hours. Anything that was posted before this period of time is “out of sight, out of mind.”

The Web has always been a stream — it has been happening in real-time since it started, but it was slower … Things have also changed qualitatively in recent months. The streamlike aspects of the Web have really moved into the foreground of our mainstream cultural conversation. … And suddenly we’re all finding ourselves glued to various activity streams, microblogging manically … to catch fleeting references to things … as they rapidly flow by and out of view. The Stream has arrived.

Spivack’s vision of the future Web as a Stream resonates with other commentaries, as I’ve discussed in related articles:

• Did Salman Rushdie envision the Web in 1990? – Rushdie’s word-picture of the Ocean of the Stream of Stories.
• Digital books: Narratives in long winding streams, Peter Brantley, 2009
• The Web as a Stream of Stories – Spivack and Brantley flow together into Rushdie’s Stream
• Rushdie’s Stream library & Borges’ print library

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Two recent articles, one by a librarian and one by a publisher, talk of the growing realization on the part of both parties that they increasingly have common interests, as both learn how to deal with the the implications of electronic publishing — Librarian Barbara Fister’s Library Journal cover story Publishers & Librarians: Two cultures one goal and publisher Neil Schlager’s blog article The problem with reference publishing.

Reading these articles has got me thinking about what I’ve been writing about on this blog in the last several months — As shown in the Categories (right sidebar) many of the subjects discussed here have common librarian-publisher threads. And in fact some of these articles have drawn comments from publisher kinds of people as well as librarians (See below). Thinking further, I realize how valuable Twitter has been for connecting to the publisher community, serving as a wide-ranging forum for discussion of current topics. So I’m listing below some of the people I’ve met on Twitter who talk about librarian/publisher issues:

In her own category: Kassia Krozier (@booksquare) – Not a librarian or a publisher, but in the center of the discussion!

Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) and his group at O’Reilly Publishing have created a unique gathering place for thinking about the future of publishing. The O’Reilly Radar blog has articles by Tim and a group of other writers, some with library connections, notably Peter Brantley (@naypinya). In addition, the annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) in New York has speakers from the library world as well as the publishing world. Writers and speakers for the O’Reilly blog and TOC conference appear regularly on @timoreilly’s Twitter tweets. Also, during the TOC conference, on-site Twitter reports are extensive. Joe Wikert (@jwikert), from the list above, also works at O’Reilly.

To read Seeing the Picture articles about issues of libraries and publishing, see the categories Publishing and TOC. Articles that have had comments/discussions with publishing people: Copyright in Google Books: Pictures & Text and Jon Orwant on Google Book Search at TOC.

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

Evgeny Morozov, in his article, Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform complains about the chaotic nature of Swine Flu information in Twitter:

There are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu. … [Twitter users] armed with a platform to broadcast their fears are likely to produce only more fear, misinformation and panic. … Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process … The “swine flu” Twitter-scare has … proved the importance of context — The problem with Twitter is that there is very little context you can fit into 140 characters.

Anyone who’s used Twitter knows that there’s much truth here. Especially for a new user, it’s hard to separate the Twitter wheat from the Twitter chaff. But it can be done. To show the shallow, mindless nature of Twitterers, Morozov quotes text from tweets about Swine Flu. And he’s right, they’re pretty valueless. But, clicking to look at the writers’ profile pages shows that most of them are fairly inexperienced, with relatively few updates and followers, so it’s not surprising that their tweets are bad. Which goes to show, just as with online sources in general, in Twitter it’s important to check the source! Find out who’s behind the information.

So, while I agree with Morozov that Twitter has some negatives, I think we need to appreciate the positive value it has added to our ability to exchange information rapidly, that will certainly make us better able to deal with a real pandemic if it occurs. In composing this article, I came across a good conversation in Twitter that speaks to my ideas:

@PhilHarrison: Twitter is relatively new & we’re all learning about its power to inform & misinform as well. (bold added)
@charlesyeo: During SARS, some people in Asia blamed media for not exposing cases earlier so the sick can get help!

Note that the second tweet, by charlesyeo, comes back to the point I made in the first paragraph, that lack of information was a serious problem in the SARS epidemic. Twitter has clearly improved that.

Eric Rumsey is at @ericrumsey

A suggestion: If you find an interesting new magazine title in Google Book Search, put it in Twitter, and include the hashtag that I just created, #gbsmag (Clicking this will retrieve tweets in Twitter Search, with examples from the new titles I recently found). If you don’t use Twitter, of course, feel free to put new magazine titles in a comment to this article.

[Click images below for live results in Twitter Venn. The numbers will vary slightly, since they're generated live. On the Twitter Venn results, click the middle intersection area to show common terms in lower left.]

The second example, below, shows clearly that the main source of alarm about salmonella poisoning is peanut butter, since this is the predominant word that occurs with the search words, as shown in the listing at the lower left.

It’s occurred to me for a long time that Venn diagrams are a good way to visualize the relationships among subjects in online searching. But I suspect the sort of on-the-fly, realtime generation of Venn diagrams done by Twitter Venn would be too slow for databases with more text per record. So it’s for Twitter, with its tiny 140-character records, to show how useful Venn diagrams can be for visualization.