Buy, Hack or Build
After a horrendous morning which involved pre-dawn alarms followed by a gigantic rock on 495 and a flat tire- making me an hour late to pick up a conference speaker (more on that later) - I FINALLY made it the fall NEASIST program, Buy, Hack or Build: Optimizing your systems for your users and your sanity.

The first speaker is Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development at User Interface Engineering. He's speaking on 'Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us'. He's now defining hacking as 'design on the fly' which I love for it's simplicity. As part of this program committee it's been my job to advocate for this program - I've found it surprisingly difficult to tell them. Even sophisticated users think 'hacking' is bad - it's actually appropriately yankee. It's innovative. It's about being bold enough to break the rules. Viva la resistance! Interesting = Google.com doesn't validate (filing that tidbit away). Actually, looks like all the 'four horsemen', Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and MSN are full of hacks. New term: Social Hacks (whoo hoo). Example: "did you mean ____?" or "customers who bought this also bought"

RSS feeds as 'pull model' where email is a 'push model'. I wonder what kind of reader he uses?

www.housingmaps.com as an example. Built with Google Maps and Craigslist. It takes real estate listings from craigslist and maps them in Google - SO NEAT. I want to make this. The developer made it in his own time, without permission from either = remixing = Web2.0. Google publishes a guide to hacking maps. Between that and the fact that craiglist is rss makes it easy. WHY oh WHY is this not possible to do something like this for finding books in stacks? I wonder if I should replace our sort of bloated and confusing directions page with a link to google directions... hmmm...

Okay, now we're getting down to it - TAGGING! Amazon just added tagging last week!? Didn't know that. This is DEFINATELY a place that libraries should be. btw, I couldn't find the tagging in Amazon? He is showing bookmarklets which I think I've been misunderstanding - it looks like a bit of javascript that makes posting to things like del.icio.us even better... I must look into this.

In conclusion: folksonomies, blogs, wikis all 'provide tools to discover, recommend, share, and promote word of mouth... We're doing what we did offline, online.' This is SO library! We need to be here - this is WHAT we do, essentially... we facilitate communication and learning. Why aren't we being more proactive?

Final conclusion: Sharing knowledge is empowering, simply bestowing knowledge is enslaving.