http://www.evident.com/

I’d like to say that David was a phenomenal speaker.  Everything that appears below is my shorthand notes of his talk.  I’m not this smart.

Libraries in an Age of Abundance

We are now in an economy of abundance when it comes to knowledge, when it comes to content.  But we are also in an economy of abundance when it comes to crap, but we know how to deal with that.  There is so much good stuff that we’re having problems trying to figure out how to wade through all the good stuff.

We don’t have a plural form of knowledge, and its the same for everyone.  There is only one truth and that makes knowledge binary.  Knowledge is scarce, we came up with this in Athens because of all of the “voices”.  So we decided that knowledge was what we believed and had proof to believe it.  Knowledge is a system and everything in it has a single place.

The second principle is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might. –Phaedrus by Plato

The Aristotelian taxonomic tree is that everything gets one place. But this isn’t real, that’s not the way the world works, but this insistence keeps us from understanding the world.

The world has clustered attributes.  And this is why digitized information is closer to reality than the real objects because real objects can only go into one place.  However with digitized information everything can be linked to each other, making messiness OK, because order doesn’t scale well.

Metadata is changing.  When you search you’ll get back everything related to the data, not just the thing you search for because metadata helps you pry up knowledge.  This makes content connected.

We’ll do it ourselves.  When you own the stuff, you own the organization of it, but online you can get the information and organize it the way that you want.  He used a great example of a flickr photo from the Library of Congress that was tagged and reorganize it because of the tagging.

We are now making a giant pile of leaves, where as before we were creating taxonomic trees.  The old ideas was including and excluding, and you exclude more than you include.  But on the net you include everything because you can’t know what people are interested in.  We can postpone organizing, classifying, and taxonomizing to the very last moment.

Knowledge is being commoditized.  This is what Google and Wikipedia are doing.  One of the good things about this is that now we are living in a knowledge ecology.

Many of our techniques for navigating is based on social networks.  There is a hidden homogeneity that we need to fight against.

Wikipedia teaches us four things:

• we can do more than we think we can — Wikipedia should not have worked, but it did
• our motives are more complex than we thought
• the old way of knowing doesn’t scale
• knowledge is a human architect — there isn’t one human knowledge

We are ceasing to take knowledge as the highest human function.  Knowing things is good, and we’re good at it, BUT something else is swarming around it and that is understanding stuff.  We are understanding thing far better, more quickly, and less deeply.

“there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions, is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuous and is capable of being examined.” — Francis Miksa of the U of Texas at Austin

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Lee had some great facts.  Luckily he’s posting the presentation on the Pew Website.  I’ll add the link later.  He also says that he talks fast…and that’s true.  I’m hoping I don’t miss anything.  His goal for this presentation is to point out how the information ecosystem is changing.  And he’s come up with points on how that the ecosystem is changing.  Below are 9 points that prove this.

The Occurrence of Information Changes

Information is Coming from the “long tail” — Chris Anderson author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

the long tail: where information is occuring.

The Location of Information Changes

People don’t need to go to newspapers anymore, they can get their information from blogs, the web, and all kinds of places.

The Velocity of Information Changes

Devices allow us to communicate quicker.

The velocity of information increases and smart mobs emerge — Howard Rheingold.

The Venues of Information Changes

We are using more mediums:  reading newspapers on your computer, reading a book on the kindle, watching tv on your iPod.

The Vigilance of Information Changes

We are constantly waiting for information input.

Linda Stone says: attention is truncated

Andrew Keen author of The Cult of the Amateur and Terry Fisher say: attention is elongated

The Vibrancy of Information Changes

The immersive qualities of media environments make them more compelling places to hang out and interact.  MetaVerse Roadmap Project

• Virtual Worlds (second life)
• Mirror Worlds (google earth)
• Augmented Reality (rfid chips that might be able to keep track of who created the chair, where the materials came from, etc.)
• Life-logging (youTube, flickr)

The Relevance of Information Changes

Information improves for your life style and beliefs because of search and customization change.  — Nicholas Negroponte

The Voice and Visibility of Information Changes

Democratization of informaiton.  A bloggers blog is as important as some other information source.

The Voting and Ventilating of Information Changes

tagging, rating, commenting occurs and collective intelligence asserts itself.  –Henry Jenkins and David Weinberger

Action items for the Information Ecosystem Changes

• be findable
• be available
• use social networks
• provide information and social support similar to social networks

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