Check This Out! Podcast

Episode 013: Monday, January 30, 2006
Playing time: 41:27
This is a special all-interview podcast.  First I talk with Tim Kearley, Professor of Law and Director of the Law Library, University of Wyoming College of Law.  He has recently won an AALL Research Grant for a project to digitize a unique translation of Justinian's Code.  After that I chat with our new Canadian Correspondent, Connie Crosby , who explains the recent Canadian elections.
This is your last week to submit an entry for the logo contest!

• Music: All Girl Summer Fun Band, Canadian Boyfriend
• Blog: http://cto.libsyn.com
• Email: jim.milles@gmail.com
• Comment line: 716-989-4422
  

Playing time: 51:50

• Law Library 2.0: Wrap-up
  • T. Scott Plutchak
  • Walt Crawford
  • Travis Ennis's Weblog

• Canadian Half-Hour
  • Musical Guest: Stina Agust
  • Library Guest: Johanna Sigurdson, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP
• Closing comments
  • AirFerg #39
  • CTO Logo contest update
  • Blog: http://cto.libsyn.com
  • Email: jim.milles@gmail.com
  • Comment line: 716-989-4422

   

Playing time 32:23

• Law Library 2.0: Social Computing
  
  • Collaborative authoring
    • Wikipedia
      
    • IMDB
      
    • Gracenote (CDDB)
    • Pandora 
    • Library Thing 
    • Writely 
  • Social tagging and folksonomy v. taxonomy
    • Intentional or voluntary
      • del.icio.us 
      • Yahoo! My Web 2.0 
      • Flickr

• Automatic  or "default"
  
  • Amazon
  • Netflix
  • Library catalogs?
• Privacy vs. sharing
• Musical guests: Jean Dickson and Keith Woodin
• Closing comments
  • CTO Logo contest update
  • Blog: http://cto.libsyn.com
  • Email jim.milles@gmail.com
  • Comment line 716-989-4422

Alert listener Nina Cascio had some questions about my comment in Episode 010 regarding Google, "perpetual beta," and the idea that new features are rolled out several times a day. Looking more closely at my source, I see that statement was attributed to "a web developer at a major online service," and it's not certain that it was Google. At any rate, here is the original from Tim O'Reilly's article:

The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta" logo for years at a time.

Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site."

Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour. This is clearly a radically different development model! While not all web applications are developed in as extreme a style as Flickr, almost all web applications have a development cycle that is radically unlike anything from the PC or client-server era. It is for this reason that a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft won't be able to beat Google: "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day."

Playing time 32:21

What is Web 2.0? Library 2.0? Law Library 2.0? An introduction to RSS. Canadian Minute: Tim Hortons. Intro/outro music: Meltdown Man, by Derek K. Miller; musical interlude: Merrigans Reel, by Jim Fidler (both from Podsafe Music Network). Canadian Minute music: Polska fran Glava, from the CD Trad, by Barry Phillips (from Magnatune.com).