But really, each of these has choices is distinct, and in many cases their use-cases do not overlap. Carrier pigeons, for example, are really point-to-point messaging mechanisms, unless you have a flock–and they take time to breed, so they are a poor choice if you have need to keep people updated on a variety of different topics. And unlike the owls of Harry Potter, carrier pigeons go to places and not people–so tracking down your significant other in either Greece or Italy–why won’t they call?–is out. (You may, of course, find different ways to make these work for you–in the digital age, square pegs can be refactored to fit in round holes, after all.)

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook

Facebook is the ideal place for keeping in touch with real people I’ve really met, especially if I’m likely to lose track of them otherwise. It’s geographically diverse, lets me share enough to give people a sense they’ve got an idea what I’m up to, and (despite its best efforts otherwise) lets me otherwise stay private (with caveats). So who do I connect with on Facebook? Friends (of various levels) from high school, college, postgrad. Friends–not professional colleagues–from work. Tricky decisions of categorization abound, of course: is this colleague enough of a friend for me to connect with them on Facebook, or do they belong on LinkedIn only? Segregating people into groups with various privacy settings help, of course, as does not sharing things I don’t want the public to possibly see. Sure, this is friend-stuff, but nothing I put on Facebook would be too embarrassing, or cost me a job. Facebook has been pushing pages (AP, PBS, BBC, business generally) that share non-personal information, but I’m increasingly finding this a distraction from the reason I use Facebook: people.

Image via CrunchBase

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been touted as the professional version of Facebook, but that’s only partly true. LinkedIn is not really about sharing day-to-day details about me, but rather about highlighting my accomplishments and work. But beyond that, it’s mostly a Rolodex of up-to-date business cards of people I’ve dealt with professionally. I will connect with any colleague (or one of my undergrads) on LinkedIn without hesitation, unlike on Facebook. In terms of privacy, well, the point is to be visible and findable professionally. So that’s what goes up there. No home addresses, no home telephone numbers, just business contact details.

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter

Twitter is for link sharing and quick conversations (very quick, and very short) with absolutely anyone I find remotely interesting. I don’t refollow anyone who follows me, only those I think are interesting. I share things I want to broadcast with the world (but am too polite to get a bullhorn). Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes professional, but always with the idea that anyone might read it. It’s great for more distant connections with people I may or may not ever meet, but who say and write about interesting things.

Image via CrunchBase

Google Plus

Google Plus is the new player, but it brings in some of the best of both Twitter and Facebook. Yes, I can put my actual friends in circles and easily limit what I share with just them (so that’s a bit like Facebook, but more focused). No, not everyone I know on Facebook is on Google Plus (and may never be). Google Plus also lets me follow people I’ve never met who say interesting things, like Twitter, but it emphasizes longer posts and more detailed, threaded conversations–without forcing me to dance with privacy settings as on Facebook, and without assuming these people are actually my friends (even if they could be). In many respects, I’m finding that it challenges quick-blogging services like Posterous and Tumblr more than Facebook or LinkedIn. It does seem a potential threat to Twitter, which I am finding myself more and more viewing as a social link sharing service as opposed to a discussion mechanism (but it’s GREAT for that).

Summary

So, here it is in short form:

Facebook: real people, real sharing of personal (but not too personal) information. If you actually know me in “real life,” friend me. If not, go elsewhere. I share semi-personal stuff here (what I had for dinner and who made it).

LinkedIn: real people doing real business networking. If I’ve met you in a professional capacity, connect with me. If not, well, tell me why we can do business! I share only professional info here.

Twitter: on the Internet, no one knows if you’re a dog, but we do care if you have something interesting to share. If you do, follow me and I might follow you back. If you don’t, follow me and I won’t follow you back. I share thoughts and links here.

Google Plus: real people (for now) sharing what they found interesting today, including articles, thoughts, stories, and photos. If you actually know me, I might add you to my Friends circle; if not, but you are interesting, you’ll make Following. Please give me commentary with your links!

Maybe next week I’ll explain how I use carrier pigeons.

Related articles

• Google+ will be squeezed out of social world, says LinkedIn CEO — Computerworld (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
• It’s Google Plus vs. Twitter, Not Facebook (scalableintimacy.com)
• Different social networks for different purposes (inpropriapersona.com)

Alice in Wonderland, from Google Books

Randy Pickerhas a fascinating post on the Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago’s law school of the copyright status of scans (by Google, for example) of public domain works. Does the effort of digitizing the work qualify as enough original effort to create a new copyright?

Where does that put Google (and Dover) with its digital scanners? We are starting to see skirmishes over photographs and scans of public domain works. The British National Portrait Gallery got into a spat with Wikipedia when Wikipedia uploaded onto its website digital images created by the NPG of public domain works in its collection. Actual caselaw is scarce, with Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., a 1999 federal district court decision, as a leading case. The court characterized the dispute as one over “‘slavish copies’ of public domain works of art” and concluded that such copies lacked the spark of originality and therefore could not be copyrighted. via The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog: Scanning the Public Domain.

In my (limited, provisional) opinion scanning works and putting them online is indeed essentially a “slavish copy.” Even the OCR of the text into a searchable format–which might well require effort and inventiveness–would not, in my mind, produce text that was any more copyrightable than the original public-domain work. It doesn’t matter how much effort Google or others invest–only creative effort is rewarded, not effort generally. Perhaps the manner in which Google displays the works might be protected intellectual property (but maybe not); certainly the software used to scan, OCR, and index the text has a good chance of receiving protection. But the text itself? I don’t think so.Picker points out that Google has tried to include language to try to protect their effort and limit the potential uses of the file:

That isn’t to say that an owner of such a digital file couldn’t try to control use of it through some means other than copyright. Go to Google Book Search and download Alice in Wonderland. The first page is from Google, not Lewis Carroll, and it offers a strong defense of the public domain: “Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians.” Then we get to the next word “nevertheless” and you can guess what follows: digitization is expensive — as indeed it is — so Google has imposed a series of limits on how the digital file can be used.

But whatever they try, I just don’t think legally  they’ve entered the realm of copyright — contract law, maybe, but not copyright. Of course, there’s ongoing efforts to strengthen copyright protection and extend it, but failing that — simply digitizing books, however much work it requires, simply shouldn’t meet the minimum level of creativity required for copyright.

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• You Can’t Copyright Facts — I didn’t Know That, Did You? (lockergnome.com)
• How They Stole the Public Domain (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)

An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has “metastasized” from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is “something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like,” without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, Calif., said at a conference at Stanford University.

via Google attorney slams ACTA copyright treaty | Politics and Law — CNET News.

I have to agree this Google attorney. I don’t like ACTA much, either, and don’t think it’s much of an improvement on the current, uncoordinated approach to copyright.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Attorney Slams ACTA Copyright Treaty (yro.slashdot.org)
• Preliminary Analysis of the Officially Released ACTA Text (eff.org)

Web marketing has grown since 1995, based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization — it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized.

Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines.

We call this new world the Splinternet (with a nod to Doc Searls and Rich Tehrani, who used the term before us with a somewhat different meaning). It will splinter the Web as a unified system. The golden age has lasted 15 years. Like all golden ages, it lasted so long we thought it would last forever. But the end is in sight.

Here’s what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.

via The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age.

I do not disagree with his advice (don’t panic!), but I do disagree with the widespread premise that somehow today’s Internet consists of more fragmentation that during the “golden age” of the World Wide Web.

First, the “golden age” Web was no more unified than today’s version. The fragmented players were different, but the fundamental difficulties were quite similar. Where once we had AOL and Compuserve, now we have Facebook and LinkedIn. Previously, Internet Explorer and its ecosystem of technology provided incompatible approaches to accessing data and sites. Users of, for example, Netscape on Linux were simply excluded from access to IE-only content, or saw a much degraded view of certain parts of the Internet. Video and sound content required custom plug-ins that would run on certain platforms and not others.

Second, the fragmentation is simply not as great as Bernoff and others maintain. 10 years ago I had to write custom (brittle) Web scrapers to pull in data from external sites. Today, I can use RSS, XML-RPC, or other “glue” standards to reliable access data on 3rd-party sites. Facebook may try to control its world, but I can access it from pretty much any device with a browser, from an iPhone to a home machine running Windows 7. Yes, it may look different (but isn’t Flash really just a flashback to the bad old days of proprietary plugins?), but the core is there for every visitor. Plus, while I can’t pull out every bit of data (friends…) from Facebook, I can get an RSS feed of status updates that I can do all sorts of programmatic stuff with.

In short, the “golden age” was hardly golden, and today’s Web is, if anything, better than it used to be in terms of interconnectivity. Certainly it’s important to recognize fragmentation issues today, but let’s not pretend it’s a new problem.

Lateef Mtima, of Howard University School of Law, suggested that the settlement would help the disenfranchised get access to books — and that copyright as a whole “should be an engine, not a brake on social development.” The lone librarian, from the University of Michigan, expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that “Broad social progress depends on being able to find, use, and re-use the scholarly record.”

I find this perspective compelling, as it connects with my own view that copyright’s purpose is not to permanently protect the property of rights-holders, but rather to foster innovation and creativity. Put another way, copyright serves a social purpose beyond rewarding individuals; the creativity and innovation it encourages is supposed to benefit society as a whole.

The concern expressed by the CDT representative, and others, is that there are potential privacy concerns with Google recording electronic access to books in a way that existing access methods (libraries, bookstores) do not is a potential problem, although in many ways it is an inevitable potential issue with any move to electronic texts. Still, I do share the concern that a single company (Google) stands to be the major gateway provider going forward — especially after recent missteps with regards to privacy on Google’s part.

I found other arguments less interesting, including arguments that this “turns copyright on its head” (I don’t see it) or that this doesn’t effectively represent the class because some rights-holders haven’t participated (this is a criticism applicable to most any class action).

My biggest worry is that the barrier of entry for other to scan books as Google has is simply too great, and that Google will become the de facto for-profit curator of what should belong to the public as a whole. But is that concern enough to scuttle the settlement? I’m not sure.

The judge indicated he will be taking his time ruling on this, due to the complexity involved. I would to, if I were him!

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• Google’s book settlement draws fire in court (news.cnet.com)
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• Who supports and who opposes the Google Books settlement (inpropriapersona.com)

Norman Oder of the Library Journal is covering the Google Books fairness hearing, being held today. I found the list of opponents and supporters appearing at the hearing particularly interesting.

Opponents include “Microsoft; Amazon.com; the Open Book Alliance; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley, law professor; Cindy Coh on behalf of the ‘Privacy Authors and Publishers;’ representatives of Japanese and New Zealand authors; representatives of France and Germany; Consumer Watchdog; and the Internet Archive.”

Oder adds:

Two of the 21 have dropped out, but two have been added. The state of Pennsylvania, also representing Massachusetts and Washington, will now be included; the states object to the provision for unclaimed funds. Also added is the literary agency Writers Representatives LLC, which objects on a wide variety of grounds.

It will be interesting to see exactly what arguments opponents make in court (they have roughly 5 minutes to present their points orally). Looking them over, it appears that, generally, opponents are invested more in the current rewards system for successful IP owners, although the inclusion of the Internet Archive and the Consumer Watchdog suggests this is not the complete story. The Internet Archive, for example, is worried about the Settlement favoring a single company (Google), as opposed to wanting to preserve the status quo — at least from what I gather so far.

Supporters include “Center for Democracy & Technology; the National Federation of the Blind; Sony; The Institute of Intellectual Property & Social Justice at the Howard University School of Law; and University of Michigan Librarian Paul Courant, who represents Google's first library scanning partner.”

It’s interesting to see Sony on this list, but then again, Sony has hardly benefited from the current publishing structure, as far as I can determine, so perhaps opening up access via Google (with whom they can partner, perhaps) would potentially benefit their e-reader plans.

The Center for Democracy & Technology generally speaks for the opening up of government and the protection of civil liberties, so it’s interesting to see that they support the settlement. The National Federation of the Blind makes sense, especially given current publishers tendencies to drag their feet on making electronic texts available, even to the blind. The only library representative, from hat I can tell, is a librarian from the University of Michigan.

I’ll be curious to see the succinct version of the arguments each makes in court — such a condensed time for oral argument generally means that only the most important points (as determined by the speaker) get highlighted.

Meanwhile, the “big two” — LexisNexis and Westlaw — are not standing still. Both are intending to release new interfaces to their signature products in the next year, and both will focus on eliminating complex search query requirements in favor of Google-like natural language searching and “artificial intelligence” based sorting of results: “Both companies claim to be creating a legal research experience that will mimic the ease of use their customers have come to expect from the leading Internet search engine, Google,” wrote the Jill Schachner Chanen in the ABA Journal on Jan. 24th.

This shift in search strategies can’t come soon enough for me. Even when I was routinely using Lexis and Westlaw, I frequently found an initial Google search — even without the new Google Scholar features — would do a far better job and getting me oriented on a case topic than anything Lexis or Westlaw could provide. Once I had some specific search terms, the big two would let me drill down, pull up case histories and related cases, and seek legal background information in treatises. But that initial searching was much easier and productive — not to mention cheaper! — using Google.

Improving this aspect might help keep customers. Not doing it will certainly lose business, at least.

I don’t think I could, in good conscience, charge a client for legal research done entirely in Lexis or Westlaw at this point, without first starting out with free (or lower cost, at least) options like Google Scholar or Fastcase. The cost difference is staggering, and I would feel unethical to charge a client for the cost of exploratory research using the big two (but not for using them to Shephardize, for example, for which a paid service is simply required).

Personally, I am far more excited by Google Scholar than by these potential changes by the big two, but any innovation in this space would be welcome.

For more, see:

• Exclusive: Inside the new Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg Platform (ABA Journal)
• On the Lexis and Westlaw of the (Very) Near Future (Wall Street Journal Law Blog)

Reflecting on Avvo’s Internet marketing conference for lawyers, Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog writes:

I started on the Internet at AOL. I answered people’s injury, medical malpractice, and worker’s comp questions. The more questions I answered, the more work our firm got and the more successful we became. The more I listened to others and the more engaged I became, the more I enjoyed myself and the more people who contacted me to help them.

I discovered that Internet marketing was not all about me. It was about what I, as a lawyer, could do to help other people. Rather than buying cheesy yellow page ads and running expensive TV ads, I could get good legal work by helping people.

via For lawyers is the world really all about Google rankings? : Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

The lesson that good connections with people — arising from providing good quality content on a blog, helpful commentary in forums, useful information and replies on Twitter, to name just three examples — is the core of effective marketing is often lost.

You might call this “un-marketing” or “non-marketing” to distinguish it from frantic SEO, blaring billboards, or extravagant banner ad purchases. It’s deceptively simple: go out and help people, and clients will find you.

Taking this kind of approach does not mean foregoing an online presence. How can you put yourself out there and be helpful if you don’t join Twitter, don’t blog, and don’t contribute to forums? And once you start seeking out people to help, how can they and others find you later if you aren’t on LinkedIn or don’t have your own Web site?

Whatever you call it, the core message is to be helpful and do good, and the clients and customers will seek you out in return.

As a do-gooder, SEO, ad buys, and similar strategies should be done to be helpful. That is, such strategies should make it easier for people to find you, and for you to be helpful in return. They are secondary strategies, not primary ones.

For a do-gooder, primary strategies involve getting out there and providing utility to others: answering questions, being a resource, advocating positions you believe in, sharing your experiences and knowledge.

Doing good and being helpful isn’t a new marketing strategy. It’s just an old way of showing the world your worth, updated for new mediums. It takes Google’s “don’t be evil” and goes one better: go do good, and the clients will come (just don’t forget to make it easy for them!). It takes “add value” and takes it further: go be helpful!

Has this kind approach worked for you? Have better ideas? Think it’s crazy? Let me know in the comments.

Compare Google to other companies, like ProQuest or Elsevier. These two (among other companies) charge “exorbitant” fees to libraries for access to research materials. I think anyone who has ever worked in a library would agree that the costs of access are frustrating and increasingly impossible, and take a larger and larger chunk of library resources, even as library budgets are shrinking. Negotiating with them is an ongoing challenge, and the tools they provide — while powerful — are nowhere near the level modern technologies should allow. Contrast this with Google, which “has given us Google Scholar, Google Books, newspaper archives, and more, often besting commercial offerings while being freely accessible.”

Google Books has revolutionized the way many students and professors approach historical research. The size of one’s local library is no longer a limitation to the kind of research work one can do. I am no longer dependent exclusively interlibrary loan to get access to books my university lacks. Even if I eventually I want to actual, physical book, with Google Books I can see if it will be useful before I waste the time  (or the very limited funds I have currently to buy it myself).

Cohen also points out, however, that for all the utility of the service, Google “remains strangely closed when it comes to Google Books.” Cohen writes, “The real problem — especially for those in the digital humanities but increasingly for many others — is that Google Books is only open in the read-a-book-in-my-pajamas way.” Google has chosen not to maximize access to public-domain books, or abandoned books. To do so would potentially revolutionize the entire sphere of intellectual property and the publishing industry — the kind of revolution Google is famous for in other spheres, but which it has not chosen to push now. The current settlement may indeed be problematic, but it is not revolutionary. Cohen notes:

We should remember that the reason we are in a settlement now is that Google didn’t have enough chutzpah to take the higher, tougher road — a direct challenge in the courts, the court of public opinion, or the Congress to the intellectual property regime that governs many books and makes them difficult to bring online, even though their authors and publishers are long gone. While Google regularly uses its power to alter markets radically, it has been uncharacteristically meek in attacking head-on this intellectual property tower and its powerful corporate defenders. Had Google taken a stronger stance, historians would have likely been fully behind their efforts, since we too face the annoyances that unbalanced copyright law places on our pedagogical and scholarly use of textual, visual, audio, and video evidence.

via Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Blog Archive » Is Google Good for History?.

Much as I would have liked to see the IP regime change and to see Google leading the effort, perhaps such an attempt is unrealistic. Google understands Web data. It’s engineers understand electronic sources, hyperlinks, software, and PDFs. Their approaches and algorithms have revolutionized Web searching. But the people at Google have less of an understanding of the kind of research and writing done in the humanities, the books historians write, and the articles and research we produce. Cohen writes:

Because Google Books is the product of engineers, with tremendous talent in computer science but less sense of the history of the book or the book as an object rather than bits, it founders in many respects. Google still has no decent sense of how to rank search results in humanities corpora. Bibliometrics and text mining work poorly on these sources (as opposed to, say, the highly structured scientific papers Google Scholar specializes in). Studying how professional historians rank and sort primary and secondary sources might tell Google a lot, which it could use in turn to help scholars.

Google has managed to move into new areas before, from search to building hardware and software (the Nexus One), for example. Why couldn’t they learn from the humanities and not just from other engineers? Advertising, after all, is already a combination of engineering, humanities, and business — so why couldn’t Google developers learn from history scholars to improve their search algorithms for Google Scholar and Google Books?

As part of my content update, I ideally wanted my site to be more dynamic, so that I did not need to touch it very often, yet to still have it be more up-to-date and fresh. My idea was to rely on updates I would make to other sites anyway, and to leverage those updates to drive my personal site too. While I could have relied on widgets and simple Javascript, this kind of material is not picked up by search engines, and did not allow enough design flexibility for my taste. Thus, I chose to switch to PHP and code things by hand, but sticking to simple approaches (RSS, for example, or straightforward APIs — I may once have been a professional coder, but these days I’m looking for simplicity first).

Here are the areas I focused on first on my main page:

About

This section I maintain locally for now, because the kind of language I’m using is adapted specifically for this combination of personal and professional site. I considered pulling it from other profile sites, such as Linkedin or my Google Profile, but the APIs were either too complex (for my purposes) or non-existent. On the other hand, the miniature about section at the bottom-right of the page is pulled dynamically from an unexpected source: Goodreads, which has a simple and effective API that makes this easy. (You’ll need to create an account with Goodreads, and request a key.)

To accomplish this with PHP, look at SimpleXML. Use it something like this:

[sourcecode language=“php”]
$data = file_get_contents($url);
$profile = simplexml_load_string($data);
php echo $profile->user->about ?>
[/sourcecode]

My Updates

I pull these from Twitter, using a simplified version of the Twitter-provided Javascript widget (although the API is quite straightforward too).

[sourcecode language=“html”]


[/sourcecode]

Featured Posts

These come from the most recent posts on in propria persona, and are pulled in via RSS feeds (using PHP and SimplePie). Other highlighted stories on my main page are put on there manually for now, although I have considered pulling from the RSS feed that SSRN provides on articles I put there. The basic code for RSS processing looks like this:

[sourcecode language=“php”]
$feed = new SimplePie(‘http://www.inpropriapersona.com/feed/’);
$feed->handle_content_type();
php foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item): ?>

• php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>”>get_title(); ?>

endforeach; ?>
[/sourcecode]

My Comments

BackType scours the Web for comments I make on blogs, and provides them to me in an easy-to-use RSS feed. You’ll need to create an account there, then use the RSS feed they provide just like I used the RSS feed to display articles from my blog.

Reading

Goodreads provides a a nice, and simple, RSS feed to show the books on a particular “shelf” (Goodreads was far easier to pull from than any other similar site) — the links go to Google Books in order to access the “preview” functionality Google offers. The code is similar to this:

[sourcecode language=“php”]
$goodreads = new SimplePie(‘GOODREADS RSS URL’);
$goodreads->handle_content_type();
foreach ($goodreads->get_items() as $item):
$image = $item->get_item_tags(”, ‘book_small_image_url’); $image = $image[0][’data’];
[/sourcecode]

Publications

My publications page has a few of the same sections that my main page has, but emphasizes the list of articles and materials I’ve published (either online or in print journals). This list — the core of the page — is pulled from an RSS feed that originates with RefWorks, an online citation management service from ProQuest. The management interface isn’t pretty, but the service works well for creating and managing bibliographies for academic papers. Thus, since I’ll use the service anyway, why not leverage it for this purpose too?

Final Thoughts

The specific approach I’ve taken here obviously requires some technical knowledge. Still, the idea of keeping your site more dynamic and up-to-date can be incorporated into virtually any site, using tools like Google Gadgets or widgets from sites like Twitter or FriendFeed. Even more simply, you may choose to simple update your site in small ways on a regular basis. Alternatively, some people have chosen to use sites like Posterous or Tumblr to centralize their personal site in a easy-to-update, miniature blog.

The goal is to give your personal site a more active, engaging feel that encourages visitors seeking information about you to respond positively to your Web presence.