Evernote is an online service that serves an interesting purpose:  it allows you to indicate digital items that you wish to remember, it stores them, and then makes the entire collection searchable.

Or more specifically, you can have it remember all your blog posts, tweets, iPhone items (photographs, etc.), typed notes, e-mails… whatever you tell it to store.  Everything gets indexed in their database, and will be there for you to retrieve at whatever time you wish to do so.

Right now this is simply a neat idea, and assuming that it works as smoothly as it’s description, a good way of archiving the wide varieties of communication and digital storage we use in our daily lives.  However, I think it is more than that… I suspect that this is the social leading edge of what is becoming more and more necessary in the digital age: the necessity of having some sort of structure to the hodge-podge of data that accumulates like peanut shells in a sports bar.

Another way of viewing this is that it is similar to the ideas behind the Semantic Web.  This isn’t a perfect match, of course, but the ability to match up commonalities between different chunks of data is the goal in each of these endeavors.  Understand that the amount and variation of the data is not going to be reduced in the years to come… we are going to need tools like this just to keep abreast of the tide of information that we will encounter.

Watch for other companies to address this idea; I will likely wait for something that can reside on my own server space (perhaps syncing indexes with others for greater effect), and preferably open source, rather than trust that this or some other cloud will achieve permanence.

found via the Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian

Add Symantic Richness To Your Markup With (RDF) Ease is the title of an article on SitePoint that delves into a topic I find fascinating, yet have only dabbled in in my own website creations.

Microformats are one of the best ideas I have seen in web design since CSS.  RDF, in some form, is what the semantic web of the future will be built upon.  CSS, for all its complexity, is a powerful tool that is still growing into a transformative design language.

Read the article, even if parts of it are foreign to you.  Think about how this has the power to change the web as we know it.  Think about how it has the power to change our catalogs, our article databases, and online collections of resources (books, images, etc.).  Think about it.

In a long interview on the state of the semantic web, Tim Berners-Lee (if you don’t recognize the name, you should really read this) briefly discussed DataPortability, the ability to move information freely and easily from one site to another:

“So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, ‘Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.’ Or, ‘You should all know who my colleagues are. I shouldn’t have to tell you again.’”

“So, the users are saying, ‘Give me my data back. That’s my data.’ That was one of the cries originally behind XML, it was a desktop application. Don’t store it in a format which I can’t reuse. So, now it’s, ‘Give it to me using the idea of standards. If you do that, then I can do things with it.’” (around 42 minutes into the interview)

Libraries are still playing catch-up in the social data area. We are starting to implement tagging and book recommendations, but we are not all that far along with implementing things. What this quote reminds me is that we should also be keeping an eye towards making it easy to export data out of our systems. Easy to use formats (like xml) and open standards and interfaces should become the norm for libraries.

This isn’t suggesting that we open all our data… it is not our place to provide patron reading or personal information. We shouldn’t make it difficult for patrons to do that themselves, if they so choose (although I feel we should make an effort to let them know the potential negative effects of placing information on the web).

We should, however, be using that data to generate social links between books (people who checked out “A” also tended to check out “B”, with A and B being books, authors, videos, etc.) and make it easy to access the patterns that result from any informational web site use.

Just something to keep in mind when we select our online tools and software…

interview found via TechCrunch

Web 3.0: Chicken Farms on the Semantic Web is an article by Jim Hendler on the early signs of what he is calling Web 3.0.  The title caught my attention, natch, and so I read the article with great interest.

However, I hesitate to agree with his premise.  He argues that the semantic web, or more precisely the standards, software and services that will rise to support it, will be the manifestation of Web 3.0.  I am not so sure.

The semantic web is a big deal, and very necessary for our long-term use of the internet.  This goes double for libraries, as our biggest obstacle is a data interchange format that is user-friendly while still maintaining the complexity it represents.  However, the semantic web is not what will re-shape our web experience.  It will help make it possible, but it in itself is primarily the organizational layer that can be used by the technology.

Web 2.0 (and as an extension, Library 2.0) has both been over-hyped and under-appreciated.  It is a significant change in how we, both developers and users, relate to the internet.  We are in the midst of this transformation, and I doubt that many can see clear to the far side, but it will be viewed as a fundamental shift in information gathering and sharing.

Much of what is described in his article is either the manifestations of the semantic structuring of information, or the Web 2.0 applications that take advantage of it.  I suspect that we haven’t yet detected that which will become 3.0 (or whatever it will ultimately be called), but that is is out there.  Just as many of the 2.0 technologies have their roots in relatively clunky analogs present in the late 1990s, the acorns that will grow into mighty oaks have yet to distinguish themselves.

By the way, it is a great article, and does an excellent job in conveying what may be in store for the semantic web.

article found via ResourceShelf