The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we’re still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how to program with weekly lessons throughout 2012.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Code Year: Learn to Code in 2012

Sign up for Code Year to start receiving a new interactive programming lesson every Monday. You’ll be building apps and websites before you know it!

- Code Year

Code Year is a project of internet startup Codecademy, a service that teaches people how to code (JavaScript only, at the moment). There have been three classes posted already, and the website says they are still accepting registrations at the homepage. Code Year is free, and it sends an e-mail at the beginning of each week with a link to that week’s course. More questions? See the frequently asked questions.

What I think is really cool about this is that a group of librarians has self-organized themselves to support each other through the year. There is a community area on ALA Connect and a list of resources on the catcode wiki that includes examples tailored to cataloging challenges. (“catcode” is a unique story onto itself. It is a wiki created to “help support dialogue between catalogers and coders.”)

Apple Introduces iBooks Author

Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning “revolution” enabled by Apple’s new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn’t fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author’s end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

- Enthusiasm for iBooks Author marred by licensing, format issues, by Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

Last week saw the big introduction of iBooks Textbooks for iPad and iBooks Author ebook creation utility. The combination were billed as a promising new way to have students interact with course materials and to have teachers build their own content. There were some not-so-nice surprises in the implementation, though. First, the ebook format is close to that of ePub standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, but strays in enough important ways that the iBooks Textbooks themselves won’t be usable on non-Apple devices. Second, included the End-User License Agreement for the iBooks Author software are terms that says content created with iBooks Author can be given away freely but can only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore. Apple also reserves the right to determine if your work is sold at iBookstore with no recourse for rejected works. The article above has more details, and the press coverage of iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author has been generally negative so far.

Update on 6-Feb-2012: Apple released iBooks Author version 1.0.1 with the only change being clarifications to the End-User License Agreement: “If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple… This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.”

SOPA and Protect-IP Are Dead

Graphic from Talking Points Memo

Leaders in Congress on Friday effectively killed two pieces of anti-online piracy legislation following the increasingly vocal protests of tens of thousands of websites and millions of Internet users.

That’s right, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are, for all practical purposes, dead in the water.

Sure, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) used the word “postponed” in their announcements, saying that Congress would only take a breather, but would certainly not give up for good on its goal of passing some sort of legislation designed to combat overseas “rogue” websites hosting pirated American content.

But whenever Congress decides to re-engage the online piracy fight — and it could be a while, given just how acrimonious the debate over the bills became in the last week — it’s almost certain that SOPA and PIPA won’t be revived in any recognizable form.

- How The Web Killed SOPA and PIPA, by Carl Franzen, Talking Points Memo Idea Lab

Who would have thought — grass roots organizations convince major internet presences to “black out” or otherwise inform users of ill-considered provisions (at best) in legislation, and in turn those users bury both houses of Congress with so much anti-SOPA and -PIPA feedback that they effectively kill the bills. Is this the closest we’ve come to direct democracy since ancient Athens? Perhaps! The article quoted above goes into great detail about the formational elements of SOPA and PIPA and the forces that gathered to stop them.

The response to Wikipedia being blacked out in particular was interesting. The Washington Post, The Guardian and National Public Radio announced that they would answer questions posted to Twitter with the hashtag #altwiki. Closer to the library community Credo Reference announced that free access for a day.

With Thursday Threads coming on a Thanksgiving Thursday, it seems appropriate to use a theme of what I’m thankful for. So, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads I’m offering three things: open source software, the internet, and public libraries. Reading this on Thanksgiving? Feel free to offer what you are thankful for in the comments.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Doc Summit Wrap up: 4 Books written in 3 days!

In mid October a Document Summit was held at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California where documentation teams from 4 open source projects, KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS and Sahana Eden as well as a few documentation ‘free agents’ gathered to a write 4 books in the course of three days and take part in a two day unconference. [In this blog post], one of the dedicated documentation volunteers and the FLOSS Manuals founder/organizer recount their experiences over the course of the week.

- Doc Summit Wrap up: 4 Books written in 3 days!, Google Open Source Blog

One of the striking similarities I’ve found between the library profession and the open source movement is an innate desire to share amongst ourselves. In the library world the sharing ranges from our ideas for techniques and tactics to our materials and metadata. In the technology world it is best exemplified by the open source “gift culture” of creating, sharing and supporting a community of developers all scratching a common itch. I’m thankful for the open source developers, the documentation writers, and knowledge sharers that enable libraries to efficiently and effectively share the knowledge and services under their care.

Cybersecurity in the Balance: Weighing the Risks of the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act

The Senate bill S.968, or the PROTECT IP Act, and the House bill H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, have raised a great deal of controversy. This paper does not deal with the questions of economic value, free expression or other issues raised by advocates on both sides. Instead, I highlight the very real threats to cybersecurity in a small section of both bills in their attempts to execute policy through the Internet architecture. While these bills will not “break the Internet,” they further burden cyberspace with three new risks. First, the added complexity makes the goals of stability and security more difficult. Second, the expected reaction of Internet users will lead to demonstrably less secure behavior, exposing many American Internet users, their computers and even their employers to known risks. Finally, and most importantly, these bills will set back other efforts to secure cyberspace, both domestically and internationally. As such, policymakers are encouraged to analyze the net benefits of these bills in light of the increased cybersecurity risks.

- Cybersecurity in the Balance: Weighing the Risks of the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, by Allan A. Friedman, Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Earlier this month there was a groundswell of opposition to hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In my own way, I registered my opposition to the pending legislation, as did thousands of others. I am optimistic that the bill will not become law, and viewed now from the perspective of the holiday I am thankful for that thing we call The Internet. That it was architected to put creative opportunity at the edges of the network, and that we have seen creativity flourish. That there are engineers and technicians watching the blinking lights around the clock to make sure they blink in the right sequence to get my bits from here to there. And that there are enough people concerned about tampering with the fundamentals of the internet that “strange bedfellows” in Congress now come together to state their opposition to the draft bill.

For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper

Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books.

- For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper, by Matt Richtel and Julie Bosman, New York Times

I’m in the same category of parent as those in this article, although I’m not sure it is a conscious decision. My 10-year-old daughter reads about a quarter of her fiction on my iPad and begs me to buy more. I bought a couple of iPad picture books for my 6-year-old son for vacation last year, but after the novelty of turning pages with the flick of finger wore off, he wanted to go back to the physical books. Most of what my children read come from the local library, so in the last place I’m thankful for my local public library. (And, well, thankful too for the opportunity to attend ALA conferences and pick up good deals on children’s books during the last hours the exhibit floor is open.) Thanks Michael Casey for posting a link to the New York Times article on Google+.

This blog will be participating in the American Censorship Day awareness campaign on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R.3261). There is an effort in the U.S. Congress to give power to the Department of Justice to disrupt the domain name service (DNS – the bit of internet infrastructure that makes human-readable things like “dltj.org” meaningful to machines) and order websites and search engines to remove links to targeted services (among other things). This legislation is supported in large part by the content creation industries to “address today’s gravest threat to the American film industry workforce: the illegal distribution of content online.”¹

The Center for Democracy and Technology has as a 2-page overview of why this is bad a bad law:

Why I Oppose SOPA

Footnotes

1. From the Motion Picture Association of America. Citation: IFTA: Jennifer Garnick, NATO: Patrick Corcoran, MPAA: Howard Gantman, Deluxe: Cathy Main, (2011, October 26). Creative Community Hails New Bipartisan House Legislation to Shut Down Rogue Websites that Steal American-Made Content. Retrieved October 31, 2011, from MPAA.

Mind-expanding topics this week. The threads start with a potentially morbid, but definitely intriguing, topic: what is to become of our personal digital legacies? If that isn’t enough to blow your mind, the next topic is an accounting of the amount of information processed in 2008. Still hanging in there? Then think about what could become of the book if we take advantage of its digital nature. You might not have much room to think big thoughts after those threads, but if you do the last one explores what could become of how our machines talk to each other.

My apologies for missing last week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads. I compose these entries on Wednesday evening and last week I snuggled with one of the children as he went to bed and I didn’t get back up again. That’s 31 straight weeks of Thursday Threads without interruption; not bad for an experiment many months ago. I haven’t mentioned this recently, so let me say it now: thank you for all of the positive feedback and for your interest in this series. It has been fun and useful to me to look back on the highlights of the week and put them in some context, and judging by the rising subscription count some readers find it useful too.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Personal Digital Legacies

Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

- The last post, Penmachine, Derek K. Miller

Ed Summers pointed to this blog post in a tweet in which Ed also said: “apart from being incredibly moving [this post] makes me wonder (again) what archiving services exist for depositing online work.” Also earlier this week was an article forwarded to me from Ron Murray in New Scientist with the title Digital legacy: Respecting the digital dead. The article covers the efforts of the British Library in working with personal digital archives, offering an overview of the techniques that border on the field of digital forensics to preserve the digital legacies of donated personal archives. And those two item follow a book I recently read called Your Digital Afterlife by Evan Carroll and John Romano (which itself I found by way of an NPR news story).

It has me wondering and considering (if not yet acting on) my digital legacy. Some of it is highly personal, like letting my spouse know how to access all of the digital bill paying sites that I use for the family’s finances. Other parts are fairly public, like what to do with this blog and my social media accounts. And it all brings me back around to Ed’s thought: is there a role for libraries in this space? Is some of what is represented in personal digital legacies the kind of highly-local content that libraries should be preserving? Or, put another way, how would our profession respond to the preservation desires of a patron who has used the Google tools shown in this 90 second video from Google (via the Google Operating System blog, Unofficial news and tips about Google).

Accounting of Information Processed

Comparisons of Digital Capacity Measurements

Three years ago, the world’s 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.

Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times.

- World’s servers process 9.57ZB of data a year, by Lucas Mearian, NetworkWorld

Those numbers come from a news release of a report from the University of California at San Diego that measures the amount of information swirling around the world’s computers. And it includes this handy table of comparisons of digital capacity measurements that attempts to put it into perspective. (Although trying to imaging the number of home computer hard drives in the state of Minnesota still boggles the mind.) I also find it to be a nice reality check. After all, my field’s contribution to that number can’t be too big, can it? So our problems really aren’t that big at all…

The Digital Book

Presentation by Mike Matas at TED (4 minutes)

The idea behind Push Pop Press [is] a digital creation tool designed to blow up the concept of the book. Frictionless self-publishing is a fertile new space, but this particular startup got a little help from former vice president Al Gore, whose exacting demands on an app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis gave this would-be company its first real boost.

Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.

- Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book, by Brian X. Chen, Wired.com Gadget Lab

I won’t call what these gentlemen show an “ebook” — something that brings to my mind static words on a digital page. No, this is a digital book — something wholly new to the process of communicating ideas from author to reader. To see why this is different, watch the four minute TED Talk video.

New Ways of Internetworking

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That’s a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson.

- This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C, by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb

A team of researchers at Rutgers University have launched the latest of a group of wireless network initiatives aiming to create a more open alternative to the Internet. MondoNet aims to enable a mesh network that lets a hybrid collection of new and existing Wi-Fi, WiMax and other wireless devices connect to each other without going through a central carrier.

A draft proposal for MondoNet describes its premise as well as how it will gather the best of existing technologies for mobile ad-hoc wireless mesh networks (MANETs). The project’s goal to create a system that provides both greater freedom and privacy for individual users than today’s Web.

- Rutgers team proposes Net alternative, Rick Merritt, EE Times

I’m including these as forward-looking points of interest. I don’t know if either will amount to anything substantial, but I do think it is interesting that researchers are looking at the next evolutionary steps in networking. Either of these proposals would be dramatic changes in flows of information between network users. I like how both seem to be building in a fundamental pillar of privacy into the design.

Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens

Okay, cute cat pictures aside, this week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads has three stories. The first is a pointer a project that scans and releases out-of-copyright music scores; this is an interest project not only for questions of copyright and asserting public domain rights but also for what it says about the perception of libraries and librarians. The second story, suggesting that organizations should hire for attitude and train for skill, makes me wonder about how this principle could be applied to the library profession. And lastly, the U.S. federal government has issued a broadband availability map based on data collected from states.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note

The site, the International Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.

The site (imslp.org) is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. Guo, the former conservatory student. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Quality control — like catching missed pages — is also left to the public. “It’s completely crowd sourced,” Mr. Guo said.

This article from the New York Times about the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) struck several chords with me (please pardon the pun). First is that this is the sort of activity libraries should be deeply engaged in. In a world where the mass distribution of physical works is common and the aggregation of digital access to materials being bundled into comprehensive (sometimes consortial-based) licenses (or libraries be bypassed by commercial distribution chains altogether), libraries can distinguish themselves by supporting projects that curate the unique and the local. The project has the word “Library” in the title and they have a category of volunteers called “librarians” (one is a high school student) but I can’t find evidence of the traditional library profession in the creation or support of the operation. As a librarian-by-formal degree (Simmons College, 2003) I’m neither offended by this, nor concerned that the project doesn’t have the involvement of librarian-by-degree people. Rather, I see this as markers of what people expect a library to be and what a librarian should do. This is an example of something we should strive towards.

The second chord is the copyright issue. It seems that this is another publishing industry segment that is under assault by the easy and relatively inexpensive distribution of content over the internet. In this case, it is the scanned versions of public domain scores. (The IMSLP has a Copyright Made Easy page describing what can and cannot be released on the site.) On the other hand, publishers can earn money by making researching and publishing what-the-composer-intended changes (my paraphrase) to public domain scores, then copyrighting the resulting derivative work. For most, scanned versions of out-of-copyright works are probably good enough and there is a cadre of volunteers who find personal fulfilment in scanning, uploading, proofing, and categorizing these versions. In its history, IMSLP was challenged in court, taken down, then reformulated and brought back online again by the original creator with the added support of volunteers. The IMSLP recently celebrated its five-year anniversary and although it faces the threat of lawsuits again, it is still going strong (hundreds if not thousands of changes per day).

Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill

How does the practice’s leader, Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle, find the right people for these unusual (but critical) jobs? “We recruit for attitude and train for skill,” Dr. Fernandopulle told Dr. Gawande. “We don’t recruit from health care. This kind of care requires a very different mind-set from usual care. For example, what is the answer for a patient who walks up to the front desk with a question? The answer is ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I see a doctor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I get help making my ultrasound appointment?’ ‘Yes.’ Health care trains people to say no to patients.”

Now that’s an effective prescription for innovation!

This article in Harvard Business Review uses an example of a “special care center” in a physician’s practice to demonstrate how attitude of workers is key in radically moving an organization forward. I’ll admit to a mental struggle of trying to integrate the lessons of this story with that of the International Music Score Library Project above. This may be the kind of hiring model we need for “re-imagining the future of libraries” (to take a riff off of the physician’s practice motto). But with seemingly so many service aspects that we can’t let go of, I’m finding it hard to imagine not hiring for skills. [Via OCLC Research's Above-the-Fold.]

National Broadband Map: How Connected is My Community?

The National Broadband Map is a tool to search, analyze and map broadband availability across the United States. Created and maintained by the NTIA, in collaboration with the FCC, and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia.

On February 17th, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) launched the National Broadband Map — a collection and visualization of better-than-dialup internet service providers in the United States. It came about using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Grant funds were given to states to gather the information needed to create the map, and it is on a schedule to be updated every six months. Network World Magazine has 6 cool things learned from the National Broadband Map (One: There is a large gap between connection speeds for small businesses and for medium and large businesses; Two: A dearth of broadband providers in the Northeast; Three: DSL is still the most available wireline technology; Four: Wireless looks like the future for rural broadband; Five: New York is the king of the 100Mbps download; Six: Wyoming is not a good place for high-speed Internet).

Last week in DLTJ Thursday Threads I posted an entry about running out of IP addresses. Since I posted that, I’ve run across a couple of other stories and websites that bring a little more context to the consequences of last week’s distribution of the last blocks of IP addresses from the world-wide pool of available addresses. The short version: channel any panic you might be feeling into making sure your systems are ready to communicate using both the existing network standard (IPv4) and the new network standard (IPv6).

The Imagined Frequently Asked Questions

Will the internet stop working?

There will not be a so-called “flag day” when everyone’s computers switch from IPv4 to IPv6. (There wasn’t the last time the internet went through a similar upheaval in the 1980s — see the “History” section below.) IPv6 will coexist with IPv4 for probably most of this decade, based on what I’m reading, as computers at the edges will communicate over both IPv4 and IPv6. Some magic in the Domain Name Service (DNS) will enable this to happen. There will come a day, though, when IPv4 addresses are truly exhausted and new services will only be reachable via IPv6. Whether we get there before IPv6 is widely deployed is a topic of much debate.

Am I ready now?

The Internet Society is calling for a World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011. “Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour ‘test flight’. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.”

I manage networks. Should I care?

Okay, that probably won’t happen. Your gear either supports IPv6 addressing and routing (perhaps with a software upgrade), or as you phase in new gear it will support IPv6. You do have a lot of work ahead of you, though, to get your network ready. The IPv6 Act Now has suggestions and links.

I manage hardware. Should I care?

I write software. Should I care?

How can I help?

Bits of History

ARPA sponsored research on computer networks led to the development of the ARPANET. The installation of the ARPANET began in September 1969, and regular operational use was underway by 1971. The ARPANET has been an operational service for at least 10 years. Even while it has provided a reliable service in support of a variety of computer research activities, it has itself been a subject of continuing research, and has evolved significantly during that time.

In the past several years ARPA has sponsored additional research on computer networks, principally networks based on different underlying communication techniques, in particular, digital packet broadcast radio and satellite networks. Also, in the ARPA community there has been significant work on local networks.

It was clear from the start of this research on other networks that the base host-to-host protocol used in the ARPANET was inadequate for use in these networks. In 1973 work was initiated on a host-to-host protocol for use across all these networks. The result of this long effort is the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

These protocols allow all hosts in the interconnected set of these networks to share a common interprocess communication environment. The collection of interconnected networks is called the ARPA Internet (sometimes called the “Catenet”).

The Department of Defense has recently adopted the internet concept and the IP and TCP protocols in particular as DoD wide standards for all DoD packet networks, and will be transitioning to this architecture over the next several years. All new DoD packet networks will be using these protocols exclusively.

The time has come to put these protocols into use in the operational ARPANET, and extend the logical connectivity of the ARPANET hosts to include hosts in other networks participating in the ARPA Internet.

As with all new systems, there will be some aspects which are not as robust and efficient as we would like (just as with the initial ARPANET). But with your help, these problems can be solved and we can move into an environment with significantly broader communication services.

The transition plan for NCP to TCP called for roughly a year-long process in 1982 to transition hosts from one network stack to the other. There were gateways between the two networks during that time. In January 1983 all the gateways between the NCP-based hosts and the IP-based hosts were turned off.

Vint Cerf, one of the parents of what we call the “Internet”, reflected on IPv4 addressing at the 2008 IPv6 conference. A DLTJ post from 2008 has a transcript of Dr. Cerf’s comments.

Footnotes

1. Adapted from the SANS Internet Storm Center entry The End Of IP As We Know It. Check it out for more techie questions and answers.

It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seven days, but the necessary distractions were numerous. Please enjoy this edition whenever you read it. As always, there is lots more on my FriendFeed aggregation page.

Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions.

Google’s Open Source blog has this announcement of a major new release of their “Refine” software package. It is software that runs on your Windows, Mac, or UNIX machine and you access it with your web browser. If your first inclination for cleaning up data sets is to drag out Excel or write a script using regular expressions, check out the three demonstration videos and see if Refine might get you to your end result faster.

Why Do eBooks Cost So Much? (A Publisher’s Perspective)

So far in our experience at Thomas Nelson, the elimination of manufacturing and distribution costs are being offset by retail price reductions and the three additional costs I have outlined. The good news is that we are making about the same margins, regardless of whether we sell the book in physical form or digital. As a result, I don’t expect eBook retail prices to come down any more. If they do, then publishers will have to figure out how to make it work. But for right now, I think the pricing is fair, based on the associated costs.

This post comes from the chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. In it he describes the shifting costs of physical versus digital production from a publisher’s perspective. His practical upshot? “I don’t expect eBook retail prices to come down any more.”

Principles for Open Bibliographic Data

For some time now the OKFN Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data has been working on Principles on Open Bibliographic Data. While first attempts were mainly directed towards libraries and other public institutions we decided to broaden the principle’s scope by amalgamating it with Peter Murray-Rust’s draft publisher guidelines. The results can be seen below. We ask anyone to review these principles, discuss the text and suggest improvements.

Here are the highlights of the five principles mentioned in the post: when publishing data make an explicit and robust license statement; use a recognized waver or license that is appropriate for metadata; if you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Knowledge/Data Definition; we strongly recommend explicitly placing bibliographic data in the public domain via PDDL or CCo; and we urge creators of bibliographic metadata explicitly either dedicate this to the public domain or use an open license.

“Copyright Infringement and Me” — The Sad Tale of Cooks Source

My 2005 Ice Dragon entry, called “A Tale of Two Tarts” was apparently printed without my knowledge or permission in a magazine and I am apparently the victim of copyright infringement.

That is the beginning of the beginning of a tale of significant copyright infringments by a small advertising-supported publication in western New England. The details have been summarized by others. What I find useful, though, are the posts that talk about lessons learned as the internet speeds the spread of memes and how significant remedies for copyright infringment can be difficult to obtain. Since Facebook plays such a central role, the tale of Cooks Source might make a for a useful case study to the Facebook generation.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2010/11/05/cooks-source-what-should-judith-griggs-have-done/ on June 9th, 2011.

This week is a mostly Google edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Below is a high-level overview of Google’s Book Search algorithm, how Google is helping web servers improve the speed at which content loads, and how Google’s internet traffic is growing as a percentage of all internet traffic. But first, there is an uprising on the RDA test records in the WorldCat database.

If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Memorandum Against RDA Test

We have found ourselves in an unenviable position of opposing the work that supposedly has been authorized by agencies representing our interests. I might compare it to a military coup d’état. I mean here the RDA “test” and its implications on the cataloging world at large. After extensive discussions on the PCC, OCLC cataloging e-mail lists with opinions from the British Library, Australia and North America, we can safely conclude that there is a broad consensus against principles of RDA and the way RDA “test” has been imposed on the cataloging world.

The original post on the OCLC-CAT list by Wojciech Siemaszkiewicz of the New York Public Library is behind a must-subscribe-and-authenticate form, but it has been copied out copied to an open website by Becky Yoose (thanks, Becky!). The subsequent discussion resulted in a Petition against the RDA Test by Jacqueline Byrd at Indiana University. The link to the position has been posted to the open AUTOCAT list, and there has been subsequent discussion there. (Hat tip to Kirsten Davis.)

Inside the Google Books Algorithm

Rich Results is the latest in a series of smaller front-end tweaks that have been matched by backend improvements. Now, the book search algorithm takes into account more than 100 “signals,” individual data categories that Google statistically integrates to rank your results. When you search for a book, Google Books doesn’t just look at word frequency or how closely your query matches the title of a book. They now take into account web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted.

Alexis Madrigal article in TheAtlantic.com draws a comparison between the techniques and algorithms used for web search with those used for book materials. The need for relevant search results is the same, but books don’t have the same inter-page linking hints that drive the PageRank algorithm for web search. The use of anonymized circulation data in creating clustered bibliographic descriptions was mentioned at the ALA Midwinter ALCTS Forum on Mashups of Bibliographic Data, and apparently it is also used in the relevance ranking of Google Books search results. (Hat tip to Ron Murray.)

Google Releases mod_pagespeed

mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them. It does this by rewriting the resources using filters that implement web performance best practices. Webmasters and web developers can use mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages when serving content with the Apache HTTP Server. mod_pagespeed includes several filter that optimize JavaScript, HTML and CSS stylesheets. It also includes filters for optimizing JPEG and PNG images. The filters are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who set up mod_pagespeed in addition to configuring proper caching and compression on their Apache distribution should expect to see an improvement in the loading time of the pages on their websites.

Google has promoted best practices for improving the rate at which web pages load for a number of years. This week they introduced mod_pagespeed: an Apache web server module that brings these practices to bear by rewriting HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets on-the-fly. Since Google now includes the speed at which pages are rendered in a browser as a factor in ranking search results, this would seem to be a good module to explore for anyone running an Apache web server with public content. (Hat tip to Ed Summers.)

Google as a percentage of all internet traffic

Google Sets Internet Traffic Record

Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks. Keep in mind that these numbers represent increased market share — Google is growing considerably faster than overall Internet volumes which are already increasing 40-45% each year.

Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks notes that if Google were an internet service provider, it would now be “the second largest carrier on the planet.” Wow! That is a lot of data sloshing around on its own internal network!

I’m starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads — summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter posts, etc.), but since I know not everyone is using those services, it might be useful to post the best-of-the-selected here once a week. Why Thursday? Somewhere long ago I read that Thursday at 11am is the best time to put a post on a blog because Thursday lunch through Friday are the most active time for readers. I have no idea whether that is true or not, but lacking any evidence to the contrary, Thursday morning will do fine. (Obviously I’m a little late on this first one, but I’ll try to do better next time. Or not — maybe this will be a one-off weekly thing.)

MagCloud — On-demand printing of magazines

MagCloud, the revolutionary new self-publishing web service from HP, is changing the way ideas, stories, and images find their way into peoples’ hands in a printed magazine format. Whether you are a novice or experienced publisher, MagCloud offers you a way to create commercial quality magazines, printed on demand with no upfront costs or minimum print runs. MagCloud is creating new ways to bring consumers and publishers together in a web-based marketplace where choice, flexibility and print on demand are the cornerstones of the community.

Could be useful for short-run, professional printing. I learned about this via a conference call with the editorial board of the NISO International Standards Quarterly.

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation (TED Talk)

TED’s Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter …

TED curator Chris Anderson takes the stage to talk about what he has seen as the impact of putting TED talks on the net specifically as well as the general case for the impact of services like YouTube on worldwide culture. This is definitely gets one thinking about the power of the visual medium. Closer to home, it also should get one thinking about assisting library patrons in creating and curating this content, no?

Plain English

Every field has its own jargon that’s meaningless to everyone else. Sometimes you want to translate a given -ese into lay terms while preserving the original text. Plain English is designed to facilitate this. The premise is straightforward: The original text is highlighted in yellow. When you click on a phrase, it toggles to the re-written simpler version, in gray. Buttons at the top allow you to toggle the whole thing at once. The words are stored in a simple JSON file.

From the laboratory of Slate Magazine comes this technique for toggling between one set of words and its translated form. I first found this on the NPR Planet Money blog in a post titled The Fed, Translated Into English. They used it to “translate” Fed-speak (e.g. the very dense statements released by the U.S. Federal Reserve) into more common language.

Google New

The one place to find everything new from Google.

Found via Jason Griffey’s post on his American Libraries Perpetual Beta blog. I noted there my frustration that Google New didn’t have an RSS feed to make this list of new things more machine-actionable. I still think that this missing feed functionality is strange, and if I get a chance at some point I’ll try to feed the page through Yahoo! Pipes to make one.

Rising Into the Public Domain: The Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) at the University of Michigan

Interview with John Wilkin, Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology and Executive Director, HathiTrust and Principal Investigator for CRMS

Interesting insight into how the University of Michigan is tackling the 1923-1963 orphan works problem. (Found via James Grimmelmann)

$1000 bounty offered for JPEG2000 support in Firefox

We’ve waited long enough. Apparently Firefox needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the early 2000′s. I have a financial interest in seeing this implemented, so I’m going to step up.

I’m going to offer a $1000 bounty for native JPEG2000 support in Firefox, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Comment #155 on this feature request has someone putting up real money to have a developer integrate JPEG2000 into the Firefox browser. The ensuing discussion gives a glimpse into how hard and how easy it could be.

White House Issues IPv6 Directive

Network World reports: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has issued a directive requiring all U.S. government agencies to upgrade their public-facing Web sites and services by Sept. 30, 2012 to support IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. Kundra’s memo mandates that agencies use native IPv6 instead of transition mechanisms that translate between IPv6 and the current standard, which is known as IPv4.

You may not have heard this, but we’re running out of IP addresses. An IP address is the thing computers use to find each other on the net (and not to be confused with domain name system (DNS) addresses — the human friendly things that we put on our business cards and advertisements). In the current version of the Internet Protocol (IPv4), we only have about 4 billion addresses and we’ve used up 95% of them. There has been a big press this year to move to the next generation Internet Protocol (IPv6) that will give us 340 billion billion billion billion addresses (or roughly 50 billion billion billion addresses for each person alive in 2012 when the 4 billion addresses of the existing Internet Protocol run out). The entry of the federal government into the push for IPv6 is expected to accelerate adoption of the new standard.

Just as it turns 40, the internet comes of age. One day before of the anniversary of the first two computers connected together by a prototype network in 1969¹ — a move that foreshadowed the worldwide network of computers we know today — the U.S. Government announced that it was forever releasing direct control over a key governance organization that makes the internet run. Called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that governance organization is what runs the top level domain name servers (DNS). And that is important because it is the DNS that translates human-friendly names such as “www.google.com” and “dltj.org” into network-friendly addresses.

Oh, you didn’t know that the U.S. Government was still involved in the running of the internet? ’tis true. In 1998, ICANN, a California non-profit corporation, was created to provide management of the names and numbers of the internet. (Technically, the functions provided by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the InternNIC, if you want to go back further in the history of the internet.) In turn, the U.S. Department of Commerce contracted with ICANN to manage those names and numbers. That the U.S. Government had this power to begin with is an artifact of how the internet came about: first as a U.S. military research network (ARPANET), then as a North America science computing research network under the auspices of the National Science Foundation (NSFNet), then to the Internet with commercial and world-wide entities playing a role. (Okay, yeah, that is a broad brushstroke of a really complicated history, but it mostly holds together.)

Since 1998, ICANN operated under memorandum of understanding process that was renewed each year. That changes now; the final authority for ICANN is derived from review processes made up of volunteer members from the “Internet community.” The U.S. Department of Commerce retains a permanent role on those review processes, but it is just one voice among many.

Congratulations, Internet! Perhaps in a few years, you’ll be grown up enough to go out for a beer. You’ll pardon me, though, if I don’t buy the internet its first beer; my party budget is not that big.

Footnotes

1. From the BBN Timeline for ARPANET:
   

   On October 1, 1969, the second [Interface Message Processor] arrived at SRI and the first characters were transmitted over the new network. The ARPANET was born. When IMPs number three and four were installed at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, IMP installations were beginning to seem routine and there was little fanfare. The network quietly expanded to thirteen sites by January 1971 and twenty-three by April 1972.