It might have been the week of the annual American Library Association meeting with all the news and announcements and programming that came from it — as well as getting into the dog days of summer — but interesting news at the intersection of technology and libraries did not take a pause. Google made a big splash this week with tantalizing tidbits about its new social media project; it is at a look-but-don’t-touch stage, but the look is enticing. Then there were two articles about really big data — what is produced in the high energy physics supercolider at CERN and what we produce as a society. And to go along with that data we produce as a society is another warning that much of it isn’t safe from the prying eyes of the USA PATRIOT Act. Finally, we revisit the Georgia State University copyright case with a comment on the potential chilling impacts on free speech.

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Google Unveils its Social Media Project

Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.

- Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web, Official Google Blog

The new Google+ service is temporarily out of capacity at the limited trial launch.

Google+ is in very limited public roll-out at the moment. Some are speculating that this is a marketing strategy to build buzz around the project like they did with limited invites to GMail and Google Voice. I wonder, based on the “We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon” message on the signup page, whether they are having difficulties scaling up the service. In any case, they are taking measured and deliberate steps in rolling this out. If you want to learn more, there are about seven minutes of videos on the Google+ Project Overview page. Beyond that is an excellent 6,300-word article by Steven Levy on Wired.com; Steven has had inside access to the development of the project for months and there are a lot of insights in the article that I’m not seeing published elsewhere.

The Size of Big Data

Experiments at CERN are generating an entire petabyte of data every second as particles fired around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at velocities approaching the speed of light are smashed together. However, Francois Briard, control infrastructure section leader, beam department, explained that CERN doesn’t capture and save all of this data, instead using filters to save only the results of the collisions that are of interest to scientist at the facility….

This still means CERN is storing 25PB of data every year – the same as 1,000 years’ worth of DVD quality video – which can then be analysed and interrogated by scientists looking for clues to the structure and make-up of the universe.

- CERN experiments generating one petabyte of data every second, by Dan Worth, IT News from V3.co.uk

In 2011 alone, 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created, the equivalent to every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for 26,976 years. And over the next decade, the number of servers managing the world’s data stores will grow by ten times. Interestingly, the amount of data people create by writing email messages, taking photos, and downloading music and movies is minuscule compared to the amount of data being created about them, the EMC-sponsored study found.

The IDC study predicts that overall data will grow by 50 times by 2020, driven in large part by more embedded systems such as sensors in clothing, medical devices and structures like buildings and bridges.

- World’s data will grow by 50X in next decade, IDC study predicts, by Lucas Mearian, ComputerWorld

These two reality checks came by way of ACM TechNews. Just in case you think you were dealing with some big hunks of data, just know that data in the library world is pretty miniscule. Now there are some that are having to deal with this sort of “big data” — particularly with regards to the new rules from the National Science Foundation.

Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data

At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act… After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it…

Frazer explained that, as Microsoft is a U.S.-headquartered company, it has to comply with local laws (the United States, as well as any other location where one of its subsidiary companies is based).

- Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data, by Zack Whittaker, ZDNet

This was a bit unexpected. If you are a U.S.-based entity and thought your data was safe from revealing through a U.S. National Security Letter because you were using a hosting service outside of the U.S., you may want to check with your lawyers again.

Closing the book on academic freedom

The scope of the proposed injunction in the [Georgia State University] litigation goes far beyond existing case law, as it limits all speech, by all actors, in any way associated with GSU. As such, it is not a limit on a particular instance of suspected infringement, but a limit on all potential speech going forward. Prior injunctions have been limited in scope and have stopped the publication of existing works; the proposed injunction chills all future expression coming out of GSU, and leaves no space for the comment, criticism, and dialogue that lies at the center of constitutionally protected speech. In order to open up a new business model, the plaintiffs ask the court to shake the foundations of the balance between incentive and expression; and the price of doing so is simply too high.

- Closing the book on academic freedom, by Bobby Glushko on Paul Courant’s blog

Bobby Glushko, J.D., is the Associate Librarian in the Copyright Office of the University of Michigan Library. Following up the frightening scenario in a DLTJ Thursday Thread earlier this month, Mr. Glushko looks at the potential impact on First Amendment free speech if the litigation in the Georgia State University case goes in favor of the plaintiffs. It is a whole new level of frightening.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was giving $3 million in “funding, software, technological expertise, training and support services” to the Library of Congress to build on-site and online exhibits of LC historical collections. Others have commented on this. From a Jester’s point of view, I’ve got problems with this on two fronts: Microsoft using LC in a cheap marketing ploy and LC’s use of a new technology that impedes access for no good technical reason.

Library of Congress as shill for Microsoft

This excerpt from the undated page “Microsoft signs cooperative agreement with U.S. Library of Congress” is the beginnning of my uneasiness. Emphasis and links added:

Scale: The Library of Congress receives upwards of 2 million visitors per year. Also, LOC.GOV is one of the top sites for search engines for international and U.S. historical searches and receives millions of hits and unique users per month. Children and teachers across the country will learn by using this site, the materials created here will be approved curriculum in all 50 states.

Scope of influence: This initiative will influence library technology worldwide. Libraries large and small from around the country and the world look to the Library of Congress for technical guidance and are certain to take note of what tools are being used in the NVE ["New Visitor Experience"] and on MyLoC.gov [not yet operational]. Because of its scale and breadth, it will have influence not only in the U.S., but also for scalable web sites in general. The Library of Congress will engage top educators to create educational content which will meet strict guidelines mandated by state departments of education for inclusion in public schools.

Partners: Schematic: User Experience. Portal Solutions: infrastructure implementation. [What the heck does this mean?]

The Technology: For the on-site visitor, Kiosks will be built using Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) using touch-screen technology for an immersive experience. Visitors will be given a “passport” (optionally mapped to a Windows Live ID), which can be used to digitally keep track of what exhibits each visitor has seen.

The publicly available web site will offer the ability to visit the library in a virtual environment which will complement the physical visitor’s experience. Because the Library of Congress is so vast, tourists will be able to “complete” their visit on line using the web site, which will have kept track of their visit when they were present at the library using the “passport” technology.

Clearly Microsoft is using this $3 million “gift” (again, we’re not sure how much of it is real cash and how much is in-kind software licenses and suck) to push the adoption of Silverlight. I’ve got a problem with a public institution like the Library of Congress being used to push a commercial advantage. If Microsoft paid YouTube $3M to make videos available in Silverlight rather than Flash, it would be a different story. That Microsoft convinced HardRock (not a cultural heritage institution) to put up content in Silverlight doesn’t bother me. If Silverlight had been adopted by the Library of Congress based on its own merits, it would be another story entirely. (Based on the information released to date, it doesn’t appear that this was the case.) That leads into the next issue I have with the LC/Microsoft deal.

Silverlight-exclusive Content Impedes Access

Silverlight does not have a wide scope of adoption; it is not installed already on the vast majority of machines on the net. Many access the internet in places that don’t allow for plug-ins to be installed. (We hear about this at OhioLINK with regards to the educational videos available through RealMedia at OhioLINK — and RealMedia has been out for a decade! We’re actively investigating a shift to Flash-based players, by the way.) Content that is available exclusively in Silverlight is effectively not available to those that cannot — for technical or know-how reasons — install the plug-in.

A justification could be offered if Silverlight represented a big-enough shift in capability to justify the added effort to install the plug-in. I don’t see any evidence that it is. For instance, I’m not convinced that Deep Zoom in the upcoming version of Silverlight is really all that interesting. It would appear to use JPEG tiles to get information from the server to the applet in the browser — the same fundamental technique used by the Zoomify Flash applet and AJAX techniques like Google Maps. The Silverlight framework seems to give a clean, one-step way to implement the creation of the tiles on the server, but that can be replicated in other ways. (See for instance, my own efforts to create a shim between JPEG2000 and Zoomify.) Besides, from a content accessibility perspective, why would we make the programmer’s life easier if it makes the viewer’s life harder.

Final Thoughts

Stu Hicks, one of OhioLINK’s systems engineers, told the OhioLINK staff last night about a new program at Microsoft called DreamSpark. Through this program, post-secondary students around the world who are attending accredited schools or universities can download some of Microsoft’s big developer and designer tools free of charge. At the time and place this post is being written, the list of software is:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Developers Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
• Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
• Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
• Virtual PC 2007

Eligibility is determined by either a Shibboleth or a Windows CardSpace identity provider on the student’s campus. One must link a Windows Live ID account with that campus identity provider and renew that eligibility about once every 12 months. They are using Shibboleth for what it was designed for; it is actually nice to see Microsoft recognize that only a true/false response from the campus is required to determine eligibility and that no personally-identifying attributes are passed from the campus to the Microsoft server to make this happen. There are FAQs for students and for higher education administrators.

The blog post announcing the program has an video interview with Bill Gates, but unfortunately one needs Microsoft’s Flash alternative called Silverlight to watch it.