Confessions of a Mad Librarian

Is the Information Revolution analogous to the Industrial Revolution? No way! The people who participated in the Industrial Revolution did not control it or its impact; they were, for good or ill, along for the ride.

The tail of technology cannot wag the dog of society and history did not begin with 1947.

The first major open source project: the first Oxford English Dictionary! It had the same distributed collaboration we now ascribe to open source.
Heterogeneous communication and collaboration are key, not the technology.

Technology is a prosthesis.

Bill's favourite blogger: Lewis Lapham (editor of Harper's Magazine)
A blog without trust is just a bunch of words

Alan Kay: It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea as it does to have the good idea in the first place
Buxton's corollary: Sometimes, more creativity is required to implement a good idea as to come up with it in the first place
Good ideas aren't precious and special, in fact they are dime-a-dozen.

Actually, we're not in an information revolution, but rather it's a data explosion. Data is not information until it informs and contributes to decision-making.
Putting books online doesn't automatically create or improve knowledge; the problems we already have with search with be magnified five-fold when the full text of books are mixed in

  Where is the wisdom we've lost in knowledge
    Where is the knowledge we've lost in information -- TS Eliot

  Where is the information we've lost in data
    Where is the data we've lost in noise -- Gale Moore

Book reading is going up, but what books are being read? What is the difference between books and documentation (which typically has a shelf life of 6 months)?

Reflecting on design:
There are 3 mirrors to reflect design -- motor-sensory, cognitive and social; the human is at the centre of this reflection

The future:
    The future is already here. (It's just not uniformly distributed.) -- William Gibson
Virtually any technology that's going to have a significant impact over the next 5-10 years has already been around 10 years. There is no deus ex machina.

The blackboard as innovation: the blackboard wasn't a technology change (it merely scaled up the slate writing board), but it is the biggest educational innovation we've seen so far.

There's been no real progress in computer innovation. What has changed:
size
processing speed
downward trend in expense
ubiquity
networking capability
location/mobility
Input/output (I/O) -- the most important -- how to transfer material from the physical world to the digital and vice versa

The general-purpose computer is insane. Again, human-centered perspective is key.

Former matrix of innovation/technology: tool/function/location
Everything (almost everything) that you're doing with a computer, you used to do with a pencil
Tools will become transparent and location will become important again, in Buxton's perfect world

Louis I. Khan - Thoughts exchanged by one another are not the same in one room as in another.
Buxton's corollary: This is true, whether person-to-person, person-to-machine or machine-to-machine
The Society of Appliances: appliances now have solo and interfaced functionality

Gaping holes/pet peeves
Current software development isn't focused on making computers easier to use for users
It isn't about the media (books, maps, music, photos), it's about learning