Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

This is a dystopian novel set in the year 2044.  You could also call it a quest novel, a coming of age novel, or near future science fiction.  It melds many different themes into a unique, funny, and exciting story.  The one common theme that seems to unite all of it is geek culture, video games, and the 1980s.

Wade Watts the main character, is a geeky kid who spends most of his time in the virtual world of OASIS.  Virtual reality in this setting is extremely realistic.  Wade Watts even goes to school in the virtual world.  The virtual world he escapes into is infinitely better than his horrific, crowded, dangerous trailer park existence in the real world. The theme of bits versus atoms pervades this book.  In the real world, even virtual money is worth more than most national currencies.

The story is centered around a contest to gain control of the world wide virtual world called OASIS.  To do this, the entrants must solves riddles that were part of the creator of the virtual world's childhood.  The childhood is a kind of super fanboy and geek festival filled with 1980s references; everything from Duran Duran to Star Trek to the video game Joust.  It is very funny.  It reminds me a bit of my own childhood.

The book adds in many tropes: a love interest, an evil corporation, and plenty of action.  It moves very quickly from scene to scene and makes you want to find out what happens next.  The book made me laugh and smile while I was reading it.  It is lot of fun especially if you are nostalgic about the 1980s, liked roleplaying games, video games, comics, and listened to rock music.

Ernest Cline has a website http://www.ernestcline.com/  .  The book Ready Player One is coming out in August of 2011.  I was reading an advanced reading copy sent to me by Library Journal   I think this book will cross reading genres and be appealing to a wide audience.

Content Strategy Meetup, January 25,Tuesday, 7 p.m. (Winter Social Session)

Content Management Meetup, January 25, Tuesday, 7 p.m., Winter Social

The meetup was kind of interesting.  I went there to learn more about the profession of content strategy.  It is an emerging profession.

First we met and introduced ourselves. I am hoping I remember most of the people there. There was Peter Gallo who was information architect. Brian E. Kirby was one of the organizers. He works for AIG as a managing editor for web content. He explained his job is more to decide what people are going to do with content than editing. Another of the organizers was Anna Svahn who works for an advertising agency. There was also Elena Melendy who was an independent contractor, Lynn Bernstein who works as an independent consultant, and Liz Weintrob who works for Saatchi and Saatchi as a managing editor and John who works as a technology person.

The atmosphere was quite comfortable. The first thing that they mentioned was a conference called Confab 2011 http://www.confab2011.com/ Anna Svahn was planning on going. It is in Minneapolis on May 9-11.

I asked about content strategy and what it was. They told me that it can mean a lot of different things. The field was relative new. It was about two years old. There is some relation between content strategy and content curation. It is more strategy than data management.

I asked about books which you could read. The first thing they suggested was that I look at Joe Pulizzi who is establishing the Content Management Association. He has a book called Get Content, Get Customers.

Several other books were talked about including; The Content Strategy Bible by Paul Sheffield. This book gives a good introduction to the field. Anne Rockley also wrote Managing Enterprise Content, A Unified Content Strategy. On the more technical side, they mentioned the book, Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko. It is a technical book on how to build a content management system including building, implementing, running, and managing a CMS.

For something a bit simpler, they suggested reading Paul Krug's book about usability, Don't Make Me Think. I mentioned two books, Curation Nation aby Steven Rosenbaum and Letting Go of Words by Ginny Redish. It was interesting hearing about these books.

Most of the people were focused on corporate and advertising data. Liz Weintrob came from a publishing background and worked with Saatchi and Saatchi.

The field is very new. It is about two years old. When I mentioned that I was a librarian they suggested I might be interested in information architecture. I said, no, I am more interested in what goes into a website than the structure, I do collection development.

They described that they were dealing with enterprise content, not smaller systems like Drupal which they use in our library.

I was especially interested in some of the ideas about metadata. They only told me that they are often hired to go in and cleanup existing services which have inadequate descriptors for their records. The search engines and indexes are often not user focused. They are also involved in data mapping and data planning which means they plan out maps of all the data they are going to put in.

I think it was Lynn Bernstein who talked about how she often had to create descriptors for the records from museums and film which had not been properly labeled. It was often a focus on individual records being described. Their objective was to make it easy for the user not the creator. She mentioned three questions.

What do we have?

What are we doing?

What are we going to do with it?

There was an analogy that data was put into a cup. Then the content strategist asks who is going to drink from the cup?

It was a very interesting evening. I learned quite a bit.  As always, feel free to correct me, comment, and think on what was said. Please don't mind my functional, if somewhat personal grammar.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly




Kevin Kelly views technology as a natural organic living process. He calls it the technium. He views it as being part of human evolution. I found the ideas to be fascinating but overly anthropomorphic. He gave living qualities to stone, steel, spoons, bricks, and computers. There is both a humanizing and a dehumanizing aspect to this writing.



The humanizing aspect is a view of increased possibilities, more opportunities to create greater freedoms and greater choice. The author shows how machines improve our lives and expand our possibilities. He also includes systems of thought like science, art, and law as part of technology. He describes how technology evolved as we evolved from the stone age to modern cities.



Where it fails and seems a bit dehumanizing is his taking a picture of nature that seems very utilitarian. He describes that eventually there will be no waste with biophilic technology. I think this lessens nature and makes it machine like. He even claims the Amish are part of the technium because of how they use technology. This was a bit far fetched to me. I don't like to think of myself as evolving in a similar way to a machine.



The unabomber, Ted Kaczynski's anti-technology views are gone into. This was quite daring to do. Kevin Kelly does not shy from tackling some opposing view points. He even talks about primitivism. This makes the book different.


There is a deeply philosophical bent to the writing. I can recognize some of the philosophy. Some of it is very much at the edge of high technology. He seems to be trodding a slightly different path than transhumanism where the idea is that we will become more than human when we integrate with machines. Kevin Kelly also does not argue for the singularity where machines become smarter than humans. Machines are a different kind of intelligence than human intelligence. His ultimate goal is to open infinite games for people, more choice, more freedom, more opportunities through technology.



Read this book it will open your mind to new ideas. It makes you think. Kevin Kelly helped launched Wired Magazine. His website is http://www.kk.org/



The book is fairly dense reading. It includes notes, an annotated reading list, black and white photographs, charts, and an index. It is very much a popular science title.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld

This book is an introductory text on information architecture for the internet.  The information in this book clarified and defined many ideas from this emerging profession.  It is quite relevant to librarians.  According to this book 40% of information architects come from a library science background.

Many of the concepts that were being described came right out of library school.  I remember reading about search engines, indexes, and classification in my cataloging class.  This book takes it one step further and describes how information on the web is turned into metadata, controlled vocabularies, and labeling systems. It also describes how indexes and search engines are designed.

It is more than just information systems, it is also the language of the nonvisible parts of websites.  It describes things which a chief information officer or a senior developer might talk about; web blueprints, taxonomy, wireframes, and content maps.  This is the planned architecture of enterprise websites.

The reader also learns the vocabulary and professional interests in education, strategy, and selling the profession.  Reading this was eye opening.  It gave me a description of how enterprise websites are created like evolt.org or the MSWeb intranet.

After reading this, I am beginning to get a context of how complex websites are put together.  There is the content strategist who puts in all the different kinds of content in the site, and the information architect who creates the framework on which an enterprise website is built..

This was an incredibly useful book.  It helped me understand the internet in ways which I had not done before.  I would highly recommend this to people who are interested in technology.