Amazing hummingbird video http://bit.ly/aJbGni (via boingboing) [twitter: boingboing]

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Netflix has a 128-slide deck, meant to be read not talked through, that explains the company’s culture, including why they don’t award a fixed number of vacation days. I find it liberating, humane, and slightly scary.

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According to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a St. Louis Park couple had so many books that they bought the house next door and turned it into their own library.

The article doesnt tell us how many books they own, but a reasonable guess might be, oh, 200 gigabytes worth.

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From the Boston Globe today:

Blagojevich a distraction for Democrats
Former governor’s retrial complicates campaigns in Ill.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Alexi Giannoulias had planned to talk jobs. The Democrat in a tight race for President Obama’s former Senate seat wanted to take the opportunity to say his Republican opponent had helped wreck the nation’s economy.

Reporters, though, only wanted to talk about the ousted Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, a newly convicted felon who is expected to be retried on some counts.

The unfinished business of the Blagojevich trial poses a major new hurdle for Illinois Democrats, who are already facing a difficult election season. Despite hopes that Blagojevich’s trial would wrap up well before the November vote, a retrial could begin as soon as this fall, in the final weeks of campaigning.

Blagojevich’s saga will keep diverting attention from the pocketbook issues Democrats want to talk about as they try to keep Obama’s old seat…

Hmm. Shouldn’t the actual headline be:

Media continues to distract Democrats with Blagojevich
Journalists’ pandering threatens democracy in Ill.

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The weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Rebecca Tabasky:

• Jonathan Zittrain works through the Google/Verizon announcement link

• danah boyd shares an email about divisions between Brazilian social networks link

• Ethan Zuckerman on “virtual, person to person, then virtual” communities link

• Steve Schultze, like, links to some web security discussions link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Malaysia: Where is Press Freedom Heading Now?” link

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I’ve got a new job: I’m co-director of the Harvard Library Lab, a part of Harvard Law School. I’m excited.

The Lab (the name is going to change) was created by John Palfrey a year ago when he became head of the Harvard Law Library (and Vice Dean for Information and Library Resources at the Law School). JP had been executive director of the Berkman Center. The key thing to understand is that the Lab was established by someone with a commitment to openness, collaboration, the importance of libraries, and the goodness of the Web. JP’s short form mission for the Lab is to “hack libraries” — in the good sense, of course, of innovating to expose even more of their value. Libraries are the centers of communities of scholars and researchers offline, and they ought to be (or at least inform) the centers of those communities online as well.

I’ve been consulting to the Lab for the past year, reporting to the fabulous Kim Dulin, lawyer and librarian, who is now co-director with me. We have a small but extraordinary team of folks who combine knowledge, imagination and vision with the ability to incarnate all three in software. The Lab has been working on a handful of small projects and one very large project. For now let’s just say that the projects generally take advantage of what libraries know — content, librarians, the users, all their interactions, all the metadata they generate — in order to help researchers and scholars find what they need, understand it, and share what they’ve learned. Something like that.

Also, the projects are awesome. And open source. And, whenever possible, collaborative in every direction. I’m there half-time so that I can finish my book, but my spirit is there 100%. (Also, my spirit works nights and weekends.)

There’s tons to do and a fantastic set of people to work with. I can’t wait to begin next week.

Frequently Asked Questions that no one has actually ever asked:

Yes, I’m still a senior fellow at the Berkman Center.

Yes, the Lab and the Center are independent of one another, but there’s a fair bit of happy overlap.

Yes, we know that Lab’s Web site needs work. We’re working on it! Jeez!

Yes, the Lab is part of the Harvard Law School Library, but we take our mandate as being more general than that.

No, the Law School Library Lab that I’m at is not the same as the new Harvard Library Lab. The latter is a university-wide group that is going to spur and encourage library innovation by funding projects and pulling together the community of people interested in the future of libraries. The LibLab that I’m at will be changing its name soon because it’s just too damn confusing.

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Last night, we went to the movies, and the small crowd in the theater watched a really good trailer. People trapped in an elevator. Lights out. A shriek. Lights on. Someone’s been wounded. A confrontation. A flash. The elevator jerks. A sudden noise. Cool. The trailer completely shut off the pre-show banter around us.

Then a title screen came up, simple white lettering on a black background: “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.” And the entire audience let out a soft “Oooh” of disappointment … followed by a loud laugh at our collective response.

Mr. Shyamalan, your focus group results are in.

(The movie is Devil and you can see the trailer here.)

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Memrrtiks, Suashem is as odd as its name. Here’s the author’s “description” of the game:

A would have improduct desting quality, teamwork, cycle stratisfacticed the focused on increased by world-class leaderson that work environment.

Just in case that wasn’t clear, it’s sort of a side-scroller in which you shoot and dodge sprites. To start, press the space bar. It’s free.

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The Awesome Foundation’s giant hammock goes live in Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Awesome! [twitter: AwesomeFound TimHwang]

[Later that day:] Another Tim Hwang-ism: He points us to his “new favorite patent,” “a method of swinging on a swing.” Good lord.

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Perhaps the coolest thing about writing a book is that you have an excuse to interview people you otherwise wouldn’t get to talk with.

Today I interviewed Victor Henning, the co-founder of Mendeley, a very popular desktop app for researchers that indexes your PDFs, provides social reading and researching tools, and aggregates anonymized information about what researchers are actually reading and annotating. There’s a lot packed into Mendeley, all designed to help researchers find out what they need to know, primarily though social means.

Victor and some friends founded Mendeley as grad students when they discovered that although they were in different fields, their research needs and processes were very similar. In the twenty months since its launch in January 2009, it’s grown to 450,000 users, with 33 million documents in its database.

I’m thinking of using Mendeley as an example of how the scientific landscape has changed. Although it’s hard to find uncredentialed amateurs who, thanks to the Web, have made large individual contributions to science — for most of the sciences, you need lots of training and access to expensive equipment — the Net has changed the world in which credentialed experts work. For example, Mendeley is able to provide a much more responsive picture of the trendlines in scientific research than the “impact factor” by which journals measure their significance; the impact factor looks at the number of citations of the articles in a journal over the prior two years, divided by the total number of articles in the journal. Two to three years is a long time to wait to measure impact. Plus, as Victor points out, Mendeley can be much more granular.

As Victor says: “My personal opinion is that some form of credentials will always matter. It’s a heuristic to decide if some other person can be trusted. But credentials will not just be that someone is a tenured profession or is at a top isnstution or is published in Science or Nature. In the Mendeley context it may be that his paper has lots of readers, or lots of rankings or tags.”

The old authorities and credentials are still there and are likely to continue to have weight. But the ocean in which they swim is now filled with a lot more fish.

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