There’s a fascinating post at ReadwriteWeb by Scott M. Fulton III about the effect “social signals” such as posts by people within your Google+ Circles, has on search results. It is not an easy article to skim :) Here’s the conclusion:

It is obvious from our test so far, which spanned a 48-hour period, that there may be an unintended phenomenon of the infusion of social signals into all Google searches: the reduction in visibility in search results of the original article that generated all the discussion in the first place. This may have a counter-balancing effect on the popularity of any article…

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Did I ever mention the really useful site Matt Phillips and Jeff Goldenson at the Library Innovation Lab put up a couple of weeks ago? If you are interested in libraries and tech, Library News is a community-supported news site where you’ll find a steady stream of interesting articles. Or, put differently, it’s the Hacker News code redirected at library tech articles.

I have it open all day. Try it. Contribute to it. Go library hacker nuts!

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The Atlantic asked me five hard questions, to which I responded at some length. It’s nice not to have to compress!

Andrew Keen had me on TechCrunch TV, which was generous of him. Thanks, Andrew.

[A few minutes later] The always-fresh CBC radio program, Spark, just posted a 26 minute interview with me. (Nora Young is a wonderful. There, I said it.)

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For the past 1.5 years or so, I’ve been co-director, along with Kim Dulin, of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. Among the projects we’ve been working on is LibraryCloud, a multi library metadata server. (You can see it at work, running underneath ShelfLife, another of our projects, here.) Today the Digital Public Library of America announced that initial (and interim) development work on the DPLA platform will be done by the LibraryCloud team — Paul Deschner and Matthew Phillips — plus our Berkman friends, Daniel Collis-Puro and Sebastian Diaz. I’m the team leader, or whatever you call the person who knows the least. We’ll do this as openly as possible, relying upon the community to help at every phase, but this will be our core work during the first phase of the platform’s development, leading up to an April 26 DPLA Steering Committee meeting.

The DPLA platform will enable developers to write applications using the metadata (primarily about content hosted elsewhere) the DPLA will be aggregating.

We’re excited. Thrilled, actually.

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Because it’s book launch day, there’s more about me to post than usual or than I’m comfortable with. Nevertheless:

The Atlantic is running a substantial excerpt of the chapter on scientific knowledge.

And I had a really fun hour on Colin McEnroe’s show on WNPR in Connecticut this afternoon. They’ve already posted it. Colin’s a great interviewer, and I appreciate having the full hour with him.

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Today is the official launch of Too Big to Know. Yay!

Marketplace Tech ran a 4 minute interview with me about it this morning. More interviews etc. are coming up, including on WNPR (Connecticut public radio) with Colin McEnroe at 1 pm today.

I will, alas, be noting media/marketing stuff on this blog over the next few weeks.

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Thanks to Mirek Sopek, the folks at Mako Lab diagnosed why my new WordPress blog template was going all wonky in Internet Explorer 9. Even after I’d discovered that the problem was that I was declaring the HTML page with Quirks, I’d put the type declaration in the wrong spot. I put it at the top of header.php, thinking that would put it at the top of the HTML page that WordPress assembles out of various files. Nope. You have to put it at the top of the index.php file. D’oh!

We still don’t know why it worked on my copy of IE 9, at the same version level and both 64-bit.

Thank you Mirek and Mako Lab! I would never have figured this out without you.

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Jonah Lehrer has a terrific article at Wired about the limitations of the causality model as data scales up and becomes more complex. (I’m over-simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.)

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Salon has just posted an interview with me, (edited) by Thomas Rogers. Tom steered the discussion in useful directions. Thanks, Tom!

I do need to disclaim the last answer, though. I’m sure I said it, but what I meant is that this is the greatest time in human history to be a knowledge seeker. I don’t think this is the greatest time in human history overall. Although it certainly is for dentistry.

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Here’s my top ten list of top ten lists of top ten lists:

1. The Top Ten Top Ten Lists of All Time

2. TopTenz Miscellaneous

3. MetaCritic music lists

4. Smosh’s Top Ten Top Ten Lists of 2011

5. Top Ten 2011 Top Ten Lists about CleanTech

6. Top Ten of top ten horror movie lists

7. NYT Top Ten Top Ten Lists for 2011

8. Top Ten Top Ten Lists about Agile Management

9. Top Ten Top Ten Video Lists of 2011

10. Brand Media Strategies Top Ten Top Ten Lists

Come on, people! If just nine more of you compile top ten top ten top tens we can take it up a level!

Bonus: The media can’t get enough of top ten lists. When they run out, they write about why they write about top ten lists:

1. The New Yorker

2. Forbes

3. NPR

4. NY Times

5. Discover

6. CBS

7. Poynter

[Later that day:] I’ve removed one from the list so that there are actually ten, not eleven. Oops. (And again, later, because I am a @#$%ing moron.)

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