Okay so it’s 2010 and I think I’m finally officially allowed to be pissed at the future. I don’t care so much about flying cars (I live in Montreal, the drivers here would make anybody fear the age of flying cars), but the Christmas shopping experience I just went through was thoroughly and pitifully outdated.
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This month those of us who work in the search industry, and I suspect more than a few investors, were passing around a cookie string that altered the way Google’s results pages were displayed:

As ugly as it may be to some traditionalists, the three column layout is a more intuitive ‘web site’ shape, and is going to be intuitive to use for a wide variety of users. This push comes from Marissa Mayer at Google, the VP of Search Product and User Experience, as it is outlined by Danny over at Search Engine Land.
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Naoise’s Note: This is a guest post by Cathy Camper, a librarian for the Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR. Cathy’s work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. Full bio at the end of the post, or visit www.cathycamper.com – Thanks for the amazing contribution to the Acquisio Blog Cathy! (p.s. – I take full responsibility if wordpress has prevented me from displaying your article in as nicely presented formatting as it was provided to me, my apologies, but I can’t access the css to indent your paragraphs).

Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search

By Cathy Camper

This article is written in response to Naoise Osborne’s engaging post “Nine Ways the Internet Could Change that Would Make Search as We Know it Obsolete” (August 26, 2009). As I read it, I had an eerie feeling that for me, a librarian, the future he described is my now. I posted a response, and Naoise invited me to write about search from a librarian’s viewpoint. So here I am.

Disclaimers first: like Naoise, I’m not a futurist, and unlike some of my colleagues, my job is to help people find what they want, not to work on the technical side of search, search engine optimization or search innovation. [Read more...]

*Update – NY Judge has delayed hearings in the Google Book Deal – read all about it*

Much of humanity’s knowledge is in the process of being digitized, and a new set of rules are currently in draft-mode concerning how this wealth of knowledge may (or may not) be made available to the public.
If you’ve ever read a book, or wanted to, if you’ve ever searched Google, or dreamed of it, you might want to catch up on the latest developments in our civilization’s fight for access to information. More recently, as physical copies of literature have become less relevant to the public, being able to effectively access their digital counterparts becomes increasingly important. This is an opinion piece, and all of ‘em are mine, the author, so don’t go blaming anybody else if your sensibilities are touched. With that disclaimer made, on with it!

Walking down the street the other day a friend of mine turns to me and asks: Hey, so you work with Google or whatever, what the hell is the big deal? Why am I constantly hearing about this ridiculous company with a childish logo, I mean, it’s just a freaking search box isn’t it?

My response was to pause for a moment in order to consider how I could express to this pre-Internet generation chum what the hell the big deal was. Eventually I responded: Well, I think that search box will come to represent, in a very real way, either human freedom, or a lack thereof. [Read more...]