Google Wave Invitations

The Wave team seems send invitation quotas in some "random" way.

Three of us received and activated Wave accounts in the same day and only I received invitation quota of 20 invitations after 2 weeks of activating.

A friend of mine received my invitation and activated her account but I received no notification for that. Should Wave team send me a message telling me "Congratulations! You friend has accepted your invitation and activated wave account. Have fun with Wave!"

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It is not the right time for Wave team to send out wide spread invitations. Wave is so "beta" and really needs to be improved in several aspects.

1. I've had some sync problem and sync will be a nightmare if the server cannot handle the request in an anticipated period of time.

2. No way to delete or block a contact.

3. No way to remove someone from a Wave if he is already in the Wave. (What if I make a mistake of adding someone in the Wave?)

4. Playback sounds fascinating but doesn't work that great. Sometimes you need to click on the scroll bar manually to see the history editing.

5. Image display. In the example below, there are two images in the Wave, but Wave only shows them separately so you cannot switch to another image by clicking on the arrows. Why is that?? (Note the image count in the left picture.)

B&N's Nook-A Battle in E-Reader Market?

The most exciting news in the past week is the official announcement of B&N's E-Reader Nook.

David Coursey from PC World lists 5 reasons that Nook will be a Kindle killer, and the reasons show that the Nook actually does satisfy many certain user needs which Kindle fails to offer.

Highlight some of the features here:

More Books:
Nook offers more titles than Amazon, and can access 500,0000 books in public domain from Google while Kindle users only can buy Kindle-version ebooks from Amazon.

Read your own PDF from Nook:
Being a graduate student, we have lots of paper to read. Kindle does not support users to load PDF documents from PC which limits the power of E-reader. And Nook supports the function.

Loan-able e-Books: Nook users can loan their e-books for 14 days at a time to other Nook owners as well as iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, and PC devices running free B&N reader software.

The function can be very attractive. I just had this class discussion that a student of my class mentioned that people cannot borrow books from Kindle users unless you borrow the Kindle itself. But I guess everyone love to share after reading a good book. So it will be a barrier if you can't lend the book to someone else.

However, it should be noticed that the Nook "loan-able" can only transact between Nook users.

Storefronts: It's really easy to stop by a B & N bookstore and potential customers can try out a Nook.

While Ballmer says No to E-Reader and states that PC is the best reader ever, nobody knows if Microsoft is rejecting a potential large market. However, Google will launch its Google Editions, a Ebook store supporting multiple devices in 2010.

With the good assumption that we can buy E-reader at cheaper prices in the future but what still remains skeptical to me is how large the market is? The book lovers always appreciate the touch of book pages and the smell of inks and the ownership of a printed book. E-reader almost ruins everything. And for the rest of the world, they are not that into book reading. Probably, they will find converged tool more attractive, such as SmartPhone with limited reading function, or Mp4 player such as iTouch, or Gameboy such as SONY PSP.

Start Using Google Wave

It is always exciting to experience some new cool tools, such as Google Wave, thanks again for Nick's nomination.

And it is so interesting to use it from the very beginning and to see how it develops even it is "buggy". Yesterday, I just saw they added "online status" to Wave contacts, although Nick mentioned that the status function had been implemented in Wave sandbox few months before.

Anyway, with high respect to Google's cutting edge technology, I still have some questions.

1. With real time support, how can Google servers handle so many sync requests? (So Google is only sending limited nominations.)

2. Wave is definitely the kind of tool and will be useless if nobody uses it, more participants in one wave, more collaboration and discussion will benefit the wave. BUT, it also makes the wave MESSY. Will there be some way to optimize?

3. What is the actual benefits from Wave than Gmail conversational mode?

I must say I'm so satisfied with Gmail conversational mode and see it as a very effective way to discuss. You can add anyone else to participate in the Wave, and you can also CC the mail to someone else to let him/her participate in your Gmail conversation.

The advantage I have figured out is that you can reply to a message IN the message context which makes it easier to response and read.

4. What is "Ping"?? I just don't get it! Is it like a private tunnel in a multi-user discussion environment?

5. A great thing about Wave is that Wave supports SSL automatically which makes the communication much safer.

How to serve people's information requirement with no advanced library reference service?

I conducted a survey named "Ask a librarian or ask Google" for a course assignment. Only 32 people took the survey and most of them were LIS students with the awareness of importance of library reference service. Most of the survey takers agreed that the library reference service could not be replaced by online information resources because of only reference service could offer quality information, research guidance and human interactions.(The survey is still open and anticipating your participation! Current survey summary can be found here.)

After the group presentation last Thursday, a classmate asked me to introduce library reference service in China and what I said was: "There is almost no library reference service in China. They do exist but nobody knows that they have "reference service". Libraries in China is more resource-oriented rather than service-oriented."
The question drove my attention to the issue "How to serve people's information requirement with no advanced library reference service?"

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The survey responses makes me more confirmed of the importance of reference librarians. And I'd like to share with you some of the responses here:

1. I had a bad experience with the 24 hour ask a librarian service featured on the SU library web page. When the librarian could not find the information I needed in a few minutes he told me he couldn't help and signed off. I feel a librarian would not have sent me away as quickly if we were meeting in person.

2. No one has bothered to scan the hundreds of pages of British Parliamentary Debates from 1879. It's almost as though they don't even care about Michael Davitt and the Irish Land Rebellion! My point is there will always be some severely esoteric information that is only available in person, in print, and in a library.

I'm so used to academic libraries with database access and I don't always have difficulty in searching for information. 2 monthes in US and all the assighments I had and going to have make me eager to learn more about the field and I really have the kind of feeling that I don't know where to start. Take a simple example, in the past month, the "First Amendment" has been mentioned for many times in different situations and I want to learn more about it. I look up in web pages, FirstAmendment Center and Findlaw-FirstAmendment , each provides tons of documents to read. Who can tell me where to start?

Here, the answer is simple, ask a reference librarian, especially a law reference librarian. But what about the rest of the world? Can they find some guidance when facing tons of documents? Or, how can we improve that? Can we offer quality information and quality research guidance online or establish and develop reference service in libraries? Take this into consideration: there is only two public libraries in my hometown, one for general public and one for children, and the city population is more than 8 million people.

The task is hard and there are so many factors need to be considered, e.g., financial resources, people's viewpoints(including the public and the librarians), government policy. However, it is challenging and deserves further exploration.

Fall Seminar of Tully Center for Free Speech

I attended the fall seminar of Tully Center for Free Speech in order to get extra points for one of the courses I'm taking. The seminar was really interesting and I was so glad of being introduced about the event by the professor.

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Part 1, When Rights Collide: Sports Coverage V.S. Branding

While Dr. David M. Rubin introduced that Chicago was the first one being voting out of 2016 Olympic bid competition and asked Bob Costas to share his opinion, a student announced in a loud voice:”Rio wins!”

That is exactly what we call “live broadcast” and “real-time transmission”! In today’s information world of user-centered Internet, with wide use of blogging, pod casting, video casting, etc, traditional sports journalism have encountered a huge challenge by everyone involved in the sports event. “Nobody has monopoly over audience anymore”.

However, the question is, who has the right to publish and transmit information about sports events? In current situation, the right has been divided into different parts and limits service providers to put appropriate items on their media. For example, Time Warner Cable owns the live broadcast right which means the company could televise the sports game, and ESPN owns the right to put video stream online.

A faculty of Newhouse, also a photojournalist, shared his story in Q & A session, he said that it was the first time that he was asked to sign in an agreement stating that he had no right to publish his photos taken during sports games in Carrier Dome. Previously, he was only asked to read the agreement.

What if an audience records the event using iPhone and puts it online in real time? Definitely, such activity violates ESPN’s ownership of the linear video right.

According to the speakers, this is far beyond the right of being an audience. The right given to the audiences only allows them to come in and watch the game. In many cases, they can take photos, record videos, but they can never post them on public domain, because that right goes to ESPN.

However, is it really possible to control such activities? Everyone could bring a cell phone with a camera or even with video function and shoot the sports game pitch by pitch, real time broadcasting. Do ESPN prosecute people for that?

Another question is, do such online information really violate Time Warner or ESPN’s right, or the information there actually introduce more potential audiences to the game and make them go to Time Warner or ESPN’s sports channels for more information? More statistics and observations maybe required to further conclusion.

Part II Internet Censorship and Surveillance

Being a Chinese student, I’m very interested in Internet censorship, because the government of China has placed strict censorship and we all have suffered from it. The search engine companies, like Google and Baidu(local search engine in China) are required to remove some of the search results. The speaker, Mr. Nart Villeneuve said that it was the company’s choice to decide which specific results to be removed under the government’s pressure.

Currently, many websites are blocked in China. In fact, I am OK if the government wants to block some sites which they see them may be threats for the country. However, things are getting absurd and ridiculous, they even block websites such as Facebook, Blogger, Technorati, and Picasaweb.

Some people believe that the blocking of foreign web services, such as Blogger and Picasaweb is a measurement to protect and promote local service providers.

Mr. Villeneuve also introduced that in China, many users’ chatting records of different instant messengers were being monitored and recorded base on “keyword filter”. (Detailed information: Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform.)

Another interesting thing I want to address here is sometimes, such activities can cause unexpected results. Actually, I read this viewpoint on Twitter. The thing is, since now Twitter is blocked in China, and it is not always easy for people in China to find a way out to “tweet”, the result is, tweets in Chinese environment are able to keep a high quality while avoiding to be flooded by meaningless chatters.

Another speaker, Steven M.Cohen talked about the Internet censorship and ISPs. While ISP is considered to be neutral, but it seems that ISP still has the responsibility for the community for keeping the harmful information away. For ISP, there are always two choices, blocking or prosecuting. However, the legislation is always far behind and is unable to respond quick enough. Therefore, law enforcement of collaboration on an international level is required.

Fri, Oct.2, Fall Seminars, The Tully Center for Free Speech

S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University