Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube
A new poll from Harris Interactive was released this morning, finding that US respondents are more excited about watching mainstream, commercial content like full length TV shows and movies online than are about watching User Generated Content, news or sports video.
While hardly surprising, I don't think it has to be this way forever. Who could help improve this landscape by maximizing the impact of the read/write web? Super sexy librarians, that's who!
The Harris poll provoked two trains of thought in my mind. First, would these numbers change if high-quality and relevant videos were easier to find on sites like YouTube?
Finding good stuff online is going to be a huge market opportunity in the near-term future. That's why CBS bought Last.fm, why eBay bought StumbleUpon, why MyStrands has raised more than $50 million for its recommendation engine, why Google Reader is introducing easy sharing between friends and why you're going to see many more startups working in this direction.
And Now for the Sexy Librarian Part...
From the other direction, though, as any experienced online media producer will tell you - there are steps that you can take to make your media easier for the right person to find. This is going to be an important role for information workers of the future.
Check out this wonderful 3 minute section of an interview that Microsoft's Jon Udell did last week on the Talking With Talis podcast. Udell posits that the librarian of the future will help a growing number of citizen media producers to classify their online media and get it connected to other related content in ways that will increase its discoverability. That is hot.
Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you've just made about last night's Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:
You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags - two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!
Now, I think this is a particularly good video on the topic, so if you're interested I will vote for it on StumbleUpon (as a sexy librarian I have a very powerful account there) and give it a good summary explanation. Any of those are steps you can take that will make your work all the easier for people to discover.
Would that be great, or what? That's only the beginning of what is possible! My point is, while mainstream commercial media may still be what the majority of people online are looking for - there are a substantial number of us for whom that's not the case and as we learn to serve eachother and ourselves better in terms of recommendations, discoverability and relevance - our numbers will likely grow.
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Interesting and useful.
Spot on about the way librarians' jobs are changing. I'm a librarian employed by my university library, with an office right in the middle of the main traffic area, to do just this type of thing for our staff and students.
I also suggest the best ways to create an article for Wikipedia so it stays there, provide training in using Flickr, del.icio.us etc, coordinate the University's Second Life Island and am currently writing a report assessing a business case for the university to self-host blogs and wikis. Why? Because that's what librarians DO.
Marshall
Finally - somebody figures out the future of tagging & search! Sort of the French Maid TV version of Maholo.
Very human search.
Smart is the new sexy, though, so I'm guessing sexier algorithms are the way to go.
A smarter upload application could prompt you for tags intelligently, based on speech-to-text indexing, your user history and contextual prompting.
Once you've got the video uploaded, YouTube could create a WordPress entry for you and update Twitter about it. Then it could prompt you to send alerts to bloggers likely to be interested in your video, based on their own history of video embedding.
Better than even an army of ready-to-let-their-hair-down über-librarians. Not as much fun, though.
Meeoowww!
I knew marrying a librarian--and then incessantly babbling to her about these types of topics--would pay off someday.
Still, she's only giving me the Dewey decimal classifications for my content.
Thank you, librarians and librarian lovers - your comments are much appreciated!
Nice article. However, any article on sexy librarians is incomplete when not including a picture of myself. Just saying.
I (a librarian) do this sort of thing all the time, but I guess the next question is why do you have to go to a LIBRARY to do it? Or, why don't you know that we're doing this already? Hi Royce, hi Kathryn!
That's great to hear, jessamyn. i remember talking to gary price years ago and he said too, if only people knew what was already available!
Interesting post. I've been avoiding the entire creating videos thing. Mainly because I can't come up with any good ideas :-)
I personally would have been one of the ones that prefer user generated content. I like to watch short videos 2-5 minutes, but anything longer and I start wanting to click somewhere else
There already are quite a few librarians doing this. I guess they already have the sexy part down!
No Marshall thank-you! :)
It's funny that those who are ingrained in web content culture often see the value of Librarians more than the average surfer. Hopefully that bodes well for our future.
sounds like FrenchMaid TV to me http://frenchmaidtv.com
Cool, finding high quality and relevant videos can be easier this time.
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com
Nice thinking
Sadly, however, librarians are not yet at this level of technical sophistication. Whether your "sexy librarian" idea materializes or not is uncertain, but librarians will feature prominently in the future of the Web. And your idea is exactly why librarians will be required---not because Google is broken, it's less about search and retrieval, but rather because of the added value that only a librarian can provide.
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