Category: Cloud Computing

Several years ago, at the 2008 NAGW conference just outside of Chicago, IL, I gave a talk about the coming of Web 3.0. Fast forward a few years to yesterday, when I was trolling about on the Internet and came across the explanation of Google’s Knowledge Graph – a GUI for the technical stuff I presented to government web developers those few years ago. The presentation is embedded below and, while it’s 4 years old and a bit outdated, it does still describe the underpinnings of the Semantic Web, mostly. No mention of HTML5 resources, of course, and some of the stuff I mentioned didn’t really pan out…

But, I checked today – just to see if one of my predictions came true. In the presentation, I said that with the proper coding of the web with semantic markup, search engines would become very powerful – able to answer questions asked in native English. So I went to Google and entered the same phrase I’d used in the presentation – “who starred in both saturday night fever and pulp fiction” and got the answer – John Travolta’s wikipedia page is the 4th response and the 3rd response shows a video clip with him featured in it. The future is here!!

All that being said, we aren’t yet at a “good enough” place – anyone who has spent more than a few minutes fighting with Siri can tell you that there are improvements to be made. Google is making those improvements, though, and pretty soon our patrons will be asking Google the exact same questions they are asking us at the reference desk – and finding the answers. This doesn’t mean reference librarians will become obsolete – it means that reference librarians will become the resource of choice for those who need more than a simple answer to a simple question. That’s what reference librarians are good at, so I’m not concerned about the “future of the profession” in that regard, but it is something that we’ll want to keep an eye on!

Until our patrons become universally wired into the ‘net (if that ever happens…), we have a way to get those simple questions answered now without resorting to fancy boolean statements  and we have a way, with Google’s knowledge graph, to point our patrons to even more information about their subject, should they want it.

Google is going to be releasing, sometime this year, their GDrive application. TG Daily says:

Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.

This opens powerful possibilities. For instance, you could start working on a spreadsheet at home and continue via Gdrive web interface accessed in an Internet cafe. When you arrive back home, changes to the spreadsheet have already trickled down from the cloud to your desktop. The idea, of course, is all but revolutionary, but Google’s execution could set it apart.

Plus a whole lot more, of course. The question is, for me, will it work as seamlessly and as beautifully as my Dropbox account? I LOVE Dropbox – I have a Dropbox folder on my laptop, my home desktop and my work desktop machines and it does an absolutely effortless job of keeping the files in that folder perfectly synched up and perfectly usable. If GDrive does that for my entire computer… I may be even more in love.
Now, this is all speculation for now – there are no official announcements from Google to back this up, and there are issues (privacy, of course, but cost and reliability guarantees and various other niggling little details) that have to be considered before folks will willingly upload the entire contents of their computer’s hard drive to a corporation’s care. If, however, the service works as well as currently existing services do *and* if Google gives some thought to privacy and practicality concerns of users, this could be an AMAZING addition to Google’s services!
Finally – before I forget – as a Public Computer Center manager, I am always looking for ways for patrons to be able to use our computers as their “home away from home” without *actually* letting them save their work, install their programs or otherwise screw with my computers. This could be a good solution – something that many of them will already have a user/pass login for (their Gmail accounts) and something that they are familiar with. Hmmm, I’m already getting ideas and making plans and the silly thing hasn’t been announced yet.
The other big announcement this week was the release of the new Zotero plugin for FireFox. This new version now includes synchronization between multiple computers – so if you find a great resource and add it to Zotero on one computer, it will sync up and be available on any other computer you have Zotero’s plugin installed to. Finally, Zotero has made it so that I can happily use it! With my reliance on 3 or 4 different computers and my heavy use of Dropbox-like applications, I just couldn’t get into a single-computer use Zotero application. Making it available on multiple computers, however, means that I’m there!