Youtube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine in the world (the largest is Google … which owns Youtube. Go figure).

Guess what? Youtube understands searching and keywords. And they give us video creators plenty of opportunities to take advantage of that knowledge.

There are three areas surrounding a Youtube video that are full of keywords – the title of the video, the video description, and Youtube tags, which appear underneath the description box in Youtube.

Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of those “keyword heavy” areas:

• Video Title – put important keywords in the title. Use a solid descriptive title for the video rather than a cutesy vague name, and put the most important keywords in the beginning of the title. If possible, make the title clear and compelling (so people will click and watch). Need to include branding in the title? Put that at the end of the title.
• Video Description – Put a clickable link to your site up-front. After that, write a good description of the video. Include relevant keywords, links, etc. Here’s what ReelSEO says to do in the video description: “The first thing to appear should always be your URL, followed by a hard return. This is because it will make a clickable link to your web site. Next, put as many words as possible in your description. More often than not, a youtube marketer will only put one or two sentences. But a longer description (for example 500 to 1000 words) is better. Remember that spidering robots index text. So give them a little food to work with.”
• Tags – Tags are used as search terms in Youtube, and you want to use as many of these as possible. Use both common and specific keywords. Include variations on words, and use quotes for phrases. If you can, use 12 or more keywords. If you’re creating video for your organization, create a set of standard tags that all your videos will use (ie, library, topeka, etc).

So – start peppering your youtube videos with relevant tags and keywords, and let’s see if your video views increase!

SEO Keywords pic by Bigstock

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Remember my post about my day in the life a day or two ago? Guess what? Bobbi Newman, cool Digital Branch Manager at Chattahoochee Valley Libraries and blogger at Librarian by Day, just posted her Second Annual Library Day in the Life Project!

Here’s what Bobbi says about it: “What is the Library Day in the Life Project? well it started with this post suggesting that we blog what we do all day at work.  Libraries are changing so rapidly and we all know no one is reading books, despite what the public may think. The idea being that you’re sharing an average day, so many of us don’t have an average day though so a lot of people did a week, me included.”

How do you participate? Here’s what you do:

• Go to the wiki
• Create a pbworks account (it’s free)!
• Add your name, your job title (so we can see what you do at a glance) and a link to your blog.
• On the 27th start recording your day or week.  It doesn’t have to be a blog post it can be photos, podcasts or videos
• Tag your posts, pictures, videos, podcasts with librarydayinthelife.
• After you’ve finished your first day come go back to the wiki and edit your link to link directly to your tagged blog posts, videos or photos.
• Of course read along!

Why would you want to do this? Well… it’s fun. It’s a great way to learn about using wikis, blogging, and other multimedia tools (depending on how you choose to share your day/week). And it’s a great way to compare what you do to what others with similar job titles do. How often do you have the opportunity to do that?

So – next week – start adding your day to the wiki!

Pic by Librarian by Day

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Notes from David Weinberger’s session titled “Miscellaneous Knowledge” (he retitled it “The Smell of Knowledge” – David is a pretty funny guy…)

We’re in an age of abundance – both good and bad stuff (ie., spam)

We’re used to our notion of “it’s hard to find good stuff” – not so hard anymore

We assume this – some knowledge is simple – it’s true for everyone – ex = some apples are red

Other assumptions:
- knowledge and truth is scarce (so institutions grow around this scarce knowledge)
- knowledge is orderly (everything fits neatly into categories, even one category)

This is not the case – ie., “is pluto a planet?” – it’s not orderly

we cluster things depending on what we’re doing at the moment – it’s not orderly – it’s personal and changing

Three orders:
first order – come up with a single way of ordering – stuff goes in a single place
second order – separate metadata from the thing – makes physical object  easier to find
third order – content and metadata becomes digital – no need to put stuff in one place anymore

In the third order:

1. leaf on many branches – ie., a camera can go in multiple categories (computer equipment, photographic equipment, graduation gifts, etc)

2. messiness is a virtue – all this stuff can link to each other, you can link it in many different ways to add value to it

3. metadata and data are merging – ie., you can search subject heading for Moby Dick – you can also search for “call me ishmael” – brings back same thing. You just used data as metadata… “everything is a lever”

Content is connection – Books are built as dead-ends – it’s difficult to make connections from one book to another. Digitally, this gets much simpler through links

4. unowned order – or personally-owned order. I can arrange it however I personallywant to – I don’t have to depend on others anymore

Cataloging – worked great in print. On the web, it simply doesn’t scale

Example – LOC added 3000 photos to flickr with the metadata they had – they allowed users to add tags, and they did. SOme photos ran out of tags – flickr allows 75 tags. So people left their tags in the comments.

LOC doesn’t have the time, staff, or expertise to tag these 3000 photos the way they’re being tagged – they needed user-generated tags

Nice slide – David added Wikipedia’s “the neutrality of this article is disputed” phrase to  a screenshot of the New York TImes… then asked – “why don’t we see this?”

A discussion list is smarter than an individual poster to the list. Knowledge exists through conversation, and is social.

Knowledge is becoming linked.

a blogger that links to other places tells people to “go away.” The hope is that readers will find that valuable enough to come back to you.

A newspaper is more narcissistic than a blogger – they point back to themselves most of the time – the rest are ads. Bloggers point away from themselves.

What happens to librarie? “I don’t know.”

“We all love books, but books really suck.”
- books aren’t convenient – you have to go get it, you can’t comment, you can’t share well.
- books have long-form arguments – it’s overrated. Hard to actually find books for that.
- books have content, but not links
- etc

What’s the “must” of libraries now? We can’t know this until we know what’s happening with knowledge – and we don’t know that yet.

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A few days ago, I shared some thoughts about David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous (and Weinberger actually left a great comment, too – how cool is that?). This post is the second part of that series. It covers three random thoughts that didn’t really fit into the first post (and weren’t big enough for their own posts, either… except maybe on Twitter…

Thought #1: Weinberger makes some very valid points about current search systems and how newer ideas, like tagging, provide better findability. His discussion of this was fascinating – but I would have liked to see him resolve the dissonance that went off in my head when he explained how tagging and better search capabilities allow multiple subject headings and tags without having one be a dominant tag or subject heading. That certainly works great in the digital world… but how does that work in, say a library with physical bookshelves? The book can only be put on one shelf at a time, which means you need a dominant subject (unless there’s a better way for us to store and track material). How do allow for both randomness and back-end order at the same time?

My guess? We’re in transition, folks. Transition from a purely physical information world to a purely digital information world, and this type of problem appears when mixing physical items with useful digital search capabilities.

Thought #2: Weinberger says, “Put each leaf on as many branches as possible… In the real world, a leaf can hang from only one branch” (pg 103). And “Hanging a leaf on multiple branches makes it more findable by customers” (pg. 104). This really relates to my Thought #1 above. Weinberger is pointing out that in our new digital world, we don’t have to be chained to the same old organizational systems we relied on in the physical world (ie., subject headings and ILS systems, for example). We can see what del.icio.us and flickr are doing with tagging and searchable customer descriptions, and figure out how to incorporate those newer ideas into our search systems. What a great idea!

Thought #3: On page 105, Weinberger writes: “Give up control.” Ouch! Librarians don’t like to do that! He continues: “That’s why it’s so powerful to let users mix it up for themselves… [online], on the other hand, we just naturally expect to organize information our way, through tags, bookmarks, playlists, and weblogs.”

Are you hearing that? Our customers want to tag, bookmark, set up playlists, and participate via blogs, comments, etc… are you allowing them to do that?

Weinberger says: “Users are now in charge of the organization of the information they browse. Of course, the owners of that information may still want to offer a prebuilt categorization, but that is no longer the only – or best – one available. Put simply, the owners of information no longer own the organization of that information.” (pages 105-106). That is HUGE. We – librarians, libraries, information professionals… are NO LONGER IN CONTROL OF ORGANIZING INFORMATION. Our customers do that now.

So why are we here again? We can still do some great things. We can, as Stephen Abram says, “improve the question.” Customers don’t know how to ask the correct questions to find the most appropriate material. This doesn’t change in the digital world. Right now, there’s still a learning curve on advanced search functionality. That might certainly change, but our expertise doesn’t change.

To put it another way – sure, I can replace the brake pads on my car… if I have a weekend to kill, money to buy tools I’ll never use again, and a copy of the instructions handy. Or I can take my car to an auto mechanic who (hopefully) has changed hundreds of brakes, has the expertise in place, and knows what to do when something strange pops up (like, say, what he’d see if I brought my car in after attempting to change the brake pads… .

We are the information experts – that never changes.

everythingismiscellaneous

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I just finished reading David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous (thanks, Brad!). It’s a great read – one that I highly recommend to everyone who reads my blog. You might not agree with everything in the book, but I guarantee the book will make you think.

First things first – Weinberger MUST know some librarians! Throughout the book, he mentions librarians… even some specific ones (ok, he even mentions Gorman and Blog People!). Weinberger also mentions card catalogs, FRBR, faceted searching (in relation to Endeca), DDC, and LCSH. He even quotes Ranganathan! So it’s definitely a “librarian-friendly” book.

Now, on to my main beef with the book. The title of the book, obviously, is Everything is Miscellaneous. And in most of the book, Weinberger tends to discuss first how something is either currently categorized or organized, and then how that organization or categorization has changed with web 2.0 tools and tagging specifically. How has it changed? According to Weinberger, allowing individuals to sort and tag information however they want equates to the world of information turning miscellaneous.

Interestingly enough, I agree with everything Weinberger says… but the term “miscellaneous” bugs me.

Instead of using “miscellaneous,” I’d use “personal.” In fact, I’d change the title of the book to Everything is Personal or Everything is Personally Relevant. Most of the information Weinberger describes as being miscellaneous isn’t actually haphazardly mish-mashed together (definition of Miscellaneous found using Google). Instead, the information, or the metadata at least, has been customized – or personalized – for “me.” Tags, searches, descriptions, customizations – all help to make the information personally relevant to me.

So… it might just be a semantics thing – I dunno. But I don’t see Weinberger’s miscellaneous pile of leaves (read the book – you’ll understand) as miscellaneous. Instead, I see it as opportunity. As something waiting to be discovered by me, tagged and described adequately enough that I can revisit it – which pulls it out of the miscellaneous pile and into my personally relevant, “I place you here” organizational needs.

And if my personal, sorted-through pile helps others (ie., tagging items in flickr), then great!

Update: Part 2 is here…

everythingismiscellaneous

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Click To Play

SXSW is this week! For those of you not familiar with SXSW, it’s a very cool “content” conference. It used to be pretty much just focused on music, but in recent years it’s also included film and “interactive” tracks. The Interactive track is the cool one – it’s all about techie web 2.0 stuff. Here’s a description from SXSW’s Interactive page – “Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the SXSW Interactive Festival enables you to connect, discover and inspire your link to the cutting edge.” Translation = all the cool geeks will be there.

I can’t go to SXSW2007 this year (though I DID send my library’s web manager) – but I can certainly follow along via blogs, flickr, and videos! I didn’t want to add a bunch of tag searches to my normal feed reader, so to follow the conference, I’m using Netvibes and tags to track the conference – this screencast explains how I set up Netvibes to do this.

sxsw, sxswi, sxsw2007, netvibes

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I just discovered Quintura, a new visual search engine interface (found via Robert Scoble’s blog). On the surface, it looks similar to Grokker or KartOO (two other better-known visual search engines).

You can play with Quintura’s online demo, but the real deal is downloading their Quintura Search product. It offers a visual map of searches done using an impressive number of search engines, including Google, Amazon, Ask, MSN search, etc.

The biggest downside for me? Sorta silly, really… but I got extremely excited in a geekd-out way when I read their “What is Quintura” description. Why? Because they mentioned LIBRARIES. Here’s what they said:

“Have you ever raked through the paper card index of a big library? You have to find the necessary letter (or their combination), take the correct drawer, and start sorting through the cards. Ring any bells?” (ok – they obviously haven’t been in a library for at least 10 years – I’d be surprised if most of their customers have seen a CARD catalog. But oh well…).

Then they go on… “But on the web, what do you do? You are on your own. Until now. Quintura is the very know-all librarian!” (ahem… Yikes!).

Then, they have an imagined conversation with a “favorite search engine,” which I think is supposed to be the search engine you usually use (ie., Google, Yahoo, etc.). And the conversation is about finding … books on physics. Hmm…

OK – besides not having stepped into a library in awhile, they also don’t get that Google, Yahoo, etc. can’t REALLY find books in your library. Or maybe this thing was written by those college students who actually think you CAN find books in a local library using a search engine.

Anyway… I was really hoping, with all this library/search engines comparison text, that the search software I downloaded would interface with, say, MY LIBRARY’S CATALOG. Now, that’d be really cool. But no luck – it only gives me that list of search engines I mentioned earlier.

Hopefully, they’ll create a version of their product that can interface with localized search engines, OPACs, etc. here’s hoping!

quintura, visual search

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I’m finding the current continuance of Gormangate sorta funny, and I’m not planning to say much about it [gripping the keyboard with sweaty palms] “must … resist … urge … to … yip … and … yawp … !”

But I will comment on this: the tags and linkwords being generated around the current ALA president are simply to die for. I screengrabbed one of them for you – See Also uses the tags yipping, yawping, and sad old men. The Librarianinblack uses irrisponsible and alienating as linkwords that link to other posts. I have also seen Gormangate and blogpeople used as tags.

For some much-needed contrast, go to Technorati.com, click tags, and do a search on “leslie burger”. Here’s what you’ll get: first, some recent images from her Flickr account. Also one pic from the Shifted Librarian, titled “View of San Antonio from Leslie Burger’s suite.” How “suite” is that (sorry for the bad play on words…)?

Then (ok – seriously – scroll on down past the hamburger ads…) you’re greeted with four posts: two discussing her work on the Katrina Project, one titled “ALA to see changes,” and one titled “On Becoming the Change You Want to See.”

I think tags and linkwords for the ALA Presidency are about to change for the better…

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Some of you probably know that amazon.com has started offering a version of tagging. I’m getting a kick out of some of the tags! Let me show you two examples:

Example 1, from The Hobbit:

Example 2, from Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance:

See the difference? The Hobbit taggers are supplying tags that “seem normal” – tolkien, fiction, etc. But the Game Boy taggers… to be fair, there are some tags that I’d consider “normal tags” – like “game boy stuff” and “electronic game system.” But take a peek at the other tags… Christian, Samay, Emily, Austin, etc… My guess? Kid’s names. How about the “First tag” listing – Logan. I’ll bet he’s one proud kid!

The problem? None, really… that’s how tagging works – you have the ability to add ANYTHING YOU WANT to an item. And I think it’s cool that kids are getting into tagging, even if they’re doing the digital equivalent of scratching their names on park benches. At least they are getting used to tagging!

web2.0 amazon tags folksonomy

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