In 2009 Martin Fenner sent me an email asking to interview me about the “Author Identifier” project I was working on for Crossref (later to become ORCID). I had no idea who Martin was, but he asked intelligent questions and so I answered them. The result is below. And Martin and I have been friends/colleagues ever since. Fenner, M. (2009). Author Identifiers: Interview with Geoffrey Bilder. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw1h
I was recently asked by somebody to speculate about generalizable application features that might help researchers in their work. I responded to them directly, but thought it might be worth repeating part of my response here. Since the early 1990s I’ve wished that the OS (any OS) would support a “Paste & Cite” feature and, now that I’m involved with CrossRef and its linking and (nascent) plagiarism detection initiatives, I am even more convinced that such a feature would be immensely valuable to anybody who does research. The basic idea behind the feature would be that the clipboard would also copy “provenance” information whenever somebody chose to copy something. Then, when the user decided to paste the content someplace else, it would offer an optional “Past & Cite” menu item. ...
I hated it in Pascal and I hate it now in del.icio.us. This might even force me to stop using del.icio.us. Of course, it isn’t the number that I really hate- its the programmers who, rather than think of the realistic use cases for a column called “notes”, just settle for the default “biggish computer number” that pops into their head. You’d think they would have at least upgraded to 512 or 1024 by now. ...
Jon Udell and Ross Mayfield have are talking about the use of social software and trust-circles as tools to find relevant and authoritative content on the web. Sounds familiar. I’ve long thought trust circles (amongst other trust metrics) are key to addressing the “Internet Trust Anti-Pattern“. It may sound incredibly un-hip and reactionary, but to hell with the wisdom of crowds. Watching the crowd might be entertaining, but when I need to work, I can get far better results if I constrain that crowd to a few people whose opinions I have reason to respect. I’d use the word “authority” again, but the word is overloaded. Just as the open access community struggles with “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom”, the user-generated-content crowd struggles with “authority” as in “power” and “authority” as in “expertise.” ...
Will implementing a good information architecture destroy your Alexa rating? Mike Davidson has done a brief analysis of MySpace which basically shows that “Page Views” could be the new “Line Count” in stupid metrics. I’ve often wondered if part of the attraction of MySpace is the air of “authenticity” conveyed by the hideously amateurish interface(s)? And now I can wonder how many marketers will take Davidson’s observations and perversely conclude that the more unnecessary page views they can get people to go through, the better. Usability be damned. ...