Was just trolling the Web for references to Mobilizing Generation 2.0 and came across an interesting series of posts related to library blogging here. Got me thinking about using game mechanics and a human algorithm to engage library patrons in the development of valuable data sets. My comment on David Lee King's blog copied below:
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Thanks for the references to my book (very flattering). Have been reading through your thread here - and love the idea of asking customers to take action.
Riffing on that idea... I starting thinking about some recent stories I've come across about game mechanics driving data collection (see this post: using-games-to.html).
What if you tied the library related action to the gathering of data that was, itself, actionable by the library... and then added a game mechanic (such as competition), so that young people would be more incentivized to participate?
In one of the examples mentioned in the above post, they've created a game where two people try to type the same word to describe a given photo. The two people play a game, but the organizer gets human-powered image recognition... and with lots of people playing the game, they get a valuable database for free!
So thinking (now very roughly) about libraries, I'm wondering a) what kind of data a library needs... and b) what kind of data library patrons might be able to develop.
I'm sure you can answer (a) better than I. For (b), I started wondering if there might be an opporunity to build out Semantic Web ontologies and data to support them. Although I'm sure there's a raging debate about the usefulness of the Semantic Web approach in the librarian community, there may be some interesting/useful connections here. At a library, people are already thinking about how one chunk of information relates to another... there might be some simple way to harvest the value in this thought process to build up a dataset that improves understanding of information on the WWW.
Rough thoughts... thanks for firing a spark... has been interesting to think through...
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