Dana’s user experience blog

Today, there is a special section of the Guardian on digital academic libraries. It covers a wide range of perspectives, and is probably worth a read if you’re interested in academic libraries, digitization, digital preservation, or student habits.

I have to take issue, though, with ‘Academia’s big guns fight the ‘Google Effect”. The definition of ‘Google effect’ given in this article, and apparently coined by one Tara Brabazon, is ‘a tendency towards mediocrity’. The article goes on to accuse students of information illiteracy, and point out that they like to use Google for everything, which gives them less-than-academic results. Attempts to provide good academic-resource search engines are touched upon, as is Google Scholar (which is ‘acceptable’, but ‘too broad’ according to Professor Brabazon.

There is actually an excellent study (see ‘British library and JISC’ on this page) about information literacy skills of the current generation of university students which is the basis for much of another article in the series. That study found that undergraduates are not necessarily as information literate as they are perceived to be, and that they use “shallow” searching and don’t really read online (but neither, necessarily, do their older counterparts).

I’m not arguing with the results of that study — it seems pretty sound to me. I suspect, however, that the thing that has changed with the ‘Google generation’, though, is not actually their information literacy, but their ability access information without strong information literacy skills and/or the help of a librarian. Google, having a very simple user interface, and great results ranking, has made it easy for the average person to find answers to their questions on the internet. It has also shown users that it isn’t necessary to jump through hoops, understand boolean search, or wade through pages of results to find information.

The mediocrity Professor Brabazon has termed the Google effect arguably does not apply so much to her students, who I suspect are much the same as always, but to the information interfaces they are forced to use to locate scholarly materials. It is understandable, I think, that students prefer to spend time on their assignments reading and writing, and now they have tools which to them appear to let them bypass the cumbersome, splintered interfaces of academic journals. There is an information literacy problem here, but it is far from “whippersnappers these days not knowing how to use our journal databases”; it is the twofold problem of the proliferation of self-published non-authoritative easily accessible material that is the internet, and the vastly superior search technologies available to sift through that material.

If Professor Brabazon and her colleagues want to encourage young people to use scholarly resources the answer is not to lambast them for being mediorce (when likely they are no different to those who have come before them), nor to throw up their hands in disgust; the answer is to improve search interfaces and online access to academic materials so they can compete with Google, or (in my opinion the more likely solution) encourage widespread use of Google Scholar.

The ‘Google effect’ as I see it is not ‘a tendency toward mediocrity’ in students, it is an exposure of the dire mediocrity of the interfaces and search process for academic material. Google has democratized information searching, and made it possible for the average untrained adult to find information — academic publishers and other information providers need to catch up by providing seamless, well-ranked searches (again most likely through Google Scholar), and at least for those who are subscribers to their resources (either individually or through their institution)* make the results available with a single click. The alternative to this will not be improved information literacy skills, people are not going to learn something more difficult if they believe the tools they have will do an adequate job. I hope the end result of the Google effect will be a trend away from mediocrity–the mediocrity of academic information interfaces–and toward usable information search interfaces for all kinds of materials.

*Agruably, these results should be more widely available than that, but this post is not about the merits of open access, and academic publishers are not likely to change their access model so radically any time soon.

I have to say, I am a little uncomfortable commenting on library 2.0. I’m not a librarian, and I have neither the academic background nor the practical experience to know what Library 1.0 delivery really means, nor what the rationale is (was?) for doing things in a library 1.0 way.

There seems to be a lot of chaos over what library 2.0 actually means, which is no doubt adding to my discomfort posting about it; the general consensus seems to me to be that the difference between library 2.0 and library 1.0 is that library 2.0 is user centric and user driven; and a lot of it seems to be driven by new technologies (though it doesn’t have to be) Now, I’m all for a great user experience, and often that is something that will involve a certain amount of user centrism, but I’m decidedly ambivalent about what it means for libraries.

To go any further with this post, I have to define what I think libraries are (or should be), and this will no doubt get me in a world of trouble with my librarian co-workers: I think libraries are free access point of information of many kinds, with value added in spaces to get that information, and librarians themselves. I think the defining point of libraries is actually librarians; they select targeted authoritative collections, and can help unsure users sort the wheat from the chaff online.

Back to library 2.0, though. Some library blogs refer to library 2.0 in terms of teen gaming nights and library blogs, others talk about user control of information.  I question what any of these things have to do with librarianship — the difference between a library and the internet, as I expounded in my masters thesis, is that a library is a carefully collected information set (and the internet is not).  The internet is always going to have more choices than the library (some of which would never make it in to a library) and users are also going to be far more in control of the likes of Google than they are of EBSCO (unless EBSCO buys PageRank from Google).  Library blogs are notoriously silent, and I can’t really understand what teen gaming has to do with libraries at all.  If these things are the best library 2.0 can offer us, I’m with the Annoyed Librarian. Not only do these things not gel with what I want in a library (and after all, I am a library user too), they seem to dilute what it even means to be a library.

Kathryn Greenhill, however, has a post that makes many aspects of library 2.0 something I could get behind.  It paints library 2.0 as a move away from the purported days-gone-by librarian shusher model (did anyone ever really get shushed?  I never did and I’m not a particularly quiet soul) and toward an era where librarians have control of their catalogue software (thus creating scope for things like user tagging, which are long overdue), library spaces accomodate collaborative and individual work, librarians seek feedback and listen to their users, and library services are available on the internet. Library usability, particularly in terms of online services, has a big part to play in this version of library 2.0 — and I am all for it — and apparently so is Swinburne, because we are doing many of these things already.

The big risk of library 2.0 is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; trying so hard to be everything to everyone that libraries are no longer libraries.  The big opportunity is providing increasingly relevant, increasingly user-friendly and increasingly useful spaces and services.  I think the way forward is to get off the bandwagon — the term library 2.0 is so overused as to be meaningless — and at least in Swinburne’s case, to keep doing what we are doing — listening to our users, and providing the best responses we can in a library context.

My apologies, I am behind and I have had some lovely comments from those of you who read regularly. My other work has gotten somewhat on top of me over the past couple of weeks, but I think the worst of the storm is past now.

I tried to use iGoogle for a week so I could make some educated comment on it, and the most educated comment I can actually make is that I didn’t actually manage to see the week out. The premise is good, but the execution just wasn’t there to keep me going back.

Part of the problem is that I can get most of the online services I use regularly into it, but not all of them; gmail, my rss feeder, a calendar and weather I could have, but I couldn’t get the metlink timetable, nor an online community I’m a part of nor Facebook in any meaningful way. Given that iGoogle is supposed to be my “one-stop shop”, the inability to access so many things that I use regularly is a substantial failing (and while I am aware that this is not Google’s fault, and someone needs to write a plugin for each of these things, knowing that doesn’t help me any).

The integration with Google’s own services is relatively poor; instead of Google content opening in a new tab the way content from all other applications did, Google content opened in the same tab, obliterating iGoogle (this was actually one of my most common paths out of iGoogle — I would do a search or read a blog post in my RSS feed and simply move on, forgetting I had ever been in iGoogle). Not only did it open in the same tab, but in the cases of gmail and Google reader it presented me with just the content of the email or feed, and none of the usual functionalities of moving to other emails or feeds.

Having failed in the useful stakes, I tried to make iGoogle fun by creating a ‘fun’ tab and adding some dingbats and crosswords and such; I also kept the original funny cat picture that it came with. I set the background to be the solar system (though I did think the one that had the sun rise and set in tune with local time was kind of fun) and tried really hard to be engaged. The only thing out of the whole lot that I liked was the funny cat picture, and I actually get my fill of those by subscribing to ICanHasCheezburger. Again, it isn’t iGoogle’s fault that I couldn’t find a cryptic crossword, but when you have to work too hard to have fun, well, it isn’t fun anymore.

One of the fundamental principles of usability is that if there is a conventional way to do something (like the top right-hand search box, for example), then you better be making a usability improvement if you break that convention, and it better be a significant improvement, or the convention being broken just overshadows whatever you are trying to do. I think it is the same with people — if you want people to change their usual habits, you need to have a compelling incentive for them to do so. If iGoogle really did create a one-stop-shop for all my web things, if it had a good interface, or even just if it was fun it could have formed a new habit for me. However, it fails on all these counts, and I have to say if I go back, it will only be to look at the cat pictures.

Google maps as maps just aren’t that great. They don’t include a scale, and lifestyle leandmarks like schools and gyms are not marked. For Melbourne, the local knowledge that goes into streetdirectory.com.au makes that a much better map, and whereis gives better directions with more options.

However, Google Maps is something special for four reasons:

1. In the bad old days, many map publishers (for example Wises in New Zealand) required you to pay to look at their online maps. Once Google Maps was launched, that business model no longer worked for them because people are unlikely to pay for what they can get for free. So now, not only can you look at Google Maps for free, but many other maps as well.
2. The integration into search results, while it is cross-promotion for Google, is also really useful when you’re looking up a business. For me, living in Melbourne without a car, it is important to know a business I select is near the transport network, and the recent integration of maps into search results lets me do that.
3. It’s everywhere. It might not be so easy to find a really good maps site in another country, especially if that country has a different national language or uses another character encoding. Tony points out that it is even good in Japan’s notoriously complex address system.
4. The thing that really makes Google Maps stand out is the photographs. While I agree with Sara that they are a little bit scary, I also really enjoyed looking at the places I have lived, and worked, and the places that are important to me. I also like all the weird and wonderful artworks that have come out of Google looking down from the sky at us, like the man shaped lake in Brazil. Some things seen by Google’s eyes in the sky are beautiful, and some of them are odd, surprising, and ultimately controversial, but it certainly has brought a different view of earth to the average internet-connected human being.

Each of those four things is value added over a traditional map, and even over many other online maps — they give the user that little something extra that makes it worthwhile coming back. For me, the real selling point is the photos, though: they take something that is a tool, and essentially boring, and make it fun.

As a reference tool, Google Books is pretty good. You can do a normal search, and get as results any matching books that Google has indexed. With the recent burgeoning of Google deals with large and well known libraries (for example The NYPL, Oxford University Library, and Harvard Library), Google Books looks set to include the full text of a decent chunk of published works. This means it is now possible to effectively run a Google search on the content of a very large library, and have the results returned in a relevance ranked order with little snippets of text for context. It’s also possible to add the things you read to a “personal library”, assuming that you have a Google account, meaning that when you just have to find the poem you read in a book that includes the line ‘the stars carried the helpless one ribbed moon away’, you can search specifically in the books you have read.

There are a few implications of this technology, though, that are problematic. The first is that under the current law, Google is being sued for copyright infringement because they have to make a copy of the works they make searchable to create the search index. Normally I would think this was a reasonable use (even though technically it’s legal), but there is a loophole that I discovered yesterday that does make me slightly uneasy on behalf of all poets: The context that Google provides around the search terms in the results allows you to search for the next line of the poem, and for a short poem, it is relatively easy to read the whole thing. Admittedly this is a somewhat cumbersome process, and admittedly it is not likely that any poet will lose a sale out of it, but you see these snippets without direct attribution to the poet, if your search results come from an anthology, and this is a sad loss of a moral right for the poet involved.

The second problem is that this knowledge is tied up in a commercial corporation who by law has first responsibility to their shareholders, but by popular cachet is the source of information on the internet. Libraries are nervous about a monopoly on information, and while some may view this as just one more twist in the historical antipathy between libraries and Google, I think it is in line with the freedom of information principle that it should be available from more than one source, if possible.

The third issue is one that is close to my heart, and one that Sara and some of these comments got me thinking about. Google books are great if you already know what you are looking for, but if you don’t have some search terms already, it’s hopeless. More than that, though, there is no serendipity: you go, you type in some words, you find the book and either read it online, buy it, or reserve it at your local library, and you leave. You never get to see the book on the shelf next to it might also have been useful, or just walked past a display that might have had something interesting for other reasons. Now, chances are that some people wouldn’t have bothered to go find a book if they didn’t have Google books, but some of them would have. Improving serendipitous information encounters (i.e. online browsing of information sources) is something that attracts a lot of research attention (including my own, for a year), and some novel approaches. And to me it is this that is the real user experience failing of Google books — not that I don’t want to actually read online, not the copyright issues, but that their browsing experience is boring and cumbersome and smacks of an afterthought. Until Google can provide me the same rich browsing experience that an actual library or bookstore does, it will only be a reference tool.

Google docs is a service that allows those with a Google account to edit, store, and share Microsoft-like documents online (or export them to a Microsoft format and use them as usual offline). Now, I am all for anything that can reasonably save me from the torture that was the write-up of my masters, when MS word redefined some of my pictures as millions of page breaks when I put page numbers into my thesis (I suspect the character combination used to represent a page break is something that could conceivably appear in a jpeg file), but I don’t think Google’s word processor is it — and I suspect this holds true for the other document editors as well (certainly I have recently read one report of a catastrophic crash of the presentation-making software).

I’m going to speak about the word processor in Google Docs rather than the rest of the suite, because I have the most experience with it. At first glance it appears very much to be a stripped down word processor, not unlike the blog editor I am using right now. On the face of it, this should be enough for the majority of users, based on the 80/20 rule. Sadly, though, this is not the case. There are some areas where Google’s word processor has missed the opportunity to improve over Word, such as picture placement, which is horrible in Word and merely average in Google Docs. There are some areas where Google Docs is limited by what HTML can offer, for example the limited customisability of lists, and the inability to add drawings (for diagrams for example). There are other ways in which Google Docs could have capitalised on its HTML capabilities and hasn’t, for example not opening hyperlinks when you click on them (ideally in another window or another tab). I don’t know what kind of a limitation it is that forces Google Docs to open everything in a new tab, but that is also fairly seriously irksome (and would be even more so if using an un-tabbed browser). And for me, the lack of integration with bibliographic software is a real problem (though I am aware that this is a specialised usage).

The thing that concerns me most about Google Docs, though, is writing any kind of work-related document under Google’s privacy umbrella. I have Google email, and Google pictures, I write a couple of Google blogs, and I have lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see in Google documents. I actually don’t think there is any such thing as total privacy on the web, and I don’t mind Google sucking up my personal information — I am the only person that can affect. I am less comfortable, though uploading documents related to my work (which is not even all that confidentail but which affects people other than me) to a site with this in the Terms Of Use (TOU):

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.” (link).

Given that the Google Docs privacy policy incorporates the Google privacy policy, and the Google Privacy policy is subject to change — with your consent, if your privacy is reduced, though I am guessing it would be Hobson’s choice (accept the new terms or go elsewhere) — and given that it takes three weeks to expunge account details if you terminate your account…I am simply not comfortable storing work-related material on the servers of a commercial company whose interests could run counter to that of my employer. Maybe this makes me a paranoid luddite who should be wearing a tinfoil cap, but when it comes to information about my employer I am finicky (even though I doubt they would care).

This is not to say that there aren’t some wonderful features of Google Docs, however. The autosave is excellent and functional, and I wish MS had done this well with their autosave (saving to avoid lost work is a mechanical, repetitive task and should be done by a machine). This autosave is coupled with excellent versioning, so if it autosaves something you later decide you don’t want, you can go back to the earlier version. I haven’t tried the sharing features, but it would be hard for them to be worse than Microsoft Word (and with the versioning, it is likely that they are better). There are two big drawcards for Google Docs, though: It’s free, and it’s online. For me, these are the reasons I use Google Docs at all. I can access it from anywhere just by clicking on a link in my email, and I keep lists of books I want to read and movies I want to see that I can add to from anywhere.

Google Docs is great for information you want to keep online, but if you’re looking for a more fully functional free document package, or one that isn’t online, I recommend OpenOffice.

Geert Lovink’s new book Zero Comments opens with a quotation from a blog post from 2005 (thanks Trees):

…In the world of blogging “0 Comments” is an unambiguous statistic that means absolutely nobody cares. The awful truth about blogging is that there are far more people who write blogs than actually read blogs.

Contrary to this post, I do like reading blogs, and I have a large number of carefully selected blogs pouring things that I find intelligent, funny, challenging or informative into my feed reader every day (and for what it is worth, I think it is important to read things that run counter to our own ideas, or we can become more extreme in our opinions — see The Wisdom of Crowds by John Surowiecki for more information about this).

So how do I find blogs to read? Well, to be honest my most successful approach has usually been a recommendation or a link from a friend who has similar reading tastes to mine — I know I will almost invariably like the blogs they like. The second most successful approach I have used is to look at the blogrolls of blogs I like (that list of links to blogs that appears almost universal), or to read the blogs those bloggers link to in their posts. This is somewhat more hit and miss, but still reasonably reliable — chances are if I like the way someone writes, I will like some of the people they link to. Recently I have even found myself subscribing to the blogs of some my commenters (those who aren’t 23thingsing with me — I’m already subscirbed to the blogs of those who are).

None of this does you any good, however, if you don’t know of any blogs you like to begin with (and neither do your similarly-minded friends). In this case, you’re going to have to resort to a blogsearch, of which there are two main options: Technorati, and Google Blogsearch.

Google Blogsearch was started mostly because with Google’s ranking algorithm blogs were causing chaos in non-blog search results. In Google, more links to your site translates to (roughly speaking) a better search ranking, and in blogging communities where crosslinking intensively is common practice a blog can accumulate a number of inbound links pretty quickly (see this commentary on why one blogger might link to another), without necessarily being the best source of information on a topic. In the end, Google magicked all the blogs (along with what appears to be some rapidly updating spammy advertising content) into a separate search, so the main search results don’t contain too many blogs (unless they are genuinely relevant), but so that users can still find blogs of interest. Having said this, however, I only use Google Blogsearch when I am looking for the most recent posts about a topic, because there seems to be an underlying assumption in the search that blogs are topical, and so search results return posts that feature the search terms prominently, rather than returning the most relevant blogs.

Technorati works differently from Google Blogsearch, blogs must be submitted (this blog is, I had WordPress do it when I signed up) and will get ranked better if they are claimed by their owners (which I have done). Blogs can be tagged by their owners, and these tags as well as any tags on individual blog posts are taken into account by the Technorati search engine, meaning that it is much easier to find a blog about a specific topic with Technorati than it is with Google. Technorati also has popular blog post and blog rankings, and users can rate blogs as favourites. All in all this is a more socially controlled environment, and unlike Digg it doesn’t seem to have been hijacked by a particular culture.

So, if you’re looking for blogs on a particular topic, my first advice would be to ask your friends, and check the blogrolls of blogs you like. Then check Technorati, and go got Google last. Since I recommend reading the blogs linked by bloggers you like, and in the hope that some of you may enjoy my blog (and to complete 23 things week 5) here is a list of the librarian blogs in my feed reader that I particularly like:

• Annoyed Librarian: She calls herself the alternative voice in librarianship, and with her dry and acerbic humour she manages to raise some pretty interesting questions (and she will find favour with those of you who are skeptical about this whole 2.0 business). Lots of other people like her too.
• Information wants to be free: Meredith Farkas writes in a way that is often challenging of the status quo, but it much less inflammatory than the Annoyed Librarian. She also runs interesting surveys, and keeps very much on top of the library blog world.
• Derek’s ALIA Blog: It seems only fair to disclose that this blog is written by my boss, but I enjoy reading it both for the words of the day, and to find out what is going on in Australian librarianship (y’know, since I wrok in Australia). Derek, like most of my favourites, also writes with a sense of humour.
• Library Revolution: Emily Clasper writes about a pleasant mix of the personal and the professional, and has a staunch user-focus with regard to libraries. She gives concrete examples of most of her ideas for improving libraries, which may make her suggestions easier to implement.
• Library Stuff: Stephen at Library Stuff excels in short posts that link to stuff I find interesting. I love this blog because it helps keep me informed about who else is out there, what is happening in the news (about libraries) and feeds me entertaining library images — all in one place.
• Librarian.Net: This is an example of a blog I read to challenge me. I don’t always agree with Jessamyn’s staunch support of library 2.0, but she is almost invariably thought provoking.
• The Ubiquitous Librarian: Brian writes only very rarely, but he works in a university library, and is another especially user-focused librarian (who has a number of innovative ideas about how to reach library users).
• LibOdyssey: A new blog written by one of my fellow 23 things travellers.  This blog has few posts, but is one of the most engagingly written blogs (of any genre) that I read.

Those are just the library blogs I read — I read blogs on a number of other topics, some of which are linked in my blogroll (and you can ask me about the others in person, but they aren’t posted here because they in no way relate to my profession). If you don’t like my list (and chances are you may not) you might like to check out Meredith Farkas’ list of librarians’ favourite library bloggers, or the top 25 library blogs list compiled using web statistics by the Online Education Database.

Of course, if you know any blogs that I’m not reading that I should be, or if you think I should be reading your blog, please, leave me a comment — I’m always up for another personal recommendation.

Once upon a time in the not so distant past I didn’t read very many blogs at all. I hadn’t found many I was interested in, and the few I was interested in I could go and look at on a pretty regular basis (I figured if I forgot then the blog must not have been that interesting in the first place).

Come about May this year, though, and I decided it was time to gain a more in-depth understanding of the library world, and the concerns facing those who work in it; after all this understanding makes it easier to really work with people in libraries to provide better user experiences — whether the users are library users, or librarians themselves. Now, I found quite a few blogs that I liked, and visiting them all regularly was really becoming a problem; the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox was getting decidedly crowded, and then I couldn’t remember what I had visited. Even then, often I would visit to find that there was nothing new for me to read; some of my favourite blogs are updated only a few times a month.

I’d known about RSS for a long time, but had not assumed there was anything in it for me until the blogs in my life got out of control…at that point I decided I had more to gain than lose, and that the time taken to set up a feed reader was going to be justified. I chose Google Reader for two main reasons:

1. It’s online. That means that whether I am at work, at home or back in NZ visiting my family I can read all the stuff I am interested in reading, without installing extra software all over the place.
2. I already had a Google email account and a couple of Blogger blogs, and I have found most Google products relatively easy to use — in other words I was suckered by the Google brand.

Like all of life’s best decisions, once I had set my feed reader up with all the blogs I liked to read, and even some of the ones that I only liked some of the material from, I wondered why the heck I hadn’t gotten a feed reader years ago. There are things that don’t really work about Google reader, it’s a shame not to be able to drag-and-drop blogs into the reader, or feeds into folders, for example. The thing that annoyed me most about Google reader initially has long since been fixed — it now has a search box. Now if only I could set Google reader to be my default reader (instead of being asked every time whether I want my feed to go to iGoogle or Google reader) and get my news alerts sent to my reader instead of my email…

I’m actually pretty attached to Google Reader. I tried to set up a Bloglines account today so that I could compare the two, and while I enjoyed looking through the standard things to subscribe to (though I can’t see why on earth anyone would subscribe to an About.com page — must be some cross-promotion with Ask.com) but when I clicked subscribe there was a ‘database error’ or some such thing. Then when I went to read my feeds it had subscribed me to some bloglines spam, so I had to click around furiously and largely unfruitfully to get rid of it. Finally I subscribed to something I was interested in, and I was presented with an array of options I could not be bothered reading, and some silly subscription options. Suffice it to say there ended my experience with Bloglines, because although I ought to be willing to put myself through that to make a comprehensive usability report on this blog, I have other things to do with my time this week. Tony and Gary have said much the same thing.

To be fair, I don’t use many advanced features of Google Reader meaning I can’t even give a comprehensive overview of its usability. I neither share posts I find interesting nor subscribe to others’ shared feeds, mostly because I have little time to read the blogs I keep up with, let alone anyone else’s, and I have no desire to share my reading with the world less discriminately than emailing someone a useful link. For what I do, though, Google reader is perfect. I’ve sorted all my feeds into folders (because of course the time I have saved by reading blogs in a reader means that I can read more blogs), and I am finally keeping up not just with the blogs I read for work, but also with those I read for pleasure.

After reading Tom’s great post about blogging anonymously versus blogging with your real name (which I commented on with many of the links in this post), I thought I would explain why I am blogging with my real name for 23 things.

Not too long ago I went to a seminar presented by (among others) social technology researcher danah boyd, and she talked about managing your online identity by putting material up that you want to be found (she has also blogged about it). Now, as a techie I’m pretty aware of my online presence, and I do a vanity search “just to see what is out there” every few months. I even did a vanity search on my first name and my soon-to-be husband’s surname in an attempt to sway my decision about whether to change my name or not (I still haven’t decided). But with this blog, I decided I would (instead of the passive, reactive approach I have been taking until now) be pro-active about my online identity, and write material that, if found by (for example) a prospective employer would demonstrate my skills in and my passion for usability.

Now, I am pretty lucky, my name is relatively common, and there are at least two people (an opera singer and a microbiologist) with my name who have a large web presence. Nonetheless, I thought pretty carefully about whether I would really put my name on this blog, because once it is sucked up by Google, this web presence can be around for a long time even if I decide to delete my blog (especially if people link to it with my name). Having my name on this blog means I won’t post about anything controversial that is outside the usability sphere, and that my language and demeanour will remain professional (though I try to strike a balance and actually have a personality too). If I had wanted to post anything personal (like music reviews) or controversial (like political opinions) I would have created an anonymous (or more correctly pseudonymous) blog (and actually, because I like to write, I do have a blog for stuff like that, and it is pseudonymous). It was helpful to read a recent discussion of anonymity in the library world, Annoyed Librarian, Meredith Farkas and Morgan Wilson really cemented my decision for me with their comments on anonymity.

So how is this usability related or making anyone’s life simpler? Well, by having a professional blog with my real name, I am working towards establishing an online presence so I don’t have to do the vanity searches quite so often. However, were I to stir up too much trouble on this blog, and make myself unpopular, Google’s cache could make my life very un-simple indeed. Using your real name in anything online is worth considering carefully, and if you have any doubt, it is probably best to use a name that is either made up, or not your whole name.