Library as Digital Consultancy

Posted on November 21, 2014 by mryanhess

As faculty and students delve into digital scholarly works, they are tripping over the kinds of challenges that libraries specialize in overcoming, such as questions regarding digital project planning, improving discovery or using quality metadata. Indeed, nobody is better suited at helping scholars with their decisions regarding how to organize and deliver their digital works than librarians.

At my institution, we have not marketed our expertise in any meaningful way (yet), but we receive regular requests for help by faculty and campus organizations who are struggling with publishing digital scholarship. For example, a few years ago a team of librarians at my library helped researchers from the University of Ireland at Galway to migrate and restructure their online collection of annotations from the Vatican Archive to a more stable home on Omeka.net. Our expertise in metadata standards, OAI harvesting, digital collection platforms and digital project planning turned out to be invaluable to saving their dying collection and giving it a stable, long-term home. You can read more in my Saved by the Cloud post.

These kinds of requests have continued since. In recognition of this growing need, we are poised to launch a digital consultancy service on our campus.

Digital Project Planning

A core component of our jobs is planning digital projects. Over the past year, in fact, we’ve developed a standard project planning template that we apply to each digital project that comes our way. This has done wonders at keeping us all up to date on what stage each project is in and who is up next in terms of the workflow.

Researchers are often experts at planning out their papers, but they don’t normally have much experience with planning a digital project. For example, because metadata and preservation are things that normally don’t come up for them, they overlook planning around these aspects. And more generally, I’ve found that just having a template to work with can help them understand how the experts do digital projects and give them a sense of the issues they need to consider when planning their own projects, whether that’s building an online exhibit or organizing their selected works in ways that will reap the biggest bang for the buck.

We intend to begin formally offering project planning help to faculty very soon.

Platform Selection

It’s also our job to keep abreast of the various technologies available for distributing digital content, whether that is harvesting protocols, web content management systems, new plugins for WordPress or digital humanities exhibit platforms. Sometimes researchers know about some of these, but in my experience, their first choice is not necessarily the best for what they want to do.

It is fairly common for me to meet with campus partners that have an existing collection online, but which has been published in a platform that is ill-suited for what they are trying to accomplish. Currently, we have many departments moving old content based in SQL databases to plain HTML pages with no database behind them whatsoever. When I show them some of the other options, such as our Digital Commons-based institutional repository or Omeka.net, they often state they had no idea that such options existed and are very excited to work with us.

Metadata

I think people in general are becoming more aware of metadata, but there is still lots of technical considerations that your typical researcher may not be aware of. At our library, we have helped out with all aspects of metadata. We have helped them clean up their data to conform to authorized terms and standard vocabularies. We have explained Dublin Core. We have helped re-encode their data so that diacritics display online. We have done crosswalking and harvesting. It’s a deep area of knowledge and one that few people outside of libraries know on a suitably deep level.

One recommendation for any budding metadata consultants that I would share is that you really need to be the Carl Sagan of metadata. This is pretty technical stuff and most people don’t need all the details. Stick to discussing the final outcome and not the technical details and your help will be far more understood and appreciated. For example, I once presented to a room of researchers on all the technical fixes to a database that we made to enhance and standardize the metadata, but his went over terribly. People later came up to me and joked that whatever it was we did, they’re sure it was important and thanked us for being there. I guess that was a good outcome since they acknowledged our contribution. But it would have been better had they understood, the practical benefits for the collection and users of that content.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is not hard, but it is likely that few people outside of the online marketing and web design world know what it is. I often find people can understand it very quickly if you simply define it as “helping Google understand your content so it can help people find you.” Simple SEO tricks like defining and then using keywords in your headers will do wonders for your collection’s visibility in the major search engines. But you can go deep with this stuff too, so I like to gauge my audience’s appetite for this stuff and then provide them with as much detail as I think they have an appetite for.

Discovery

It’s a sad statement on the state of libraries, but the real discovery game is in the major search engines…not in our siloed, boutique search interfaces. Most people begin their searches (whether academic or not) in Google and this is really bad news for our digital collections since by and large, library collections are indexed in the deep web, beyond the reach of the search robots.

I recently tried a search for the title of a digital image in one of our collections in Google.com and found it. Yeah! Now I tried the same search in Google Images. No dice.

More librarians are coming to terms with this discovery problem now and we need to share this with digital scholars as they begin considering their own online collections so that they don’t make the mistakes libraries made (and continue to make…sigh) with our own collections.

We had one department at my institution that was sitting on a print journal that they were considering putting online. Behind this was a desire to bring the publication back to life since they had been told by one researcher in Europe that she thought the journal had been discontinued years ago. Unfortunately, it was still being published, it just wasn’t being indexed in Google. We offered our repository as an excellent place to do so, especially because it would increase their visibility worldwide. Unfortunately, they opted for a very small, non-profit online publisher whose content we demonstrated was not surfacing in Google or Google Scholar. Well, you can lead a horse to water…

Still, I think this kind of understanding of the discovery universe does resonate with many. Going back to our somewhat invisible digital images, we will be pushing many to social media like Flickr with the expectation that this will boost visibility in the image search engines (and social networks) and drive more traffic to our digital collections.

Usability

This one is a tough one because people often come with pre-conceived notions of how they want their content organized or the site designed. For this reason, sometimes usability advice does not go over well. But for those instances when our experiences with user studies and information architecture can influence a digital scholarship project, it’s time well spent. In fact, I often hear people remark that they “never thought of it that way” and they’re willing to try some of the expert advice that we have to share.

Such advice includes things like:

Best practices for writing for the web
Principles of information architecture
Responsive design
Accessibility support
User Experience design

Marketing

It’s fitting to end on marketing. This is usually the final step in any digital project and one that often gets dropped. And yet, why do all the work of creating a digital collection only to let it go unnoticed. As digital project expert, librarians are familiar with the various channels available to promote and build followers with tools like social networking sites, blogs and the like.

With our own digital projects, we discuss marketing at the very beginning so we are sure all the hooks, timing and planning considerations are understood by everyone. In fact, marketing strategy will impact some of the features of your exhibit, your choice of keywords used to help SEO, the ultimate deadlines that you set for completion and the staffing time you know you’ll need post launch to keep the buzz buzzing.

Most importantly, though, marketing plans can greatly influence the decision for which platform to use. For example, one of the benefits of Omeka.net (rather than self-hosted Omeka) is that any collection hosted with them becomes part of a network of other digital collections, boosting the potential for serendipitous discovery. I often urge faculty to opt for our Digital Commons repository over, say, their personal website, because anything they place in DC gets aggregated into the larger DC universe and has built-in marketing tools like email subscriptions and RSS feeds.

The bottom line here is that marketing is an area where librarians can shine. Online marketing of digital collections really pulls together all of the other forms of expertise that we can offer (our understanding of metadata, web technology and social networks) to fulfill the aim of every digital project: to reach other people and teach them something.

This Too Shall Pass – Deleting My Facebook Account

Posted on March 15, 2014 by mryanhess

I’m killing my Facebook account.

And with it, I’m severing that company’s ability to collect data on my web habits, whereabouts, social connections (including off-Facebook connections) and financial transactions.

Apparently, I’ll also be reducing my exposure to NSA malware, as Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a public thrashing of Obama and the intelligence services that have been spreading malware through imposter Facebook sites.

This really won’t be that hard. Last year, I began experimenting with not using the social network, just to see how that was. This impulse was born from a general annoyance about FB’s murky privacy policies and the general tone of content on FB which had became increasingly irrelevant to my real social connections with people. (Remember when people started to appreciate that group emails were rude and began with the lines, “sorry for the group email!”…That’s how Facebook seems to me now, without the apologetic preface.)

BTW, if you’ve got your own suspicions about Facebook, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a great timeline of Facebook’s shifting privacy policies. Reading their timeline is a great way to get your head around how free Internet services (FB, Gmail, etc.) are really about hooking you in with very clear and considered privacy policies that are planned to be revoked once they’ve got you dependent on them…or at least that’s how the timeline suggests this business model works.

Of course, deleting my Facebook account won’t be without costs.

If you’ve been a rolling stone like me, you have friends in many far-flung places. Facebook did make those connections feel stronger, so that aspect will be missed. But I’m online and quite findable, so if my pals from Japan or Europe want to find me, they only need know my name.

It turns out that completely deleting your account is a two-week process, described quite well on Digital Trends. The trick is that once you delete your account, you cannot log in for two weeks, or your account will be reactivated. That means you should first delete all apps from phones, tablets, etc. before deleting your account. You should probably delete your cookies too, just to be sure you don’t inadvertently reactivate it by triggering all those FB web beacons that mine the Interwebs.

Anyway, I’ll give my FB contacts a few days to run across my post and then I’ll zap it for good.

Better living through anonymity!

The Library Website Will Disappear

Posted on January 11, 2013 by mryanhess

A new year always elicits thoughts about the future, but this month, my library has been considering our next strategic plan, which has focused those thoughts for me on my library and the profession in general.

Since I’m principally charged with managing the online aspects of my library, I come to these kinds of discussions focused on web platforms, online communication and consumer technology trends. One of the biggest trends (you may have noticed) has been the adoption of mobile, touch screen devices like iPhones and tablets. I include even Microsoft’s attempt at reinventing the PC with its Surface Tablet, despite early failures to woo consumers. And given this apparently irresistable move toward mobile, tablet-like computing, I have to ask: what does this ultimately mean for the library’s web properties: our websites, our online instruction guides, our discovery systems and our digital collections?

Palo Alto Venture Capital firm KPCB recently explored this very issue in their 2012 Internet Trends Report. Some major insights from their report include:

Mobile traffic is now 13% of all global Internet traffic, up from just 1% in 2009. In some countries, like India, mobile Internet traffic has surpassed desktop traffic.
Almost 1/3 of US adults own a tablet or e-reader
Together, iOS and Android are 45% of the OS market share, vs. 35% for Windows
The install base of Tablets + Smartphones will surpass PCs + Notebooks this year

But one trend that stands out in KPCB’s analysis is that of the Asset-Light generation. A long-form definition can be found via a very Asset-Light resource: Quib.ly. But to put it more succinctly, being asset-light means your lifestyle is one less reliant on physical commodities and personal know-how, but instead, relies on cloud and crowd-sourcing just about everything. You don’t carry around notepads, you don’t buy maps, you don’t rely on “experts” for medical advice or which movie to see next. Asset-lighters, meet their needs by streaming, connecting and sharing.

From KPCB’s perspective, this is quite important in terms of where the web is heading. Some notable examples relavent to libraries include: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Amazon Textbook Rental and of course, good-ole Wikipedia.

So, socially, we’re moving toward a very different economy and radically different means of information distribution, especially when it comes to learning.

Add to this, two major and imminent innovations and you will get a glimpse at just how different the world will be in only 5 years:

Wearable devices, especially eyeware will give people the ability to navigate the Internet by voice command, gesture and all through lenses fixed to their faces. Status: Google Glasses are expected to enter the market in early 2013 and Apple won’t be far behind.
Artificially-intelligent agents will not quite resemble HAL from 2001, but be very capable of understanding your vocal commands and then ferreting quite reliable answers to your questions or carrying out mundane tasks, like creating appointments or sending messages for you. Status: Did you see IBM Watson slaughter Jeopardy’s world champions or used SIRI on your iPhone?

So, the way we gather information and where we go to get it is already changing. And the interfaces are already being revolutionized and that pace will accelerate dramatically over the next 5 years as voice and sight overtake the the very impractical and immobile keyboard…even the touchscreen may be reduced to the point where iPads seem like a whimsical dead-end much like 8 track or Beta tapes.

All of these changes will have an immediate effect on the core of our current Internet paradigm: the Web Page.

Text and links with a smattering of images have been the key content types of of web pages since Tim Berners Lee first formulated the WWW. Mobile devices have changed all that. Not only do they steer away from typical web interfaces in favor of “apps,” they actually de-link parts of the web from each other. The result, in most cases is a much more curated and manageable Internet.

And this is important for libraries, whose pages are almost hard-wired around interconnecting pages together in rather daunting tangles of hyperlinks, portals and gateways. Unfortunately, this paradigm is increasingly less relevant to today’s devices and today’s Asset-lighters, who expect a web page to cut through the clutter and get them the answer. In fact, they want an app to do the heavy-lifting for them.

And add to this, semi-intelligent software agents and a re-conceived commercial Internet based around voice and sight and you can see how much work libraries have ahead of them.

The users 5 years from now that enter our libraries’ virtual spaces, will expect a curated, largely automated experience. Already, we see this on the ground where incoming students are completely beside themselves in the antiquated library environment. One recent Facebook post on my library’s newsfeed noted: “The Library has a website?”

Another telling anecdote: One colleague of mine defined her job as teaching people to fish. I then asked: How many people actually go fishing anymore. Fishing to them is dropping by the supermarket. Full-stop.

The world is just getting too complicated for people to be expected to take the time to find information on their own. Information will continue to be a commodity, yes. Information will continue to badger the human mind. But AI servants and wildly different means of gathering information, will mean that single individuals will never have to tackle almost any information problem alone. The crowd, the bots and the apps will do the fishing.

And the web page will be like Matrix code that few ever need to concern themselves with. Get ready…

Uninventing Copyright

Posted on February 15, 2012 by mryanhess

The recent hubbub about SOPA/PIPA and MegaUpload have reminded me of the wounded Black Knight in Monty Python’s the Holy Grail, who despite having lost several limbs, continues to fight. Yes, folks, the battle over copyright law is over. Big media lost, and biting at the public’s ankles isn’t going to change their fate.

Last week, I undertook a quest to remove all CDs from my home, adding them to my hard drive for eventual migration to Google Music or some other service. The idea of tossing that collection of hundreds of CDs, which took years and much money to accumulate, would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But this is a new age, the media paradigm has shifted and the value of physical media objects is approaching zero. In fact, if you take just online services like Pandora, the value of a song tied to a piece of plastic is actually a negative value in my opinion. In today’s market, music (and increasingly video) is ubiquitous in the online environment to an extent that the supply variable is off the charts.

I’ve always been one to grow weary of a song after a dozen or so plays. I really don’t understand how someone could listen to a Classic Rock radio station, where you’re guaranteed to hear the same 100 tracks every day for the rest of your life. That reminds me of the Night Gallery episode where the hippy goes to hell and must endure the same track of Muzak for eternity.

Give me serendipity or give me death!

US Bandwidth Consumption:

All of this makes me really question the very premise of the copyright issue anyway, which has been based on the century-long period where music and film were “things” you had to buy in order to experience. If you think about it, vinyl and celluloid were what made commodities of our human desire for melody and stories…those things that had filled our evenings since we were striking sticks together in caves. I can’t emphasize it enough: the commodity of music and drama has been a very brief anomaly in human history.

And that period seems to be fast expiring.

Check out Frédéric Filloux’s article Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem for an interesting analysis of the where the media implosion stands.

I recently finished Jeremy Rifkin’s The Third Industrial Revolution where he explores an emerging future that is much more collaborative thanks to new energy and networking technologies. In his estimation, all information will be free. And it won’t only be media companies that will have to respond to this new paradigm. Researchers, technology companies, governments…everyone will have to change. Technology will make it impossible to make money on ideas in the future because secrets and monopoly can’t exist in a world where everyone can hack everyone else.

Wikipedia and digital commons are the memes of the future.

Anyway, whatever the case, the fact is as I wantonly tossed my last CD into the bin, I can say that I felt liberated. Viva la revolucion!

Future is More than just Mobile

Posted on December 3, 2011 by mryanhess

Prediction season is upon us. We’re coming up on 02012, and prepping for my library’s 6 month review of our annual plan. So, why not a few thoughts on the future of libraries?

Obviously annual plans only look a year out and so immediate technologies are top of mind in that particular document: mobile, Quick Response Codes (QRC’s), location-based services (LBS) and eBooks, to name a few. But I’m a far-focused futurist, so allow me to indulge that perspective as I consider the future of libraries and what we’re doing at DePaul University’s Libraries.

Let’s start with mobile. This is a hot topic among librarians, but few understand that the long-term mobile story is just getting started. In just a few years, brands such as Android and Apple will offer the truly killer app of mobile technology: Google Goggles and iShades. And when that happens, those augmented reality devices will dwarf the techno-social impacts the Internet has stirred thus far.

Think back to when Bill Clinton began heralding the age of the Information Super Highway back in the mid-1990s. Readers of Mondo2000, that shining, but short-lived Silicon Valley technobabble magazine (before there was Wired!), will recall its pages filled with dreams of global social uprisings spawned by the freeing of information from the oppressive clutches of the physical world. Anything would be possible…perhaps, gulp, a psychedelic, neo-anarchistic Utopia that would make Occupy Wall Street shudder!

Mondo2000 and the Clintonians had big ideas and many have come true in one way or another. But nowhere in that vision was mobile.

Fast forward to 02012 and mobile is changing the Internet once again. We hear about “responsive design” for our websites that take the mobile view as the starting place and build out from there. We hear about mobile reference services. QRC’s in the stacks. Mobile-friendly knowledge management services embedded in our web services.

But this is near-focused planning that, by 02022, will prove as naive as Mondo2000’s 01991 musings on Mandelbrot fractals that will one-day synch with your CD Player!

Google Goggles and iShades will be about taking the Internet and laying it over the physical landscape: Your street, your friends, your sports, your own person and, yes, your libraries. Information formerly at your fingertips, will now be on your eyeballs, on demand, curated to your personal, social and professional history with relevancy also weighted by your actual location. And I might emphasize, that physical location itself will be embedded with a history of FAQs built up by previous Killroys that stood there before you.

So, you might ask, if I’ve got Wikipedia, Yelp, Google and Angry Birds super-imposed over my world, why do I even need a library in my town or university?

Let’s be honest, many people will not. Quasi-intelligent web services (akin to today’s forerunners like IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri) will be able to field most public library-type questions, basing their answers on all the kinds of data curation variables listed above. Information commons will also be made redundant for most people as software moves to web versions that you can manipulate in the air just in front of your physical body. And books…give me a break. Print…and text for that matter…will soon be confined to a narrow set of use cases. Video, web-demos and avatar instructors will be the new medium of most communication in the world of Augmented Reality. And I would add, web pages will be as antiquated in 02022 as the yellow pages are in 02012.

But all this said, the library will still have a role, some of it fulfilling its traditional mission of bringing information to those without the means or skills to access it on their own. And let’s face it, we are moving into a world of reduced resources and scaled-back prosperity; a world that will need to go through some painful transitions in how it supplies affordable energy, right down to affordable calories for those 7+billion human engines going viral on Spaceship Earth. So, there will be no shortage of people requiring a central technology and information access point…that place we will call the library.

But new services will also be core to their work. Despite a more humble economic outlook, the world of 02022 and beyond will hardly be standing still. Technological change will be accelerating and with it, there will be pressure for even extraordinary people to cope. Enter the techbrarian: an expert in emerging devices, web services and information resources whose job it will be to train students, business people and the general public on how to keep up with the dizzying changes hurdling us into Tomorrow.

At DePaul’s Libraries, we’re laying the groundwork for this Age of Augmentation (and disruption). QRC’s are our starting point, even though they are really just a bridge technology like the Prius is to Electric Vehicles and the Walkman was to the iPod. Layering our stacks with those distorted crossword-puzzle-looking codes is akin to assigning a URI to a physical location, which is a baby-step toward augmented reality.

Our plan comes in three initial phases, starting with creating QRC access points to reference services, leading to integration of our LibGuide Research Guides with relevant sections of our stacks and then on toward taking the QRCs outside the library to other locations around campus. Eventually, we envision applying this technology to allow users to check out computer terminals and reserve rooms.

But QRCs are small potatoes. Ultimately, we envision taking the URI’s assigned to physical locations and generating augmented reality services. Imagine walking into our library with your iShades on and being able to instantly identify available rooms based on green indicators super-imposed over our library doors. Imagine being able to have a virtual chat with a reference librarian/machine whose avatar appears in a window hovering over the rare book you are examining…a librarian who can see what you see on the page and help you understand the nuances of the book’s illustrations. Imagine coming in to the library broke and confused, but with an urgent information need that requires you to visit the sub-surface oceans of Ganymede to understand the recently discovered xenocology swimming in all that Jovian brine.

Welcome to DePaul’s Libraries of 02022! This is your techbrarian speaking: Check out the latest in augmented eyeware, sit back and prepare for liftoff!

Google+

Posted on July 11, 2011 by mryanhess

Just a quick library update and then on to my trial experience with Google+…

It’s been a whirlwind month in Web Services, but I’m quite pleased to say that one of the biggest projects for which I was hired has taken a huge step forward. On July 1st, my team and I successfully deployed major enhancements to the library portal, including a full re-architecting of the site navigation. If you’re wondering why so few blogs as of late…that’s why.

Up next, working with IT to transition the new architecture and features to SharePoint.

I hope to chronicle the whole experience soon.

But fresh on my mind is my experience playing with Google+, which from my first few minutes exploring it, feels like another great innovation by the folks in Mountain View. Needless to say, they really re-thought Google Wave and kept some of the best elements of it.

One thing that really lept out at me was how you can choose who to broadcast your posts to. In Facebook-speak, that would be the equivalent to posting to your wall, but filtering out who of your contacts can see it. Of course, this could get dangerous, especially if you’re the type that has significant alter egos you like to play with. The genius, of course, is that Google+ gives you the tools to do so, but you can see how a careless mouse click at 1am might cause some reveal your inner otaku to your co-workers.

The whole “real life social network” issue was one Paul Adams discussed in his very viral preso on how online social networks had so far failed to mirror the real way people are connected. That is, they didn’t allow for nuances in relationships, so a colleague was equivalent to a close friend.

Joke is, Adams used to work for Google, and now works for Facebook.

Anyway, the service looks like a keeper and it will be interesting to see what impact it has on Facebook’s own services now that Adams works for them (lol). One open question also is, killer app or not, are people even looking for another social service to dive into. And, as has been illustrated time and again, there’s no logic to what makes or breaks a social network. American-based Orkut took off in India and Brazil, but failed in the US and Facebook continues to flounder in Japan.

Anyway, back soon…

Top Down is Upside Down: #Tunisia #Egypt

Posted on January 26, 2011 by mryanhess

“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

-Princess Leia

You gotta love when Internet technologies go radical. Two weeks ago, we saw Tunisians turning to social media to coordinate their successful overthrow of their president. And now, in Egypt, Twitter and Facebook are so threatening to the regime there, that those services have been shutdown as Egyptians demonstrate in the street.

Of course, there are no guarantees that these technologies will win the day for democracy. Such was the case in Iran a couple years ago. You may recall that these technologies initially caught the government by surprise. You could almost hear the questions among the mullahs: “Twitter? Is that a domestic organization?” But they learned quickly enough and that was the end (for now) of Iran’s brush with political reform.

But, these web technologies are powerful, disruptive tools, and one wonders at what point they will bring down the Big Kahuna of despotic regimes: the Communist Party of China. Despite all the fear and loathing these days about the emerging communist-cum-capitalist giant displacing the US, China is a ticking bomb and I doubt their ascendence wont see a significant hiccup soon. I know, because I’ve been there and people are none too pleased with Beijing. In fact, from what I saw, the farther from Beijing you go, the less happy people are with Beijing.

8%+ economic growth has so far delayed the inevitable, but the level of rampant corruption in China is widely recognized and despised by the Chinese public. They just won’t easily admit this in front of foreigners, but if you listen carefully to what they say, you’ll hear it.

Back in 2001, the last time I was in China, most Western media were not accessible through the Internet. I was actually in a muslim region of western China on 9/11, in an Internet cafe, forced to use a back-channel method for getting around the censors. That’s when I saw the news just moments after the terrorist attacks in New York. Of course, nobody around me knew anything about it. And they wouldn’t for almost 48 hours.

Things have opened up since in major ways, but Facebook and Twitter are not allowed in China. And we all know the story of how Google decided to shut its Chinese search engine. But here’s the rub. The Chinese are spreading out around the world as students, travelers and business people and getting very comfortable with these tools, and then they go home and are faced with the censorship issue head on. So, increasingly, they are becoming very intimately aware of their government’s authoritarianism. And learning how to circumvent it.

You do have to wonder when tensions do flare in China, how will the public react to their government when it starts pulling down popular social networks used widely by Chinese students and businesses. From my experience, the Chinese have very high expectations for how their government is supposed to respect the will of the People. That is, they take the name People’s Republic to heart. In fact, whenever you have local disturbances in localities involving corrupt local officials and, say, polluting industries, the people often expect Beijing to step in and do right by them. No matter that Beijing often responds by taking a hard line against activists. But the expectation is still there.

Anyway, that inevitable moment when the government lets The People down (like they did in 1989), will be very telling, and may have a much different outcome now that communication is so fundamental and so decentralized.

Anyway, here’s three cheers to Tunisians and high hopes for Egypt!