[WEB4LIB] The sky is falling... was: Re: Welcome to the Schoogle Era

[K.G. Schneider]

> But while we're complaining about how we suck at marketing [and still not
> really coming up with any useful suggestions for fixing that, AFAICS),

Sure. Outsource it to Google. And I'm only partly facetious. See below. 

> I don't think this means that we will be closing our doors anytime soon.
> Nor
> do I expect to see Karen shutting down LII next week/month/year. I DO
> think
> that we need to think HARD about how we offer what we offer, and instead
> of
> trying to reinvent the wheel, work with Google to make this tool work with
> us.

Exactly, Scott, but to keep LII's doors open, and to plan to STAY open, we
have to constantly rethink who we are, what we offer, and why we are
relevant. A little emergency thinking from time to time has not hurt us one
bit. And in a sense, every time we migrate or add a shift of service, we do
"close down" the old LII. We were a gopher once upon a time; we have gone
through many other changes. Soon we will be in a real database, and offer
features that bring us Internet-years closer to where we need to be (which
is of course always a moving target). 

We also know we suck at marketing (at least, *I* suck at marketing), but we
occasionally stumble in the right direction, such as when we launched RSS
feeds and suddenly people were finding us whole new ways. Ah hah! Go to
where users are... hmmm... o.k., now I've written that on a Post-It. ;) In
essence, by creating RSS feeds, which in my stupidity I would imagine people
would find by coming to our site, we outsourced our marketing to the RSS
engines and aggregators, who are now our Very Very Best Friends because they
do for us for free what we couldn't begin to do for ourselves for love or
money. <flinging kisses to Bloglines and Radio Userland>

The reason some of us predict problems with the new services is that
Libraryland sometimes finds it more important to reinvent the wheel, or rest
on its laurels, or insist on its way of doing things, than to "work hard,"
in your terms, toward the seemingly important outcomes, public service and
survival of our profession. Google is not the problem; Yahoo-see-el-see is
not the problem. Too often, we is the problem. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com