Has anybody out there thought about advertising an OpenSearch service via ZeroConf-style wide-area DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD)? A quick look at the DNS-SD SRV Service Types doesn't seem to indicate as such, and a search for "opensearch and dns-sd" or a search for "opensearch and zeroconf" mostly shows hits back to this blog.

I see three reasons for considering this:

• Lets the discovery happen even when users are looking at one of your webapps or subdomains where you can't twiddle the HTML HEAD element (there are still plenty of these)
• Lets a remote service find out more about the institution running your network (modulo "but I'm not on that network now" problem, which plain ol' zeroconf itself could help)
• The more avenues for discovery the better

Er, those being "general reasons for anybody using OpenSearch to consider this". My own reasons extend these with more specifics about library-specific uses like metasearch and link resolvers, some details of which I've written up before.

One main drawback to all this is:

• Browsers and javascript-in-browsers don't do DNS

...or, well, Safari and Konq do, but not IE (not without a plugin, and "First Install This Thingy" doesn't scale) and not Mozilla/Firefox. But then again we could always proxy that with a web service, yadda, yadda. See also mozilla bug 14328 and discussion.

Defining an SRV type would be pretty straightforward - it probably only needs a key pointing to the path of the OpenSearch description document, since that's what that's for.

Back in January I wrote:

"The only iPod-plus-cell-phone combo I could imagine Steve Jobs signing off on would be one whereby the entire iTunes Music Store is available from the device. I.e. you can buy anything from the iTunes catalog right from the device, and listen to it nearly instantly ... and then listen to it on your computer later, too."

/me reaches for wallet...

I said 'bluetooth' when I should've assumed wifi. Either way: does anybody know if it does zeroconf? I've read that the iPhone does not do zeroconf.

My last post was about my recent talk where I try to highlight how iTunes is able to work its instant-sharing magic - by using ZeroConf. Today Walt Mossberg, the most influential tech writer around, chose to highlight this very thing in his must-read Personal Technology column called "You're Using iTunes, But Are You Missing Some of the Fun?"

So to paraphrase Mr. Mossberg:

"You're using the library and the network, but you're missing some of the fun."

Thanks to inkdroid I've been nursing a geek crush on ZeroConf for over a year. Its time might just be now.

(If, after reading the WSJ piece, you want to know more about ways ZeroConf could be used in libraries, just follow the tag. I just hope it grows more coherent as you move forward in time.)

Here are the slides (all one hundred and thirty-freakin'-five of them) from the keynote/"vision" talk I gave yesterday morning in Louisville, KY at NASIG 2007. I was very sorry to miss most of the rest of the conference, but was quite glad to have the chance to present this talk to a very engaged crowd (especially considering it was 8am on a Sunday) and catch up with several friends I hadn't seen in ages after the talk.

The name of this talk is -

A New Approach to Service Discovery and Resource Delivery

...and that's what it's about.

In it I reprised some slides and concepts from previous talks I've given at a NISO meeting last November and code4libcon this past March and a few more slides from an earlier Access talk. But rather than just rehash slides explaining why COinS and unAPI are useful, I tried to place their potential benefits in a critical light, and from that perspective, I tried to state a much higher standard we need to try to reach for, and not settle for less, and one obvious (to me) way to get started.

That path is through the dynamic service links we now see everywhere. In this talk you'll see a series of slides about 2/3 through that start to explain what I think we should work on next - a way to unify interfaces to those peskily incompatible service link boxes that would open up a ton of doors that would remain closed even if COinS and unAPI both really exploded.

So have a look, and, if they don't make sense on their own, rest assured that a healthy number of serials librarians (at least a good 1/3 to 1/2 out of several hundreds at one point or another) seemed to be nodding vigorously in agreement with the proposal early yesterday morning.

I'll do my best to give it a more direct blog writeup in the next week or so, but I'll be offline a lot this week for some old-fashioned Stuff To Do and Places To Go. In the meantime, enjoy the 135 slides. :P

(Last in a series.)

Last week I gave the talk I'd been leading up to. Here it is in a nutshell (photo by Nicole Engard):

The premise of the talk is: people are already starting to ask us "why doesn't the library work like iTunes?" By this they really mean (I think) "how come when I walk into the library everything in the library doesn't just show up on my machine like when I open iTunes and my friends' music just shows up on my machine?"

I think we need to take this question very seriously. Especially because there's no good reason we can't do just what that not-so-hypothetical user wants. A great candidate networking protocol (ZeroConf) is already out there, flowing in the network. We could layer OpenSearch over our metasearch interfaces, and intermingle search and resolver services fairly easily, and along the way *every* one of those steps would have side benefits: merging OpenURL resolution and metasearch UIs into a single view simplifies things for users; adding OpenSearch means you can put your library's catalog right into your users' browsers; using ZeroConf to announce your service makes it easy for everybody to find your interface from anywhere.

During the talk I demonstrated just how much ZeroConf is already flowing all around us - we're swimming in it!. Apparently the video didn't video, so to see how it works for yourself just try the follow the next time you're on a network with a lot of other users (like, a public wifi spot would be ideal, but it should also work at your workplace).

• If you haven't seen it before, turn on iTunes music sharing and look for people sharing their music. It's fun and incredibly easy.
• Install iStumbler and look at the bonjour services tab (note that this is also a useful tool for browsing wireless nets.
• Install Bonjour Browser to get a closer look at the network traffic underlying the more user-friendly screens in iStumbler.

The conference wireless AP was unreliable, so I bought my own and turned it on as an open wireless net (named "librarywebclique", in honor of librarywebchic). In the middle of the talk I invited participants to join the net so I could show the ZeroConf traffic in iStumbler and Bonjour Browser. In a matter of seconds, about 20 people had done just that and all of us could see who was sharing iTunes, who had visible web servers, SMB shares, or ssh ports open, among other things. From where I was standing, it was a pretty convincing demonstration, and all it entailed was showing everybody what their machines were *already* doing.

I can't stress enough how important it is to keep a close eye on what's already happening out there on the net at a global scale. The microformats.org project is frustrating in many ways but they're dead right in their insistence on recognizing what's already out there as primary (though I'd quibble over their self-consistency in enforcing that, but that's another story). This traffic is flowing on the network - lots of widely-used apps already use it - there's no reason we can't just hop aboard.

I'm attaching slides and audio as best I can, but imho it was the kind of thing you had to see - it's very easy to make a point about what's possible by showing that it's actually already out there. Still, try those apps above (they're OSX only, but the traffic isn't, so you can probably find similar apps on other platforms) and you'll get the point.

Near the end I took a few questions, but didn't think to repeat them. One was "what about remote access?", to which I responded that this model doesn't really improve much on that set of issues or make it much worse, though in theory by adding desktop-level discoverability it's possible it could improve things slightly. Another was "what do you think the interface to this would look like", which is a bit tougher to answer. There are examples like iTunes and Delicious Library to follow for what it should look like when a library just "shows up" on your machine. But I think my immediate answer was the right one - I don't know, but it could show up in a lot of places, like the browser, or a desktop app, or on server apps, because this is a platform/infrastructure level service opportunity. In one of those answers I stated that "if we don't provide this level of ease of use, then we're failing", and because we don't, I think we are. Failing, that is.

There is a lot of talk out there in biblioblogoville about "getting into the flow", but I can't imagine a better way to do that than to radically integrate our most flow-oriented services (metasearch and openurl service resolution) and advertise its availability on our networks. And it can be accomplished quickly, cheaply, uniformly, and with a variety of side benefits.

Which, of course, probably means that it'll never happen, because our community isn't really capable of this kind of realization, let alone acting quickly upon it at scale.

That doesn't mean that I don't think you should bother with it - of course not, I think this is all very doable, and I hope that I met my objective of trying to frame all of this in a positive light: see the last few slides, where I suggest how to respond to "can't we make the library work like iTunes?": we should respond by saying "yes, let's."

The slides are attached as pdf, and here's the audio to lead you through 'em. You can hear my clicky-taps to advance the slide most of the time.