The NFAIS annual conference started yesterday. What a change for me from last year, when Dick Kaser and I live-blogged it for its full 2 and a half day run. We were exhausted! And I’m not missing the dial-up connection at the Ritz Carlton one bit. So don’t expect wall to wall coverage this year, I’m just giving some impressions of the conference.

It’s always amazing to see a full conference room on a Sunday afternoon. But NFAIS manages it year after year. Linda Beebe, American Psychological Association, is welcoming us. The idea for the program committee was, “How do we get to be cool.” It required a stretch for them. Remember that this is an association that’s been around since the 1950s.

Content Unleashed is a perfect topic for Grokker’s R. J. Pittman since his visualization technology unleashed content in a very nontraditional way. He’s been told not to talk about Grokker, which is sort of a shame. The talk started with a remembrance of book stores that shelved their wares by publisher rather than topic. He then explained about today’s millennials.

Here’s my notes on his talk. These are his words and thoughts, not mine:

The millennials are born digital. They don’t have a home phone number (it’s mobiles, texting). They don’t write letters, they send emails and IM. They don’t read instructions. They don’t wait (expect instant gratification). They don’t walk to the library, at least not first. They Google, IM, flickr, blog, Starbucks, wifi, netflix, and they wikipedia.

Their eworld is filled with new digital information, they’re bombarded with services. What’s driving the change is huge advances in power, storage, display, and bandwidth. OLED keyboard where each key is a screen, function keys become Firefox, iTunes, Mozilla, Photoshop, etc. and keyboard could change when you hit a particular web site. Another driver is China, building its digital society from the ground up, where more web searches are done on mobile phone than on PC.

New world order of XUL, HTML 4.0, CSS2 and CSS3, DOM2 and DOM3, XML, etc. XUL is visual markup language. Look at iTunes’ Songbird, which is completely virtual and wired into other devices. Could work as a research dashboard for articles and abstracts. Music and video are hard, and we can do this, why aren’t the publishers doing it?

Interesting gap in user experience between premium content and Google. We’re structured and future generation isn’t. Users want to try lots of searches very quickly. They want to be the iterative agent, not the software iterating. They want the search engine to fix the search, not them. It’s that instant gratification thing.

The effect is not verbatim but its characteristics have set the standard for present and future generations. Search must be simple, unbounded, unrestricted (free), and consistently fast. It’s not just search, it’s workflow applications. Google is the baseline. So what’s the next revision. Now it’s the socialization of information. It’s all about sharing, interacting, and sharing notes.

C|Net.com’s visualization, connected network of connected stories.
Newsmap: 1 main design project shows visual cues based on box size, color, font size
24eyes: capitalizes on RSS , can configure as you want for news dashboard.
It’s the network effect.
10×10: research project has sparked derivative companies, it’s a map with photos instead of words, clever navigation such as scroll bar on side.
Flickr: among the Web’s top 100 trafficked sites, created groundswell. Yahoo bought it before it could become truly cool.

These hot new systems lack quality control, brand trust, and certification.

EBSCO’s pairing with Groxis to create entirely new entry point. EBSCOhost adopts Web 2.0. If he’d known about structured, premium data when he was a Stanford student, he wouldn’t be messing about with the Internet as much as he does. (That would actually be a shame, in my opinion.) He’s showing podcasts for educational purposes like learning French. Podcasts are an entry point. Also video podcasts.

There’s huge opportunities for publishers. Leverage the expertise of innovators to find new and better ways to delivery your content to more people.

He rushed through the last two slides, so I couldn’t capture all of it, but the slides should be available in a few weeks from NFAIS.

Talking with attendees after R.J.’s talk, I was astounded to discover that most of what he said was new to them. It seems to me that we’ve been discussing this at library conferences for the last few years.

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