I have a pretty good list of people I would like to interview for this book. It's on a note card on my bulletin board in my office. I have done a few interesting interviews already. I am in the process of scheduling many more.
I have the usual suspects on my wish list: Hal Varian, Jimbo Wales, Brewster Kahle, Michael Gorman, Clay Shirky, etc.
But who am I missing? Could y'all help me with some ideas of unusual suspects? "People of interest," one might say.
Who is doing some really cool thinking about Web 2.0, Web 3.0, search technology, information science, AI, the semantic Web, etc?
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Comments (8)
I can't come up with any specific names offhand, but I would consider interviews with ex-google employees very insightful. Exes have better insight into their previous employer than any current employee would. You should also interview anyone you can find from the competition who will speak off the record. Please consider Google vendors and clients. Vendors and clients can make or break a company. Their insights and attitudes can provide a view to the future for a company.
Fred Turner
Paul Duguid
Michael Buckland
Stefano Mazzocchi
Helen Nissenbaum
Robert Cook
Folks from the library community:
Peter Brantley, director of the Digital Library Federation
Lorcan Dempsey from OCLC
Tim Spaulding from LibraryThing
Nick Carr (see his piece "The Amorality Of Web 2.0"
Jaron Lanier ("Digital Maoism")
See Jon Garfunkel essays on civilities.net
(I can't give lots of links here)
TALK TO SHELLEY POWERS ABOUT SEMANTIC WEB! (burningbird.net)
Eszter Hargittai for her user-search research, of course
Gary Price of resourceshelf.com and Ask.com
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com
Umm, me? Old interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php
Off the top of my head, I can suggest the following:
* Terry Winograd, for insights into early Google days, and even some perspective on current ethical issues they face.
* Trebor Scholz, for critical views on Web 2.0
* Vint Cerf
It might be nice to interview some folks who are actively DOING something. There's Tim Spaulding at Librarything.com; just about any of the speakers at code4lib2008 (http://code4lib.org/conference/2008/schedule); the "Biblioteca 2.0" crowd (http://biblioteca20.ning.com/), esp. Bonaria Biancu; and many others.
I noticed that women are quite in the minority of those suggested. To remedy that, I suggest looking to librarianship:
(alpha by first name, in feminist fashion--and those were just the first ten I thought of off the top of my head)
Seth-- thanks for the heads-up!
Siva-- you might start here with The Search For News, my response to John Battelle's book...