The Exbiblio system is, of course, about closely integrating print on paper with online texts. One of the obstacles that needs to be overcome is the fact that the majority of written texts do not yet exist in digital form. The Google Books Project aims to change that, but it faces quite a struggle against copyright holders, many of whom hate the idea of their property being propagated over the internet. Personally, I think they are wrong. The existence of digital texts does not discourage me from buying a nice paper copy of classical books such as War and Peace, but that’s by the by.

The LA Times reports that The University of California is in talks with Google to digitize 34 million volumes from its 100 libraries on 10 campuses. It’s said to be the largest academic library in the world:

Daniel Greenstein, UC’s associate vice provost for scholarly information, said that joining the Google Books Library Project — with its ability to search for terms inside texts, not only in catalog listings — would help “create access like we’ve never had before to our cultural heritage and scholarly memory. It’s a whole new paradigm.”

Greenstein mentioned the fear that a natural disaster might destroy this body of knowledge for ever. He was no doubt thinking of the fire at the Library of Alexandria where many of the great texts of the ancient world were lost, possibly during the war between Egypt’s royal family and Julius Caesar in AD 48. Incidentally, Stanford University has just recovered some lost works from the Greek scientist Archimedes who in the 3rd Century BC jumped out of his bath an shouted “Eureka!” – “I have found”.

More about the UC talks with Google can be found on Tim O’Reilly’s blog.

A slightly baffling but intriguing phrase caught my eye in an Exbiblio email recently: “Cruelty-free tantalum.” I wondered what this was about and had a look around the internet to find out more. I discovered that it is an evolving story, not unconnected with an event in the news.

Last Sunday, the people of war-torn Congo queued up at the election booths in a remarkable exercise in democracy. Despite its official name, this was the first election in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1960. Congo is one of those countries that is, in a way, cursed by wealth. The violence that has raged since 1994 through this central African country is largely a battle to control Congo’s mineral resources which include diamonds, copper, and ores such as tantalite which is known locally as coltan.

Tantalum has has a high melting point and is capable of storing and slowly releasing an electric charge. Understandably, it is used widely in electronics. The rising popularity of mobile phones and gadgetry caused the value of this mineral to climb steeply during the 1990s, and then slump in 2000 along with the tech crash. 80% of the world’s tantalum is in Congo.

Many of Congo’s poorest farmers, including children, were drawn to tantalite ore, either as independent prospectors, or seeking work in the mines. Tantalite became a focus for fighting and banditry. Some of the deposits fell into the hands of rebels who used forced labour.

A tantalum rush ensued, and a legion of small farmers took their picks and shovels into Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park in search of the mineral. The park is one of the last habitats of the extremely shy and retiring mountain gorilla. The incursion of miners has posed a threat to the existence of last 250 gorillas living in the park.

The unfortunate set of circumstances surrounding Congolese tantalum has given rise to campaigning against buying this mineral from Congo. But things aren’t always so simple on the ground. Many local people found tantalum to be an important source of income, and were dismayed when prices fell in 2000. I quote from a BBC report:

“It’s our only way of making a living,” said Blanchard, an intermediary who travels upcountry to buy coltan from the small-scale miners and brings it back to Goma to sell. “There’s nothing else to do here.”

These distant events have a direct bearing on Exbiblio’s policy of ethical sourcing, but I’m not sure that this is a straight-forward moral issue. Tantalum has been a motivation for banditry and the exploitation of miners, and some of it is tainted by “blood” just as much as conflict diamonds. In some cases, its extraction has disturbed families of gorillas, but refugees from the war have also been a big problem for the animal life of the National Park. On the other side of the argument, tantalum has also provided income to extremely poor Congolese. Congo is still a violent place, but its nascent democracy needs all the help it can get. It needs to move on from the civil war in which almost 4 million people have died (mostly through hunger and disease)– a staggering death toll that has gone largely unnoticed by the world. You can buy tantalum from Australia, and be sure that your hands are clean, but can you be certain that you aren’t turning your back on one of the most needy parts of the world? Bear in mind the verdict of The Economist newspaper on the Congolese election:

The best chance for a generation, unless the world walks away.

I’m really looking forward to attending the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco next month. I’ve been watching the Steve Jobs keynotes and many of the WWDC sessions via Quicktime for the past 5 or 6 years and it will be great fun to finally make the pilgrimage in person.

Our company shirts will not arrive in time for WWDC, so I designed my own Exbiblio shirt on Zazzle for the recruiting events at the conference. It turned out pretty well, check it out.

If you are attending the conference and are interesting in working with us or just chatting about Exbiblio, I would love to meet you. Send me an e-mail or an instant message and we can coordinate a meeting.

Mitch Kapor , who gave the world Lotus Notes, has announced on his blog that he is incubating a new startup. His description is suitably vague for an early stage project.

We’re working on innovation at the intersection of search and social production. Think of new services which are a cross between Google and the Wikipedia. So far it’s just been myself and my co-founder, Todd Agulnick. We have built an incredibly nifty proof-of-concept system built around tens of millions of bookmarks.

Search and social (or collaborative) production are of course the hottest areas on the Internet. It goes without saying that Google has shown that Search has enormous utility and the ability to drive contextual advertising. Social production is exemplified by services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us and Writely. The first two were bought by Yahoo, and the last one by Google. From what I’ve seen of Exbiblio, it too will be operating in these key areas.

Update: Kapor’s project is called Foxmarks. It synchronises bookmarks across different computers and there’s a wiki about it here.

Declan Curry of the BBC has been chatting on his blog with Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company.

Ben and Jerry’s, as you probably are aware, has always made a point of being more than just a business, and has aimed to change the world for the better – just as Exbiblio aims to do. It was founded in Montana in the 1970s, and six years ago was sold (some people say “sold out”) to the food giant Unilever. Ben and Jerry continue to run a foundation which bears their name, and to be involved in the social aspects of the company.

As Jerry says, originally their company was considered to follow a “hippy” way of doing business. These days it is mainstream. Certainly here in Europe, “fair trade” coffee and chocolate can be found on the shelves of every supermarket with large markups (and a few extra pennies going to the farmers). Even the great oil giant BP bears a green logo.

BBC viewers sent in some good questions to the blog. One writes that “ethical” companies that sell up to multinationals are just giving their new owners a respectable “green wash”. Jerry responds that when Unilever bought the company, it committed to buying the milk and cream from family farmers, and it continues to fund the Foundation at the same level as before. He admits, however, that although Ben and Jerry’s tries to influence its owners, it’s like a small tail trying to wag a big dog.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, job interviews at Exbiblio can begin with a question about helping the homeless. I notice that from now on, helping the homeless on the streets of Las Vegas will become a criminal offence punishable by a $1000 fine or six months in jail.

Here in the UK, someone who commands a great deal of respect on this subject is John Bird, the founder of the magazine, The Big Issue. The Big issue is sold by homeless people as a way to help them get back on their feet. If Bird was interviewed for a job at Exbiblio, he would have an interesting answer to the question about what you might do when approached on the street for money.

Bird has attacked “hand-outs” as “mollycoddling” the homeless, and has accused charties and soup-kitchens of making the situation worse. (here’s one ex-homeless blogger who disagrees with him). In fact, I heard him telling the BBC today that giving bread to people on the streets is like “feeding pigeons.” He added that it gives them “hope but not opportunity.” In his view the only correct way to approach the problem of homelessness, is to work on ways to get people off the streets and back into mainstream life, rather than continuing their dependence.

This is a question with a number of legitimate approaches. To a large extent it should be about individual conscience and choice, but of course it’s important to take a look at what works and what doesn’t work. However, making it a jailable offence to help the homeless on the streets, as in Las Vegas, strikes me as quite extraordinary.

The first week of this blog has had a slightly bumpy ride, but I suppose that all the most interesting journies have a few bumps on the way. I thought it might be useful to link to the site which explains why a company might want to have a blog in the first place. It’s called the Cluetrain Manefesto, and it propounds the now famous theory that markets are conversations and that those conversations are conducted in a human (not marketing/pr type) voice. You’ve probably come across it before, but it’s always worth a re-read. You have to scroll down the page to get to the Manefesto.

I stumbled across this interview with Apple Inventor, Steve Wozniak. He has a number of interesting things to say about inventions, but I think this thought bodes well for Exbiblio:

Then there’s the iPod. Its success is due to the fact that it’s a satellite to a computer: The computer has become absolutely central to our lives

Wozniak believes that many areas in technology are swamped and that perhaps there should only be a dozen companies making computers. The industry is mature, and it’s hard to come by new inventions. But clearly he believes that an invention that is a satellite to the computer has lots of mileage in it.

From what I’ve seen of Exbiblio’s technology, it is about making the good old-fashioned book orbit around the computer – in fact, if Exbiblio suceeds, the book will be the ultimate computer satellite, perhaps even cooler than the iPod.

Here is a time-lapse video (no sound) of myself using our prototype Kibble software. I am doing the following:

• Reading a printed Word document
• Selecting key phrases using a CPen 20 pen scanner
• (The phrases I scan are getting added to my life library)
• Adding note annotations to each scan
• Uploading the scans to a web server using a key code and then e-mailing the key code to the document’s author so that he can view my comments
• I am then attaching the digital version of the Word document to the scans in my library by dragging the document icon onto the library entry (this happens automatically in newer versions)
• When I click on a scan, Kibble is launching the digital version of the document on my hard drive and highlighting the portion of text that I captured with the CPen.

Currently at Exbiblio, the majority of the team is working on a project we call “Kibble” as in, eating your own dog food. Kibble is really a collection of projects involving use cases, design, hardware prototyping, and software prototyping.

When I say prototyping, what I really mean is hacking. We often implement features just one or two days after the design team requests them!.

The goal of Kibble is to prove to ourselves, investors, and eventually partners, that we can apply our technology in ways that are useful in real-world applications.

I’m part of the team that is rapidly implementing a Mac OS X application that stores, organizes, and provides actions based on text fragments captured out of printed materials using handheld scanners. Kibble also has a web component for sharing and accessing text captures from the web. We are using the CPen 20 to do the text captures for now, though we are also working on a prototype of a next generation line-by-line scanner.