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Last week’s biggest surprise was the announcement of Nintendo’s new design for the DS. It had been rumored for weeks, and the fan mockups have been flying fast and furious, with some hitting very close to the mark.

What’s most interesting about the announcement of the new design is that the day before the announcement, the General Manager of Nintendo UK said he was not aware of a redesign in development, even though Reggie knew something back in November. The very next day, the pics were all over the web, and there was much rejoicing.

So, is this bad message control, perfect message control, or did he honestly not know? Is Nintendo getting all cagey, or so ossified that a territorial suit was not aware of a major product announcement? The most likely explanation is perfect message control, but I’ve heard that Nintendo of Japan doesn’t necessarily keep the left hand informed.

Nintendo’s brilliant ‘and then there’s the Revolution‘ strategy for the next generation requires cachet by the truckload, and getting the ascendant DS in tune with what we’ve seen of the Revolution’s aesthetics thus far says that the integration that Nintendo’s got in store for us is going to raise the bar considerably. The stylish new look also helps the DS compete with the ultra-slick but nearly gameless PSP on a level where the PSP had previously had an undeniable edge.

Nemo’s already getting an ‘old’ Kart DS bundle for his birthday to settle the household squabbles over my DS, which I apparently don’t get first dibs on, even though it was a Father’s Day present!  The new DSlite will be hard to resist. I wonder what the eBay market for a used ‘old-style’ DS will be like once this hits, since we surely don’t need 3 DS’s in the house.  Although, family mario kart night could become a new tradition…

John Scalzo reports on the first year of his circulating game collection at Mysterious Public Library (MPL). That post went all the way to the top last week, and I’m hopeful that this growing awareness that games belong in the library will start to drive more demand and less funny looks.

Interestingly, his hottest title was Harry Potter 2. I wonder if this is just because there are more Potter fans in the library (duh), or if it also caught the eye during searches for the books, especially since the titles probably didn’t spend much time on the shelf. Katamari Damacy also makes the top 10. I really wanted to use Katamari multiplayer as a surprise round game last season. Maybe someday…

Kotaku’s post back at Scalzo’s 6-month mark said he had sold the MPL administration on supporting the ps3 at launch, although his first year wrapup sounds less convinced about it. It really depends on the intersection between library patrons and early adopters. I think that a lot of the people in my town who are likely to shell out $500 on launch day probably have no clue what the library is doing. We’ve got to change that.

Now that John’s gone and leaked some departmental jargon, I reserve the right to use the term ‘muggles’ in reference to users. It’s really not so much jargon, as it is a familiar framework for analogies in discussions at the office.

Our geekly powers aren’t really magical, but in accordance with Clarke’s Third Law, magic is in the eye of the beholder. They are muggles because we seem like wizards to them; the muggleness is all in the head. Seriously, which is easier to explain: Wingardium Leviosa, or AJAX?

A challenge facing Library 2.0 is how to adequately explain the types of breakthroughs it might bring us all; but now that we have what some might call Web 2.0’s first killer app in the best blonde joke ever, we have a shining example of Web (and Library) 2.0’s potential, with which to illustrate the breadth of possibilities.

For some reason, the joke reminds me of this absurd, inexplicable Sega CD title called PANIC, perhaps because Nemo and I have been playing it lately. You play as a generic, but undeniably japanese little boy in pink overalls who gets sucked into the global computer network when a virus infects the ‘Computer Network Server’ that controls all the electrical or mechanical devices on earth. You have to find your way through hundreds of rooms, each with several unmarked buttons, to the Computer Network Server (which, you discover, looks like Siddhartha) to deliver a program, called PANIC, that will wipe the virus out worldwide, stopping the malfunctions such as elevators that drop Easter Island heads on waiting passengers, speedometers that vomit, and monuments that blow up spectacularly around the world if you push the wrong (right?) button.

I got PANIC after renting it 3 times in 1995, just as I was was starting to poke around the web on some NeXTs we had at the architecture school. And thus, I was, by sheer luck, in the right place at the right time to create the first ever home page of the Michigan Marching Band Tuba Section. Because we were playing so much PANIC at the tuba house, one of the features of that page was a PANIC-style control panel of 16 buttons with colored ascii symbols on them which took you to some of what passed for weird websites in 1995, although I ran out of weird sites and used a very early uroulette for four of them.

The pure brilliance of the best blonde joke ever honestly makes me think about the web as I haven’t thunk since those heady days when I was first discovering it, when it seemed so much like PANIC, with its interconnected and crosslinked rooms and unpredictable buttons; the web was so deep and recursive. Until recently, the web had begun to seem so familiar, incapable of surprising even with extreme content, which is now totally expected. It’s nice to be surprised again, to have a sense of wonder and disorientation, so different than the numbing comfort of daily browsing.

“If we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” Thus spake John Blyberg, and he says those sorts of things in meetings all the time, and takes the wind out of some magnificently superfluous tangents. He’s absolutely right, and the kerfuffle about the term (and the ideas of) ‘Library 2.0‘ could have been easily foreseen by the sufficiently jaded.

While I think the term is undeniably here to stay, there are a few factors that are kerfuffulating the issue that could stand to be aired out a bit.

Library 2.0 implies not only enhancement, but also inclusion.

Ever since we started banging those rocks together, we’ve been learning that newer is usually better. There will always be missteps, like Asbestos Pyjamas, or Windows ME, and not everyone is going to agree, like Buggy Whip Sellers, Travel Agents, or Torah Scribes, but the march forward over time has been, well, inexorable, at least in regards to technology. In the information age, programmer’s version control schemes were rapidly seized upon as a marketing device that presented an easy way to communicate both newness and essentiality. Procter and Gamble’s marketing people probably wish they could just release ‘Crest 4.2!’ instead of having to come up with a new phrase each time like ‘now with more whitening detartarizing sparkleoid microbead blaster POWER’, that has to be legible at a small size and at a distance, amongst a field of competing holographic sparkles.

So, yes, product 2.0 (or at least product 2.1) is almost always better than product 1.0, but that doesn’t mean that product 1.0 was bad (although it may have been). Not only that, but product 2.0 had better include almost all the features of product 1.0, or offer superior alternatives. There are no vestiges of the old republic to be swept away; product 2.0 is not inherently a coup. It’s the next iteration of the idea, building on the successes of product 1.0 and learning from its weaknesses. While product 2.0 may involve a complete restructuring of the backend if 1.0 was klugey or unscalable, I haven’t heard anyone say that the Library 2.0 idea involves that sort of institutional razing. We’re just talking about what our institutions should do next; the baby, she’s still soaking in it. You know, the bathwater.

It probably ought to be Library 7.0 or something.

Part of the kerfuffulation comes from the Library 2.0’s inference that these new ideas are the shiny new one true path version, and the history of Libraries up to this point are the old hat version. While it’s true that the new services (and more importantly, the new approach to service development) that Library 2.0 entails are enough of a jump from current practice to merit the next integer in the sequence, compressing the changes libraries have been through over the centuries into a single version can be seen as belittling or dismissive if taken too seriously.

So, what version of Library are we running here, anyway?

Okay, call cuneiform Library 1.0, after the oral tradition alpha and cave wall beta. The shift to paper-based books surely merited Library 2.0, and the Greeks’ addition of Fiction Collections in 500 BCE ushered in the era of Library 3.0. The Han Dynasty’s addition of a catalog, stored in silk bags, brought us to library 4.0, while the Romans brought a key innovation to Library 5.0: open stacks, a feature that would disappear from some future releases. The threat of shrinkage drove the medieval libraries to bring an interesting concept to Library 6.0; loss prevention in the form of chaining the books to the shelves. Maybe it’s time for that idea to come around again. Gutenberg forced reinvention into Library 7.0 as the precious became commodity (and as the Torah Scribes cried ‘Feh’), and maybe we can skip a bit to the expansion of the Carnegie era and call that Library 8.0. I think you can call the integration of events and programming into the core services of the public library Library 9.0, and the access point role that’s grown during past decade could easily be Library 10.0. It didn’t take long for the entire US to go from Library 9.0 to Library 10.0.

Now, that gives a better sense of the head start libraries have on the web; we’re already in our double digits. Web’s only just now hitting 2.0, but it has a buzz that’s undeniable, and the key idea is not that Library 2.0 will assimilate all the 1.0 stalwarts, leaving only a smoking bun blowing desolately across a gleaming dystopia of pulsating middleware and pingbacks, but that the next iteration of Libraries will take our formidable history and integrate the techniques and technologies of the Web 2.0 toolset to make something new, yet familiar, and hopefully, better.

Library 2.0 is not only for rich libraries.

It’s certainly true that at larger, more comfortably-resourced libraries and consortia, staff are more likely to have time to argue about this kind of thing, and while larger libraries are more likely to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their services, the empowering thing about the tools is that it does not have to be that way. Because Web 2.0 is the product of increasingly smarter software development tools and progressively more robust open-source code libraries, inventing and implementing a new Library 2.0-style service requires more creativity than it does cash. Furthermore, the ideas of Web 2.0 are based around sharing code, access, and services; the stuff that the bigger libraries do over the next few years are likely to become available to smaller libraries much faster than the internet achieved its current ubiquity. The toe’s already in the door; better web-based services and the instant community they can bring can spread quite quickly, as the investments are centralized and little (if any) last-mile infrastructure upgrades are required.

Also, while a big focus of Web and Library 2.0 is on the web user, don’t forget that Library staff are web users too. Even if the digital divide still takes a bite out of the impact of a library web service in a community, these tools will provide better service and stronger community for staff and patrons in the library, not just remote users. And, as noted above, when these services get integrated into products, turned into packages, and distilled into simple scripts, implementing them is not necessarily going to involve a cut to collection budgets, especially if the services are provided for all libraries by Consortia or State Libraries. We’re all in this together, and the adoption curve is always speeding up… but it gets to everyone eventually.

There have been a few spots in heavy rotation during [adult swim] for a emulated game subscription service, and leaving aside the message that the existence of this sort of a business model sends to libraries, these spots feature a lovingly selected set of games, even showcasing some highly underrated titles.

Two in particular really got my attention, both from Genesis games that seem so obscure that I almost feel as something private has just been aired nationally. One is Dynamite Headdy, and the other is Kid Chameleon. In Dynamite Headdy, you are a birdish puppet who can change his default, throwable head for one of 15 others, while in Kid Chameleon, you are a super cool, sunglasses-and-leather-jacket-wearing kid who can wear one of 15 different helmets. Interestingly enough, the final boss in Kid Chameleon is ‘Heady Metal’.

Also remarkable about Kid Chameleon is that the game takes place inside a virtual reality arcade game (’Wild Side‘), of which the eponymous Kid Chameleon is the best player in town. How meta is that?

I find myself pining for the long-gone apex of the Fifteen Interchangeable Head genre. I know I have Dynamite Headdy around here somewhere, but I’m afraid I may have sold Kid Chameleon on eBay.