Open up your mind and say, ahh...

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn’t have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books  got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you’ve seen and what you’re likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don’t shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won’t unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it’s not that the mall won, it’s that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I’ve demonstrated my pro-book chops. I’m not saying I want paper to go away, I’m merely describing what’s inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now, (most of the time) the insight and leverage is going to come from being and fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

We’re entering into a new era of the Internet, where users are now looking to find validated sources within the mix of information overload that we all experience, said Steve Rubel, EVP of Global Strategy and Insights for Edelman during his presentation at Mashable Connect 2011. This shift is changing the nature of authority.

“The reality is, there’s too much content and not enough time,” says Rubel. “More content will be created today than existed in entirety before 2003.” With limited time and attention spans, people are experiencing information overload as well as “people overload.” Rubel called it a “friending arms race,” referring to the Facebook phenomena in which “he or she who dies with the most ‘friends’ wins.”

While Facebook is known as the most intimate of the large social networks, the simple truth is that the average user doesn’t know 20% of his Facebook friends. Rubel pointed to this — and the fact that in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year was “unfriend” — to propose that the new “Validation” era of Internet life has begun, as of 2010.

Prior to the Validation era, the Internet experienced two other distinct eras, says Rubel. The first was the era of “Commercialization” (1994-2002), in which publishing was “costly and inaccessible to the masses.” As a result, media companies and brands ruled the digital space and the dot-com boom gave rise to a few new players, including Yahoo, Amazon and Google.

With the dot-com crash, though, publishing costs decreased, enabling almost anyone to be a publisher — thus, the era of “Democratization” (2002-2010). Cue the entrance of mainstream bloggers and Twitter fiends, accompanied by the shift of authority and trust from brands to individuals.

Edelman publishes an annual “Trust Barometer,” which gauges attitudes about the state of trust in business, government, NGOs and media across 23 countries. In 2006, during the pinnacle of the era of Democratization, the study found that people trusted their peers most when forming opinions about companies. Rubel pointed to the rise of social media to explain this finding.

The 2011 Trust Barometer survey illustrated an essential shift in trust, with academics, experts and technical experts within companies rising to become the most trusted sources. Meanwhile, the authority of peers has notably declined 4% since 2009.

With this shift in authority, Rubel proposes that as of 2010, the Internet has entered the Validation era, in which Internet users are beginning to “find the signal in the noise” and hold on to only those pieces of information and people that are most important to them online. The rise of intimate social networks such as Path, and group messaging apps such as GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society and Kik, is an indicator that “people want to be closer to people they care about and let all the riffraff set aside,” says Rubel.

How do brands gain authority in the age of digital overload, then? Rubel pointed to the “Media Cloverleaf” as a solution, calling it the brainchild of Edelman’s CEO Richard Edelman. The Media Cloverleaf features four distinct spheres of media which should all be utilized to engage the public on a regular basis, he said. This is the idea of transmedia storytelling. Here are the four spheres of media:

• Traditional media encompasses the big media companies that have “survived and thrived.” This includes radio, TV and print media outlets.
• “Tradigital” media includes “digitally native media companies that are largely blogs, sometimes niche-focused, sometimes horizontal,” explained Rubel. These outlets are characterized by having high social amplification, SEO sophistication and sometimes a blur between advertising and editorial, says Rubel.
• Owned media was defined by Rubel via a quote from Andy Heyward, former President of CBS News: “Every company can be a media company.” This is the idea that every brand can create valuable content.
• Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are driving increased engagement with brands and increased traffic to the other media spheres.

Consumers see these media channels as one, not as four distinct areas, Rubel warns. As a result, the opportunity for businesses is to “propagate new ideas across the Cloverleaf.” Here are Rubel’s five steps for success:

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1. Elevate the Experts

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Find your company’s subject-matter experts and empower them to “cultivate new ideas and engage in meaningful conversation around them,” advises Rubel. These experts could be employees or even your most valuable customers. Start by setting them up with press interviews or enabling them to represent your company on Twitter, Rubel suggests.

Cisco Together, for example, is an owned media project from Cisco that brings together subject matter experts to discuss how technology is connecting people in all new ways across various industries.

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2. Curate to Connect

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Rubel pointed out an unprecedented opportunity for companies and individuals to gain authority and become thought leaders by being the ones who “separate art from junk for people to understand it.” Curation is just as important as creation.

Social video king YouTube, for example, is finding new ways to curate the massive amount of videos that YouTube users upload on a daily basis. Most recently, the company partnered with curation startup Storyful to put together playlists for each day of the Egyptian protests.

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3. Dazzle with Data

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“People on the Internet do not read,” Rubel says. “They read 20% of a webpage before they move on; 57% never come back to that page; and we spend 15-20 seconds on a webpage before we move on. We are a global planet of fruit flies.”

The solution is to make data and information more visual and entertaining. The New York Times understands this idea and even employs a team specifically for data visualization. From visualizing America’s consumption of meat and how various groups of people spend their days, to making interactive maps of homicides in New York City and minorities in China, The Times has produced some of the most compelling graphics on the web.

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4. Put Pubs on Hubs

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Publish your company’s content, such as slideshows and white papers, on hubs like SlideShare and Scribd, so that interested parties can access it and “go deeper” when they want to.

Facebook, for example, is using Scribd to publish guides and case studies for developers, journalists and Facebook Page administrators.

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5. Ask & Answer

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“Be a source of knowledge,” says Rubel. Social media is a great outlet for doing just that. Rubel recommends that companies empower all of their employees to ask and answer questions via social media, instead of putting a few people in charge of that responsibility.

While at Mashable, I have sourced experts from “Help a Reporter Out,” Quora, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments and many other online outlets. Answering and asking questions online is just as valid as doing the same thing in person. The Internet is not just a playland; it is an extension of our offline lives, a place where individuals and companies can become highly influential and respected.

Which companies are best positioned to gain authority as we move into the era of Validation? Let us know what you think in the comments.

View Steve Rubel’s Mashable Connect presentation:

125 years after building the world’s first automobile, Daimler has updated the line of bicycles sold under the Mercedes-Benz brand.

The new Benz bikes are the latest in a long line of product tie-ins from luxury manufacturers. Two-wheelers have worn the three-pointed star since 2005, though cyclists now have their pick of bikes branded by automakers. Audi introduced a series of bikes earlier this year, while the Ferrari, Jeep and Cadillac badges have been applied to bicycles in the recent past. There’s even a BMW M-series bicycle.

Whether they’re sold directly by car dealers or badge-engineered, all these bikes have had one thing in common so far:  they offer middling performance at a premium price tag. Cycles with similar components are generally available for less money without that car brand tie-in.

Though Benz’ bikes are expensive, they’re also built by ultra-premium manufacturer Rotwild and feature high-quality components, so buyers can take comfort that they’ve at least overpaid for a nice bike. The lineup includes a full-suspension mountain bike, a fitness bike and a city bike that comes complete with a luggage carrier and a Busch and Müller lighting system.

The most serious offering is a 15 lb. carbon fiber racing bike with an SRAM Red gearshift and brakes. Only 100 have been built, and two of them are already used by Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg as part of fitness training for the Mercedes F1 team — aspirational product placement in its highest form!

There’s also a kids’ bike. Though it doesn’t come with training wheels, it can be lowered so that new riders can steady themselves with their feet on the ground. Previous models have sold for a whopping $450, though it’s adjustable for kids between 3 and 6 years old so at least parents won’t have to buy a new one for three years. BMW sells a similar cycle, so kids can start learning brand loyalty before they can read.

Should you want to fully become a rolling, human billboard, Mercedes sells Benz-branded cycling outfits in all sizes. Unfortunately, the bikes and accessories don’t appear to be available in the US.

Photos: Mercedes-Benz