If Craig Silverstein had invented the method by which Google decides how to return results, would the top secret Google juice be called SilversteinRank instead of being named after Larry Page as it is as PageRank? I was assured by Craig that the secret (licensed from Stanford til 2011) would have lost the wonderful pun and definitely be called SilversteinRank.

Most of the questions asked and answered at today’s talk were meatier and more relevant than that one. Craig talked about Google Book Project, Google Scholar, Mobile futures, Google Health and Google Coop.

On the digitzation front, Craig noted that only 20% of the world’s printed material is in print. 5% is in the Public Domain and 75% is neither in print nor copyright free — these are the infamous orphan works that are not interesting enough to be kept available for profit but cannot be made available legally for free. 75% of our recorded knowledge made unavailable by bad policy.

Craig lived in Chapel Hill years back. About 30 years back as it turns out. For a few years when he was around 4 or 5 years old while his parents completed their medical training at Duke. While here, he had a run in with a Duke athlete. A basketball player came to visit Craig’s school (in Durham). He asked each child what their favorite college team might be. Craig answered the Tar Heels. He was marked for life.

He did, as Fred pointed out, wear a shirt of the appropriate blue shade for his talk here.

We had a great panel. Moderating for folks like these — Jose-marie Griffiths (Dean of SILS), Barbara Rimer (Dean of Public Health), Carol Jenkins (Health Sciences Library Director) and Fred Stutzman (claimid.com and Social Networking researcher exceptionalle) — was easy and fun. (err I was the moderator).

Great crowd of about 600+ people and good questions. Good evening.