Monday, November 06, 2006

Future stuff...

My immediate future, of course, involves getting a different car, but I was thinking more in the bigger picture kinda way when I wrote that title. Recently, I heard Jean Gralley speak about the possible digital future for picture books (which she explores in Books Unbound (which if you haven't seen, you really should)). It's great to see people trying to push a form forward in the digital realm, rather than simply trying to make old rules apply no matter what. I suspect technology is gonna change every aspect of publishing (though not, one hopes, every aspect of storytelling!), so trying to be ahead of the curve... or even on the curve... seems key.

And while still mulling this over, I ran into Ms. Dewey. Now, you'd think this is a library thang, what with the Dewey reference, but instead it's an interesting hybrid of search technology and entertainment. I admit, I laughed quite a few times both at some of the waiting around stuff as well as some of the responses to my search terms (which also brought up perfectly fine search results ala any search engine). Would I use Ms. Dewey if I were in a rush? Nah. Would I use it if I could create a more personalized version of it for folks to use to search my blog? Oh, sure. Would you?

It's fun to think about this type of stuff, though right now I gotta book and deal with far more prosaic life issues... like the fact that I haven't had coffee yet!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the mention, Gregory! There was a wonderful response to "Books Unbound" at the Santa Barbara conference. I really enjoyed that weekend and with a nice mention like yours, maybe I'll get to "show and tell" again somewhere.
Thanks again!

Nancy said...

Ms. Dewey is very funny. The only issue I had with her is that she was a tiny bit too impatient while I tried to come up with search terms for her.

When are they going to come up with Mr. Dewey though, that's what I want to know.