Making the World's Knowledge Computable

Has anyone had a go at the latest search engine - WolframAlpha?

They have an ambitious goal - to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. (more about WolframAlpha). It is no Google killer yet but it seems to do a pretty good job of questions that have an exact answer. Try a search for city sydney for instance and you get a map, coordinates, population, current time and temperature amongst other things.

Is this bringing us closer to the possibility of having a completely free, all digital reference collection?

Top Tech Trends panel from LITA

Have a look at this article from Library Journal which is about some of the discussion at the recent ALA conference from the Top Tech Trends panel from LITA (Library Information and Technology Association).

Are there any trends you would like to add to this list?

Thanks to Michael Stephens

Michael Stephens, as part of his Hyperlinked Library talk at Macquarie University,suggested setting up an emerging technology committee.

As we are working in a range of libraries it seemed an idea to set up an emerging technology blog. On this blog it would be great to see posts about different new technologies. Further discussion about their applications can take place here or on the RISG blog.