Booleanings

Proof that someone at Microsoft is working (it's not the lazy-B yet): The Windows live local virtual earth street level demo is pretty cool.

My first thought is "neato." My second thought is, "big deal, what would you do with it?" which is quickly folloed by wow, this could really be useful for something." The more integration of gps, mapping, and video we have, the more we're going to see these hybrid apps. Some of them are going to stick -- they've gotta. Thanks for MS to throwing this one up against the wall.

OK, so I'm all of a sudden thinking about how an application like this could be used in the, stick with me, library world. OK, thinking out loud here. One of the problems with catalogs (and online searching) is that you lose the browsability (serendipity they like to call it) of the stacks. The idea that you may think you want one title, but when you go to get it from the stacks, you find another document that you didn't think you need, but is the best match for your need. Well, in online catalogs you have access a bunch of titles that correspond to your search, but their context to each other is (other than fitting your search terms) non-existent. You read that document electronically (and context free) and go on your merry way. Poof! So much for serendipity.

But, what if you could do your searching in the catalog, and then, when you went to electronically retrieve your document, you could "browse" -- via a technology like virtual earth street level -- the other items shelved with your document... Then to take it a step further, would if you could flip through the scanned pages of all those books and make your serendipitous choice (via the -- insert your favorite search engine name - Books project).

I'm sure if I thought about this for more than 15 minutes I could shoot some holes in it, but just for a second, it sounds pretty compelling. Cool.