I can’t resist commenting on BOOKS as we continue to skip down the yellow brick road to Web 2.0, Web 3.0 or whatever!

Here is an excellent visual list of the Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century. Needless to say, each tells a ‘story’ – and the cultural shifts around some of them have been profound! Books still have a significant place in our world – and perhaps this is why they still figure in Web 2.0 developments that make books easily accessible to buy and read.

5 Alternative Ways to Browse Amazon provides an array of alternative visual search tools for….. well yes, for finding and buying good books. Very good read.

Developments in visual search tools seem to be gaining pace. You will be amazed at what is happening at Space Time, 3D web search, currently in Beta and only available on a PC. But what a WOW! way of searching “at the speed of thought”. “Watch as your information converges in one space at one time”.

But even more interesting for an information professional is the presentation about the Semantic MEDLINE Visualization Prototype which incorporates the semantic web and natural language processing – manipulating information as well as documents to respond to a searchers needs. It connects knowledge from various resources from PubMed and Medline – and natural language processing will summarize and produce a visual network or relationships between the material you are interested in.