This afternoon I gave a talk at the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference, "Scholarly Communication 2.0", in San Francisco, on the future of search. Well, theoretically, that was what the talk was supposed to be about.

I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Anurag Acharya from Google (Scholar), and a Microsoft Live program manager, Heather Dystrup-Chiang. (They had much more on-target presentations than the one that I gave).

This talk was a little bit of a condensation and rehash of one that I had given at NLM; better than that talk for having been given once before, and for me to have acquired more information and had time for a little bit more thinking.

The talk is not available in audio or video, so one thing that I drew out in the talk relates to the active thread in our communities (publishing, library, and so forth) on how content will be mashable, remixable, etc.; that this, while important, should perhaps not be so much a focus as the act of reading itself, and how reading can be transformed into a more iterative, or social, or collaborative fabric. I am not suggesting that is the sole future of reading - much reading will always be solitary - but rather we are seeing the enablement of a new form of interaction with material given our current set of technologies which is more social, and in a way, very familiar to any of us who have sat in front of a grandparent or uncle and heard them tell stories.