Inventing the Future by Tim O'Reilly

"So, what am I seeing today that I think the world will be writing about (and the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs chasing) in the years to come?

• Wireless...
• Next generation search engines....
• Weblogs....
• Instant messaging....
• File Sharing....
• Grid computing....
• Web spidering....

All of these things come together into what I'm calling "the emergent Internet operating system." The facilities being pioneered by thousands of individual hackers and entrepreneurs will, without question, be integrated into a standardized platform that enables a next generation of applications. (This is the theme of our Emerging Technologies conference in Santa Clara May 13-16, "Building the Internet Operating System.") The question is, who will own that platform?"

I found his discussion of web services interesting, especially in regards to web spiders. My brain is still gel-ling around all of that. This is cool - I've done Tech Summits at SLS about four of the seven topics Tim lists, and our Reference Service covers search engines. Have you ever played that game where you read out loud your fortune from a fortune cookie and add "in bed" to the end of it? If you're a librarian, read tech/visioning articles and add "in libraries" to the end of everything. See if you can apply what you're reading to your current environment.

BTW, the fun version of the fortune cookie game is to add "@ your library" to the end of your fortune.