A report is wafting around our library staff tearoom table- a vital current awareness information dissemination device. The 2009 Horizon report is published by the New Media Consortium and Educause Learning Initiative and examines annual developments in techology. This year the changes they identify are mobiles, (new interfaces can run third-party applications and are location aware. Mobiles may be the new laptops when it comes to surfing the web away from home.) cloud computing(the emergence of large scale "data farms"), geo-everything (geocoded data to help with "mashing up" applications), the personal web (people using bookmarking and igoogle etc to search and view the web in a personalised way) semantic-aware applications- the semantic web prophesised so long ago by Sir Tim Berners Lee and yet to become a real force, and smart objects(real life objects with personal identifiers such as barcodes or rfid which carry information about them that applications can access.
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