Last week we presented Reading Ahead at the UC Berkeley Design Futures speaker series. Since we conducted this study without an external client, this was our first time sitting down with a group of people and talking about what we found and what the opportunities are. In most client situations we’ll meet people from across departments within the same organizations; here we met people who represented many different aspects of the book industry, from antiquarian booksellers, to experts in the digital reader space. Since our emphasis had been on the consumer side, this exposure to the diversity of the producer side was really enlightening, and the result was a really provocative discussion.

Thanks, Liz, for the opportunity. We look forward to the next opportunity we have to share this work with a live audience!

click screenshot to enlarge

This is an interesting new feature from Google. At least, I’ve only noticed in the last few days, and I haven’t seen it mentioned on the usual blogs that hype every new thing that Google does (I guess this is just an improvement in searching and that’s just so – yawn – less interesting than other Google improvements or innovations).

Looks like the top result for a search (but only certain type of searches – it doesn’t work for portigal or portigal.com – is it only for sponsored?) come up with not only the links to the site, but also a selection of links to other pages in that site. Interesting tradeoff between useful and clutter. I’m not sure yet what I think; I imagine I’d typically want to open the page anyway, and then use the context of that page to choose my subsequent links. But I guess if you knew you wanted to do something specific on that site, like check arrival times, if there is enough info in the link shown in the Google result, you might try that.

We’ll see what happens. Nice thing about the web – companies can try out new features easily and take them away or improve them easily (sure, it’s not easy exactly, but if you wanted to do this with a car feature, that’d be a lot harder).