The afternoon saw a program on Products, Services and Features that Deliver the Cool Factor with Rafael Sidi, Elsevier Engineering Information, moderating. He started by showing a Flickr drawing he’d created for the conference.

Howard Ratner, CTO, Nature Publishing Group, talked about how NPG unleashed content through RSS feeds and podcasting. As an aside about podcasting, he stressed that you shouldn’t just read content—that’s “shovelware.” Amazingly, the Nature podcast is for sale at iTunes and it’s in their top 500. He showed Connotea and noted that blogs and community forums are becoming very popular among scientists. Even the CEO of Macmillan, NPG’s parent company, Richard Charkin, now has a blog . And NPG’s got a cool mashup of Avian flu (with data gathered by Declan Butler) with Google Earth.

Greg Gomes then described WileyPLUS and played a Flash demo of the product. Looks to me like a good product for undergraduates who need to learn lots of facts, but I’m having trouble envisioning it as a critical thinking tool. Greg Merkle was braver. He ran a live demo of Factiva Search 2.0, pointing out how controversial the tag cloud part of it was. Some customers love it; others say “Get rid of it.” I’m part of the love contingent. Search 2.0 has some fascinating discover elements to it.

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