That's exactly what this article reminded me of. While I would love to only see an internet filled with stimulating intellectual conversations, I don't want an algorithm deciding what I see and don't see.
While a personalization approach could work, I believe that a better solution is changing the way the discussion forum works, not hiding and censoring certain content from certain people.
This is a great idea. I can see this being very useful for research and helping others with computer problems and troubleshooting.
I assume you are the developer? If so, I suggest you add a text tool, box tool, and arrow tool, because my drawing skills are crap and sometimes I just need to quickly highlight something or point something out.
If those features are implemented I could see myself using this a lot and saving myself a lot of trips to photoshop. Great Work!
Interesting. FTA "And would users choose to go to Google for this service, rather than some of the other e-book publishers and providers out there?"
Personally I have had nothing but good experiences with Google, and depending on the prices and books available I would have no problem renting books from Google.
And since they've already got damn near every book ever written scanned and indexed I can see big... uhhh, synergies. Or whatever the non-wanky synonym for "synergies" is.
I google for "obscure topic X" and I find a few crappy websites combined with what looks like a great discussion in the book "An Advanced Course In Obscure Topic X". It tells me I can find a hardcopy in the library three miles away, or for 99 cents I can rent an e-copy from Google for four weeks. Why the hell not? Everybody wins -- me, Google, and the publisher.
I switched from Firefox 3.6 to Chrome and I never looked back. I loved the fact that Chrome was fast, sleek looking, simple and once got extension support easily customizable. The only thing I currently don't like about Chrome is it's spell-checker.
Firefox 4 has been out for a while and it seems to be just as good as Chrome in most aspects, so I would recommend you use whichever one you prefer.
While a personalization approach could work, I believe that a better solution is changing the way the discussion forum works, not hiding and censoring certain content from certain people.