Untethered publishing

In a recent post to the Lib Licence Listserve Joe Esposito asked his readers to imagine the possibilities offered by a new generation of dynamic content solutions from publishers. Solutions such as mtrip. Quoting from Esposito's post :

"It takes but a small leap of imagination to see Mtrip and its
many inevitable kin beginning to shape the ways scholarly
reference works get created.  As the level of editorial work for
something like Mtrip is huge, the effort and cost of other kinds
of reference works is bound to rise.  This in turn will create
new barriers to finding audiences, as the best-produced services
are more likely to attract attention.  By "best" I don't mean
empty bells and whistles but features that provide real use to
readers."

To be honest it's taken me some time to appreciate what Joe was driving at. But intelligent, automated and highly personal publishing has been a bit of a recurring theme this week. Let me explain.

Aft mTrip first up was paper.li, a service that trawls your twitter graph and re-presents all your tweets and those of your network as a daily newspaper. Neat. In fact it's more than neat, it's awesome.

Next day there was this story from ReadWriteWeb:

"Tomorrow at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, Primal
will launch a new publishing platform. It's grandly described as a
"semantic synthesis platform," but simply put it's a publishing
platform that automates the production of content. What's more, the
resulting web pages include no original content. It's all aggregated from other sources."

Now if I were a research student looking to put together my Literature review, or a teacher/lecturer assembling course specific content for my students I'd be grateful to any savvy publisher putting together a set of tools that help me not only to search for content that was related and of interest but assembled and add some neat tools to help me manage, interrogate and scan the content too.