Probably the presentation that got me most excited at this week’s Future of Web Apps conference was QuotationsBook, launched at the conference by QB founder, Amit Kothari to, it must be said, a fairly muted reception – this was a pretty flashy audience who expect a lot of innovation and slickness.

QuotationsBook is a neat quotation source, with some (but far from all) of the features we’ve come to expect from the sort of Web 2.0 apps featured at FOWA – bookmarking, easy sharing, and external embedding. A quick comparison with other quote sources such as Wikiquote, The Quotations Page (#1 on Google) and Bartlett’s for the simple but probably not terribly common string ‘publishing’ reveals the following results:

• Wikiquote: 1202 mostly irrelevant results, which you have to click through to read.
• Quotations Page: 1 result.
• Bartlett’s: 1 (rubbish) result
• QuotationBook: 38, mostly great, results.

These differing results are clearly the product of QB’s advanced thinking on how people use Quotes, together with a more serious approach than most quotes sites – instead of just pilfering other sites or waiting for users to add quotes, they re-indexed Gutenberg, for example. They deserve to do well.

What’s more interesting to me about QB, however, is it’s the first site I’ve seen to apply the principles of the semantic web to text. We’re all aware of the websites and applications that are transforming the way we access and interact with photography, video, music and other art forms, but there’s been very little done to upgrade the experience of literature. Apps like QB are among the first to think about what we can do with plain text, and that’s what makes them particularly exciting. I hope we can bring you more from Amit and the team soon.

The above image is from the Future of Web Apps conference which happened in London last week – unlike the Print Is Dead blog, however, I was there, and I know that Richard Moross of Moo‘s next slide was “Oh no, it isn’t.”

Moo’s presentation was entitled “How we turn virtual stuff on the web into beautiful stuff in the real world” and explained how they’ve use the latest web technologies to redeply a 500-year-old industry: printing. Expect to see more of this – here and elsewhere…

[Photo courtesy of Pixelm's Flickr stream]