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This evening’s SearchSIG featured a panel discussion on tagging and social bookmarking.

L-R: Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Kevin Rose (Digg), Michael Tanne (Wink), Manish Chandra (Kaboodle)

Charlene Li (from Forrester) moderated.

The room at Yahoo was full — standing room only. A quick show of hands indicated nearly everyone in the room had used tagging services before.

Some discussion about “how can we trust the tags”, tag spam (Charlene’s term was “spag”), discerning intent from user tagging and other actions, and the problems of tagging users and the range of social gestures built into the various systems.

Joshua used the example of receiving LinkedIn connection requests from someone whose name you don’t recognize. You don’t want to accept it, because you don’t know who it is. You don’t want to reject it, because it would be rude, and you might actually know them. So he has a huge backlog of random connection requests piling up in his inbox.

Someone in the audience commented that between keyworded search and tagging, people are starting to lose grammar, and instead come up with “restaurant san francisco cool” instead of complete sentences.

Participation rates: Wink assumed 5-8% of their users would tag, actual is 30-40% active (but they’re just launching and are picking up a lot of knowledgeable early adopters from word of mouth). Digg has around 20% of their traffic from registered users (they don’t exactly tag, just digg). Kevin says Digg has around 140K registered users, generating around 4M pageviews per day.

Charlene wrapped up the Q&A with some predictions for the upcoming year:
1. The rise of some sort of social link and social standing system to “rate” users
2. Some sort of social “disaster” will occur on one of the new services, despite best efforts to prevent social disease from creeping in.
3. Today’s companies are mostly small, smart, startups. In a year there will be a different cast of characters from mainstream media, search engines, bigger players.

Thanks to Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure for organizing another great session.

Quick notes from SearchSIG last night:
This month’s SearchSIG featured John Batelle along with Dan Farber and a panel discussion on vertical search by Gautam Godhwani (SimplyHired), Pete Flint, (Trulia), Adam Beguelin (Truveo), and Tony Gentile, (Healthline). If you look carefully at the photo above, it’s nearly self-documenting, as the web page with the speakers and agenda is projected behind the stage. If only they had sat in order…

Best quote of the evening, from Gautam Godhwani: “I have yet to see Google do applications well”. This in response to a question to all panelists about why Google / Yahoo / Microsoft wouldn’t end up squashing them like bugs at some point. In the background, John Batelle ran a search for “search company ceo” on SimplyHired, which came back with 1020 matches…

Tony Gentile from Healthline had a more defensible reason for existence, in that they’ve built a domain specific taxonomy and onotology for mapping consumer names for health-related topics into the professional medical namespace, and has a quote from Eric Schmidt to the effect that “health and law are two areas that they wouldn’t approach now as they require too much domain knowledge” or something like that. Truveo has a lot of branded content, and claims to do an excellent job of digging out metadata, thus letting you quickly filter for recent gossip, sports highlights and adult content. Trulia works with real estate agents to map their listings onto a Google map, with filters by price, zip code, etc. I have a hard time keeping Truveo and Trulia straight.

A quick show of hands turned up something like 1/3 of the attendees were involved in building a new search engine, most of them not Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft employees. Hmm. This might be correlated with the large number of search company CEOs.

Update 11-12-2005 16:10 PST – more from John Batelle, Dan Farber, Om Malik, plus a pointer to an Information Week article with the quote from Eric Schmidt regarding domain knowledge requirements for law and health search (via Tony Gentile)

I wrote earlier today about my reluctant late-adopter status for audio podcasting, and now I come across an article about Apple quietly introducing video content to iTunes Music Store.

The quiet, fanfare-less launch of video podcasting (in fact, it’s not even clear when it was launched) is a bit surprising for the company, but there may be a reason: there’s not too many video podcasts out there in the wild. Furthermore, video podcasts are currently only playable on your computer, although it seems clear enough that a video iPod is on the way. If you didn’t believe it before, you should definitely believe it now.

I don’t recall if anyone mentioned video on iTunes at last night’s Search SIG discussion. Ev Williams (from Odeo) commented that a lot of what makes audio podcasting compelling doesn’t apply to video, in that audio can be consumed anywhere, and has an existing use model (drive-time radio), while video is typically consumed while sitting down in front of an increasingly large television at home. Eric Rice did show a live demo of video blogging on Audioblog, illustrating the possibility of large scale user-created video content in the future. I’m not sure who’s going to look at all the video, though. Perhaps the same people who are watching reality TV shows.

Once again, I’m well outside the demographic, since I barely watch any television at all these days. If I could get a commercial video podcast service to replace cable TV with, I’d probably subscribe now, though.

Discussion and demos on podcasting and audio search last night at the inaugural SDForum Search SIG meeting.

I want to like podcasting, but to date, I haven’t really gotten into it, either as a listener or as a producer. In theory, I should be all over this, since it combines some of my favorite topics: media technology (mostly audio, but eventually video), internet publishing and distribution, and search (which seems to be under everything on the internet). In practice, I haven’t found a good fit in my daily routine yet, partly because I don’t have a long drive to work. I sometimes listen to music while I’m working, but often need to be on the phone. I’m sort of interested in some of the conversational programming, such as those on IT Conversations, but I can read similar content in a fraction of the time required to listen to a podcast segment, and I find that I can’t listen to them while I’m working as I either get distracted from my work or totally tune out the content. I tend not to use the iPod much either, for some of the same reasons.

All that aside, the demos of Loomia, Odeo, and Audioblog showed how rapidly the tools and services for creating and distributing podcasts and personal media are improving. They all provide directories and search services for finding podcasts, and are moving toward providing tools and hosting services for individuals to create and publish their own audio podcasts.

David Marks showed Loomia, which provides an extensive, personalizable directory of podcast feeds. The site features an inlined Flash audio player, so you can play the feeds directly in the browser page, which I’m trying out while I’m writing this. He also mentioned that their site makes use of the Dojo open source library for implementing AJAX features.

Ev Williams showed the Odeo Studio application, which isn’t yet available on their web site. It puts a simple audio production app in the web page, allowing you to record with a computer microphone and mix in audio such as theme music, applause, and sound effects. Looks like fun, and removes another barrier for potential podcast creators who might not have the inclination to go find and learn to use an audio editor.

Eric Rice showed Audioblog’s video clip publishing service, along with how to “dial in” and create a podcast by leaving a voice message. Although their site is called “Audioblog”, they are developing a lot of similar video capabilities. Their site will also transcode video from a variety of formats, including 3GP; this allows them to accept video uploads from mobile phones. They will host the media data, and it sounded like they were looking into handling media rights clearances with ASCAP and other artists agencies on behalf of their publishers sometime in the future.

The opening panel discussion, moderated by Doug Kaye, should turn up on IT Conversations in a while, I’ll try checking it out later.

As a bonus, I also met Munjal Shah and Tara Hunt in person afterwards. I’m looking forward to trying the Ojos image search alpha when they get it cooked enough.

Update 09-15-2005 20:01 PDT: added a photo of Odeo Studio from Niall Kennedy, plus a followup on iTunes and video podcasting

Update 10-20-2005 21:26 PDT: Links to the audio at IT Conversations are posted at Yahoo Search Blog

I caught a couple of the sessions at the SD Forum Web Based Architecture event yesterday. Adam Denning (Senior Director of the Architecture Strategy Team, Microsoft) prefaced his talk by noting the grand titles that software architects often end up with, and the often fuzzy and open-ended nature of the territory.

I liked this take on the role of the software architect, from someone in the audience, which I think was Pat Helland from Amazon:

Q: What’s the job of a software architect?
A: “Make stuff up and sucker people into building it!”

Someone else in the audience observed that unlike physical world architects, software architects are often involved in actually implementing their designs.

Andre Stechert, Kevin Burton, Alok Bhanot, and Colin Johnson had a panel session after lunch. Andre thinks of software architecture as “the parts of the product that are hard to change”.

On rolling out new software: Kevin observes that apps with large user bases (looks at Alok at eBay) are generally penalized for deploying too early, because of a higher premium on stability and security, while startups are penalized for deploying too slowly, because their main issues are establishing a competitive position in the marketplace before burning through their startup resources. Alok says simplicity is good, overengineering is a risk, eBay has 7 levels of processes, sometimes you don’t anticipate the success of your product. (He also avoids citing any specific war stories.)