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)

Today, mobile search in the US = $1 billion per year in 411 calls.

Well, that’s a gross oversimplification, but it gets to one of the main points from this evening’s sold-out, standing-room-only joint Search SIG and Mobile Monday session on Mobile Search, held at Google this evening.

The panel discussion was moderated by David Weiden from Morgan Stanley, with panelists

• Elad Gil (Google)
• Mihir Shah (Yahoo)
• Mark Grandcolas (Caboodle)
• Ted Burns (4info)
• Jack Denenberg (Cingular)

Jack Denenberg from Cingular was the lone representative from the carrier world. During the panel, he made the observation that 411 “voice search” was at least 2-3x the volume of SMS and WAP-based search, and that Cingular (US) is doing around 1 million 411 calls per day at an average billing cost of between $1.25 to $1.40. All US carriers combined do around 3 million 411 calls per day.

This works out to more than $1 billion per year in 411 fees!

Other comments from Jack: Wireless 411 use is still rising. Wireline 411 use is starting to decline. Today mobile search is based on user fees (airtime) and search fees (411). In the future, we may see some movement toward advertiser listing fees. The carrier provides a channel for business to communicate with prospective customers.

Pithy comment from the audience: “I see 4 guys trying to make the best of a bad situation, and 1 guy creating a bad situation.” More comments on why no location based services, why SMS is still limited to 160 characters, and partner-unfriendly pricing. Why $1.40 for an address when Google is free (except for $.20 for data fees).

Mihir from Yahoo mentioned that they have been running trials of paid mobile search listings using Overture back end on Vodafone in the UK, and it’s going well, so the mobile paid listings are starting to happen already.

Lot of comments about user interfaces being too complicated. Mark from Caboodle says that for each click into the menu system, 50% of the users will give up trying to buy something, such as a ringtone. They have a system for simplifying this, but unfortunately they weren’t able to get his demo onto the big screen so we never got to see it live.

Some discussion on the carriers generally having a preference to simplify the user experience by giving them a single, (carrier-branded) aggregated search, taking advantage of the proprietary clickstream and data traffic information available to them through the data billing system.

The Yahoo mobile applications seemed the most plausibly useful. The send-to-phone feature allows you to send driving directions and other info from Yahoo Local to your phone. The mobile shopping application could be used for price comparison while shopping in person (although this doesn’t do much for the online merchants today). Some of their SMS search result messages allow you to reply to get an update, so you can send an SMS with “2″ in it to get an update of a previous weather forecast.

For his demo, Jack ran an impromptu contest among 3 audience volunteers, to see who could find the address of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art the fastest, using voice (411), 2-way SMS search, or WAP search. All of them got the answer, although 411 was the quickest by perhaps a minute or a bit less.

The 4info demo looked interesting. They use a short code (44636) SMS with the query text in the body, geared toward sports, weather, addresses. They also provide recipes and pointers to local bars if you key in the name of a drink. Someone in the audience pointed out that searching 4info for “Linux” returned a drink recipe, which Ted reproduced on the big screen. Not sure what the drink promo or the Linux recipe was about.

During open mike time, someone (mumble) from IBM did a 15 second demo of their speech-activated mobile search, in which he looked up the address of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art by speaking at the phone, and the results were returned in a text page. Very slick.

Lots of interesting data-oriented mobile search projects are building for the future. But $1 billion in 411 calls right now is pretty interesting too. Who makes those 411 calls? Are they happy paying that much?

I avoid calling 411 because I feel ripped off afterwards, and often get a wrong number or address anyway. But it’s not always possible to key in a search.

Photos at Flickr

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