Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Search SIG Bonanza

Search SIG – Search Different: Tagging, Social Bookmarking and Sharing



Last night’s Search SIG was a great room-packing event that brought out close to 250 people from my estimate.  Nice job Dave and Jeff — I rarely see an SDForum SIG with half that many people.  It was also good to run into a bunch of folks I haven’t seen in a while, including Jean Sini of Stickis, David Marks of Loomia.


The panel of founders of “social search” companies del.icio.us, Digg, Wink, and Kaboodle, along with Forrester’s Charlene Li, was a great mix.  The discussion centered around tagging and search.  A couple points I found interesting:



  • Kaboodle is del.icio.us for shopping.  I somehow missed that when I saw the demo at TagCamp.  Now that I get it, I think Kaboodle will succeed wildly.  I’ve already migrated some of my del.icio.us links for a digital media receiver I want to buy to my new DMR page on Kaboodle.  Auto-discovering and storing prouct image/description/price info for stuff you’re shopping for is a simple but huge improvement over researching products the “plain link” way.

  • A prediction by Charlene Li that there will be a whole ecosystem of services that rate, rank, and measure tags and taggers across the growing set of tag-centric sites.  Makes sense if the data is there to be harvested, which it is for the most part it seems to be.

  • Del.icio.us’s Josh Schachter had the quote of the night when responding to the question about how to virally grow like del.cio.us did: “Tap into the bored-at-work network.”  Brilliant.

  • Digg spy rocks — seeing the pulse of the Web in real time is just plain fascinating.  But overall Digg desparately needs tags.  My eyes bleed when viewing stories by category.  It’s just too granular.

Charles Hudson and Brian Cantoni have additional writeups.




Next Collaboration SIG Jan 23rd – How Hackers Collaborate


Speaking of SIGs, the next Collaboration SIG event, How Hackers Collaborate, will be held on Monday January 23rd in Palo Alto. 


We’ve got a great lineup including “old school hackers” Lee Felsenstein of the Homebrew Computer Club and Jim Warren of the West Coast Computer Faire, along with some “new school” folks like David Weekly and Jeff Lindsay of SupperHappyDevHouse.


We really want to provide more face to face for attendees, so we’re mixing up the format and doing a “collaborative panel” BrainJams-style.  Basically everyone will split up into small table discussions led by our panelists, rotate a couple times to mix and match, and then the panel will get up and hold a traditional panel discussion based on the evening’s converations.  We’ll see how it works!


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2 comments:

Jonathan Nolen said...

If you're looking for a digital media solution, I can recommend both the SlimDevices Squeezebox and the Sonos ZonePlayer as excellent choices. The Squeezebox is open, hackable, haS a great user community, lots of extensions, and is fairly inexpensive. The ZonePlayer is functionally beautiful, slickly designed, but closed and expensive. But they both work great.
http://www.slimdevices.com/
http://www.sonos.com
If you have any questions about either, let me know.
P.S. I'll FINALLY be living in San Francisco starting next week. I'll shoot you an email about that beer I owe you. : )

scottmcmullan said...

w00t! Very cool Jonathan -- let's hang out.
I like the Sonos full-featured remote. That's all I really care about. Any others you know of that give you a full-UI into your collection via the remote?