Mike Butcher's blog

Rory: The only thing I've retained is Hotmail and anything formal I do through email.

Dot: I switch email a lot as they get full of spam. They don't hang around forever.

Like Podcasts? Blogs?

Dot: I read a lot of blogs, but not interested in Podcasts. Metafilter.com I keep visiting.

Rory: I subsribe to a lot of band night and DJ newsletters. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia.

Rory: All 300 Gigabytes of the TV I watch is illegally downloaded.

Dot: Me too. And I'm not worried about that [Ed: audience clapped at this point] If it was easy and good quality I'd consider paying for it - well, some of it.

Chair: William Higham - MD, The Next Big Thing, talked to two of the current generation of young digital consumers.

Rory: Filling up a band night is easier than 6/7 years ago apparently.

Dot: "A huge amount of communication is through instant messaging and messageboards." Which medium you use depends on what kinds of people you want to talk to.

Dot: Multiple digital identies are maintained and 'never meet'.

Dot: In fact there are so many reaosn not to use MySpace, one of which is your job interviewer will find you!

Rory: Realised he could make more friends if he was on MySpace. I'd follow the crowd. He sets a target and if it doesn't work in 6 months he delets his profile.

Alex Barnett of MSDN said that Windows Vista will look like Windows of old, so improvements have to be incremental.

Barnett: These days there are multiple user Interfaces into Google and others, but the market is voting with its feet - they tend to stick with what they know.

Which is going to win though? Social search, intuitive search driven by Blinkx (or Autonomy for instance), or attention data (Microsoft Borg Profile)?

Barnett: OPML is just an enabler and people don't care. Kids will be accutely aware that they're data  is.

Chandratillake: Technologies don't matter - today we live in the library model of the internet. That's insane. You should be aloud to swim, whether it's via a mate or a search engine. It's about how we should be in the centre of it rather than viewing it through a text box which is that big.

That's true for something like Blinkx Pico [Ed: don't mention the Microsoft Paperclip], but also true since Microsoft clearly wants to use 'attention data' as a way ti make recommendations, while LastFM uses other users like you to recommend theings and promt search or discovery.

As far as content owners are concerned, Blinkx' Chandratillake said that content owners are moving from having a search box on the site to using that to set up automatic embedded feeds of information on those popular search terms.

One audience mentioned the paperclip scenario and Chandratillake said the idea is that knows what's going on contextually, but not intrusively. He says only around 2 bloggers have mentioned the privacy issue.

Well, that's the impression you'd get after listening to Matthew Ogle, senior Web Architect, Last.fm, talked about the kinds of things they are coming up with to literally mashup people's experience of listening to music online.

One person seemd to say Pandora do it better, since it's more 'selfish' oriented....

Ogle said we admire Pandora and they do it well. There is talk about expert versus bottom up.

One of the challenges is that there are so many kinds of users - charts people, listeners, bands, labels etc. So what they are trying to focus on is genre and mood.

Even an OPML file of RSS feeds can tell you a lot about a person says Alex Barnett, MSDN International Program Manager, Microsoft.

Basically I'm pretty sure that as the market matures that we will have services which can recognise this.

Everyone is planning to allow you attention data (your OPML files, profiles,  etc) can be plugged into a Microsoft system.

Grehan: Logging in is a huge issue since Google has very few logging in compared to Yahoo and MSN.

Barnett seemed to be saying that there's a more of an opportunity in allowing people to move their data around than there is in locking it up.

Mike Grehan - founder & CEO, Marketsmart opened the afternoon session on search. He mentioned at about 30 terrabytes are being crunched through by the major search engines right now.

Suranga Chandratillake - Founder & CTO, Blinkx, said most people were retrofitting text search around search instead of looking at the meta data inside the video. Blinkx cracks open the technology itself to look at video and audio.

"Blinkx Pico: Instead of having to actively search for things - stopping what you're doing, finding a search engine, figuring out what to search for, navigating pages of results and all that other stuff - Pico changes everything by bringing relevant results to you. Automatically."

Matt Locke - Head Of Innovation, BBC New, talked on folksonomies.

Why is tagging content so important? Is it just a geek fetish or will it go mainstream? Are there historical parallels we can learn from? And how can we integrate folksonomies with existing taxonomies and structured data to help us find what we want, when we want it?

He recommends we read "Sorting things out".

"Comparibility"  - the ability to transfer terms form content to context and retain meaning.

The first iteration of Web search was to literally index pages. Easy to spoof and created far too many results, says Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!.

Google's version of PageRank was the last and biggest breakthrough so far.

Query composition has problems though, and valuable queries like plumbers in London don't work so well.

Social search for this works much better however, and that's the focus of Yahoo strategy today - using what people say to refine search results.

Yahoo!'s idea is to connect a person with a question to a community of people best suited to answer the question.

Bradley Horowitz - Vice President Of Product Strategy, Yahoo!, spoke about the changing face of Web search. 

Yahoo is re-tooling from being Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 but it's not being lead by 'pirates' internally but by 'C' level executives.

After a decade involved in UGC, Yahoo reckons that are 1 per cent are creators, 30 pc ar synthesisers, 80pc are consumers.

He is depressed by the 15 mins of fame teenagers lip-synching to bad pop songs. What is less depressing is things like Flickr where people can post amazing photos.

Flickr is different because it's user generated, allows ofr folksonomy tagging, has APIs for developers and is distributed by the users.