CogBlog

After coming out of the keynote by Mark Kvamme I was stoked. Ten years of excitement and bliss are coming our way. I was so excited that I even thanked Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer for the great session. They look kind of alike ok? Though the fact that the "speaker" was standing alone with Steve Hall might have clued me in...

So, now that Mark/Geoff had buit up the excitement level, I was off to hear Bambi Francisco grill some "thought leaders" on the future of search. Panelists included Kevin Ryan, Managing partner of Kinetic Results, Dana Todd of SiteLab (and current President of SEMPO - Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization), John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing, and Fredrick Markini of iProspect.

Sounded like a great session.

But it turns out that the future is not well defined. Maybe my hopes were too high, but the session seemed to me to contain a few too many random musings about the future of search, and very few clear ideas. Maybe it had something to do with the panel itself. The representatives, though I'm sure they do a fine job with things like reacting to change, or plotting a reasonable course for their customers, seemed to me are really more well-connected users of marketing tools than oracles for the future of search.

Bambi Francisco started things off by sharing a bit of data on the number of new search-related VC investments there have been lately. Back in '99 (most conversations inevitably reference the earlier "boom") there were 32 search related start-ups, but last year there were 47, and 82 in the last two years. Many of these are related to vertical search tools--search for music, blogs, friends, and just about anything else under the sun.

Frederick Markini pointed out that many of the most popular online applications like iTunes are really just specialized forms of search. So, maybe we need to broaden our definition of search in the future. John Batelle expects the vast majority of these new startup to ultimately fail, but those that survive will re-define our understanding of search. He thinks there will be an inevitable jump to the use of actual natural language (spoken) as an interface to search. That is an interesting idea.

Dana Todd feels that people are generally just too lazy to try other sites, so most of these vertical sites will have a hard time attracting an audience. She pointed out that most of these sites still rely on the major engines to actually generate their initial traffic.

It was interesting that Mark Kvamme mentioned this in his keynote. He said the average user only regularly visits 7 sites. And, that companies they invest in must have already been "discovered" by the online community. "Great sites are discovered, not promoted".

From there the session sort of descended into a discussion of "what is personalization". "I mean, I change from day to day". A few panelists began having their own conversation. Audience wasn't invited, but I'm sure it was interesting.

Bambi wrapped up with the question -- what are bloggers going to be called in the future? Panelists looked into the crystal ball and brought out "boring," "clutter," and "authors".

The final message from all of this? Something big is happening.

Maybe what this session needed is some good ol'facts and figures - Geoff Ramsey style. Or was it Mark Kvamme?