Semantic Monkey

Well, it’s been a long time, a fantastically busy time and that’s the end of my non-excuse for the lack of posting of late.

I’ve just landed in Chicago to attend SES and discovered some weather for the first time in 15 months (you’d be amazed to hear you can actually miss weather if you move to California!) and a bank of Taxis outside the conference parading around with the new Yahoo! advertising on the top. I have a feeling this is a happy accident, but marketing is rather a ‘dark art’ so I’m not committing to that.

I’m here because I was asked to join a panel (Developments in Information Retrieval on the Web) and talk to the crowd about Semantic Data along with Jamie Taylor (MetaWeb), Martin Hepp (Universität der Bundeswehr München) and Jay Myers (Best Buy).

It’s a great panel - two guys capable of talking about any aspect of RDF and Microformats and two guys who’ve had the pleasure of learning from them and implementing structured data solutions. Jay works over at BestBuy where he’s done a cracking job of integrating structure on a public site with a massive catalog (~500k+ pages) - oh and he’s also been instrumental in developing the GoodRelations spec, so all-in-all a Semantic Superstar! That sort of implementation makes my life so much easier and hopefully, in turn, yours as Search Engines and aggregators start to use this structure to help you find what you want.

If you’re in town and would like to meet for a drink please drop me a mail, IM or reach out on Twitter.

UPDATE:

It’s all over, i’m heading back to California where white stuff doesn’t fall out the sky and coats are for people with holiday cabins in Tahoe. Huge thanks to Sean Golliher (great blog template, Sir!) for organising a great panel, it was a really enjoyable session.

Shame on those of us who felt the delay whilst Martin got his Mac ready would have made a good advert for Microsoft’s ‘I’m a PC’ series - the upshot is this great video of his presentation with slides. http://vimeo.com/8065914 It’s a pity we don’t have the full 126 slide original to compare it against!

In the spirit of sharing, as soon as I get to a stable connection I’ll be adding my slides to SlideShare and asking Jamie and Jay to do likewise…. more soon.

UPDATE 2:

I’ve uploaded my slides from the panel to: http://www.slideshare.net/NickCox/ses-chicago-2009-searchmonkey

UPDATE 3:

I just saw a Tweet from Jay Myers, now his slides from SES are up on Slideshare at http://slidesha.re/4UoQbg. 3 down, 1 to go!

If you’ve never done it, you’d be amazed at the havoc a 3 hour PST to EST timezone change can play with your body clock. Just as I was getting tired on the first night I realised it was actually 3am local time and I was due at the conference center a little sooner than I’d planned. Whinging aside, my trip to SES Toronto was worth every foggy headed moment.

My thanks to Jed, Anne and Bill for making it an enjoyable panel. We covered a good range of topics from how to utilise rich/social media to improve your branding, to the latest user-session insights and the benefits of using structured data and correctly labelling your content.

I also got a chance to revisit my TV career and remind everyone why I average about 19 years between appearances.  For those who follow these things my last appearance was in 1990 on the great BBC kids program Blue Peter.

Huge thanks go to the Yahoo! Canada team for their warm hospitality. If the chaps at border patrol don’t put out an APB for shifty eyed English guys, you just try and stop me coming back. I need claim my remaining 1min 13seconds of fame!

I’m excited to be able to confirm that I’ll be speaking at SES Toronto on June 8th. It’s been a few years since I worked a booth at an SES event back in my Mirago days and I’m looking forward to see how much things have changed.

I’ll be part of a panel discussing ‘Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges’ along side Anne Kennedy (Beyond Ink), Bill Tighe (Google), and Jed Schneiderman (Microsoft).

Obviously with the timing so close to the scheduled launch of Bing I’m expecting a storm of questions for Jed about their new approach to highly dynamic federation. Also with both Yahoo! and Google on the stage attendees will get to really understand the benefits of (and increasingly easy ways of incorporating) structured data to visibly impact their representation on the SRP.

Track: Nuts & Bolts
Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges
Search result multiplicity is not a new phenomenon, but recent advancements guarantee that the world of search and marketing will be changing forever. How do the new “blended” search results pages affect your marketing strategy? Do these changes mean that the major search engines are eager to keep the “second click” on web properties owned by themselves? How popular are the new blended search results with users? This session will include research data available only at SES.

Moderator:
Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board & Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

Speakers:
Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board & Managing Partner and Founder, Beyond Ink
Bill Tighe, Agency Business Development AE, Google Canada
Nick Cox, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo!
Jed Schneiderman, Online Marketing Lead, Consumer & Online, Microsoft Canada