correlate

I will be speaking at Search Engine 2007 in Boston next week. Should be a good conference run by Infonortics with a full list of speakers on a variety of different search topics ranging from search experience, collaborative search, business intelligence and generally where search is going. Speakers will be from a variety of organizations in the space including Google, Fast and Endeca to name a few.

My topic for discussion will be “Beyond Search: Visualizing Emerging Intelligence” and will cover:

This presentation discusses the current state of search, the advantages to text mining in extracting meaning from unstructured data as well as the future of search such as a move towards a role-based search environment, which will likely be one of the biggest technology trends to affect the enterprise. The concept of “role-based” search is about systems intelligent enough to understand the totality of what you do: your industry, your job and the daily tasks you undertake, and then help you accomplish those specific things more effectively. Effective role-based search applications will use technologies that uncover trending, comparison, discovery and determination of sentiment, which will then feed into applications that present the information using visualization and analytics. The session will also address business searching and how search networks will realign themselves to help all types of professionals find better information, faster.

To be honest, I’m as interested in attending to hear the variety of search topics from others in the industry as I am to share my experience and speaking at the event. The event should be very informative and any opportunity to get a bowl of New England Clam Chowder at Union Oyster House is a plus as well.

I’ve been out in San Francisco this week at Web 2.0 EXPO. The element I find most fascinating about these type of conferences is simply the environment and dynamic of the people, their passion and enthusiasm about the incredible things happening on the web. Interestingly, the thing that jumped out at me this week was not from a small start-up trying to make a name for itself but from a large company that continues to innovate, Abobe. And the question that jumped out at me from their Adobe Apollo presentation is “Are you not connected?”

Of course, the selling points of application-like interaction, jazzy flash with drag and drop and full power that the desktop brings was an intriguing platform concept. However, the ability to run elements of web-based applications off-line is incredibly powerful. Check out the demo of the eBay application built on Apollo.
(Original here) TechCrunch also covered Adobe Apollo back in January.

The concept of off-line applications, particularly office-base productivity tools has been all the rage of late with Zoho, Zimbra and Google Docs to name a few. But for me, the ability to run critical features of web sites that matter whether I am connected or not, and then simply synchronize with the web when you are online I find ground-breaking. You plug in, you synchronize with a site, you work/read/interact with that site off-line and then you plug in again with your updates going out to the site and the site updates coming to you.

You can see that Apollo is starting to get more coverage Adobe Apollo per day for the last 30 days.

, I only think it will continue to increase. And I believe the number of developments on the platform will only continue to increase as well.

It did bring up a very healthy debate with a colleague of mine. He asked the interesting question, “Is this going to matter since everyone is soon always going to be connected?” It is a great question in the world where mesh networks, mobility, WAN, home wireless networks and Google deploying free wireless to whole cities. However, my counterpoint to that is:

• Do people want to be ‘plugged’ in all the time? I feel people may simply want to take a break from being connected. What better way to do that than use a web site off-line?
• Sometimes there are huge advantages to productivity and personal work-flow by being able to operate on web based apps and content “off the grid”. Bloggers do it all the time and then upload later.
• Is it plausible that a connection will truly be everywhere? It will extend including airplanes which has already started but I think everywhere is a bit of reach for anything.
• How long is it going to take for connectivity to truly be ubiquitous? And that you will have a connection without hopping networks in a disruptive way? I think there is still time.

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• My instincts simply tell me you need both.

Again, with all things, time will tell. I see the need and I’m intrigued as to the level of applications that begin getting created on these type of platforms, whether Apollo or the next one to come out.