Search

Locative media first came onto my radar in 2005 when notice of a collective called Proboscis and their Urban Tapestries initiative hit my inbox at NMK.

If the list of companies attending our event tomorrow is anything to go by, the innovations and opportunities around search and location-based services are moving up the agenda.

From telecoms, portals, publishers, application developers and digital marketing agencies, to PR companies, ecommerce outfits, VCs and social networks - it's shaping up to be a classic Chinwag event that brings the different shades of digital together to collectively get to grips with the latest trends.

Every year it's the same moldy old format recycled round the media hype circuit. It's the year of the mobile web, of mashups. It's the end of print media, the death of the gatekeeper. Revolutions are ushering themselves in left, right and centre, and whoosh! Life as we know it will be forever unutterably changed... yeah!

Right now, you can still book a ticket for Chinwag Live: Search vs Recommendation tomorrow night, Tuesday 2nd September, but we're closing bookings tomorrow morning.

Location and geolocation technologies might sound boring to the novice, but they're fuelling a raft of bold new web and mobile services with a social and locative flavour that are setting media and technology trendwatchers alight with excitement.

You will no doubt have seen the launch of Cuil last week, but have you seen the volume and intensity of [mainly negative] commentary surrounding it? I published an article on the Cheeze blog, outlining five reasons why Cuil could be the future of search. Within minutes we had many comments, all berating Cuil for its lack of size, its struggle with uptime and it's look and feel.

Other bloggers went as far as calling Cuil 'liars' [the bloggers' words not mine] whilst many articles covered the negatives.

Yahoo recently launched their open source search tools, under the name BOSS ( Build Your Own Search Service ). The published aim of BOSS is to grow the breadth of search offerings using the Yahoo technology. Use of the Yahoo technology is free in return for Yahoo selling ads against the search results. There are plans for Yahoo to start sharing [what little] revenue they achieve from these new search tools.