SMX Search Marketing Convention in Seattle

I attended SMX (The Search Marketing Expo) in Seattle today. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google were all trapped inside together, hiding from the massive spring downpour outside.

The Seattle Times had some good coverage of the event. Search (and the monetization of search) continues to be a hot topic and Seattle seems to be one of the epicenters.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

I hate folders. My files never fit perfectly into a folder structure. Many modern taxonomists are suggesting that we are seeing the demise of folders and the death of buckets. In other words, if all content can be tagged with keywords then why bother sticking it in any particular folder. How often have we all tried to file a document in a particular folder only to realize that it could actually be at home in multiple folders? With tagging, we don’t have to worry about this, just tag a document with a variety of keywords and you’ll be able to find it again one day.

David Weinberger talks about this in a much more eloquent fashion than I do. Check out his new book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I especially enjoy his humorous brushing aside of Melvil Dewey, inventor of the stunningly frustrating Dewey Decimal System. Check out the video below where he talks about (among many other things) how Dewey was a man obsessed with the number ten...so much so that he would arrange his travel dates so that he would arrive at his destination only on dates that were divisible by ten.


"Google Tech Talks May 10, 2007 David Weinberger's new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categories at once, and search them in many ways. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you'd expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen."

Amaznode Visual Relationship Searching

I loved this the first time I saw it a couple years ago and it is still a blast to use. Type in your favorite author, musician or filmmaker and (based on the amazon database) you will see a visual representation of your search results. Lines connect related images and clicking will bring you to the products. This is a great way to discover relationships you never new existed.

"Amaznode is a relation based search engine for amazon which is made with adobe flash9(as3). This search engine visualizes a relation network of products in amazon, from the statistics data "customers who bought this item also bought", by digging related products again and again. Amaznode is not only for searching but also good for researching and making an associate link."