Recently in Gilbane San Francisco 08 Category
Obviously I've taken a little blogging break. The combination of our San Francisco conference taking place just before summer hit, a short vacation, a flurry of activity here including new reports, partnerships, people, and the need to ramp up for Gilbane Boston in the Fall, have consumed me (especially the vacation, part 1). It is time to catch up. There is too much to cover in one post, so I'll spread things out over the next week.
I'll cover our new reports later, but you can learn more, and download some of them at http://gilbane.com/Research-Reports.html. The reports that aren't free are available at http://gilbane-store.com/.
It's been a month since Gilbane San Francisco, so I will just say that we had a great event, and it was good to see many of you there. This was our largest San Francisco event so far. Interestingly, Gilbane Boston remains our largest conference, and, after 4 years in SF and our 5th this year in Boston, it's time to recognize that is likely to continue as they are both continuing to grow at the same rate.
If you didn't make it to San Francisco, the site and program will remain live so you can see what you missed. If you were there, remember that the link to the presentations was listed in your program guide. If you can't find it send an email to customerservice@gilbane.com. Our conferences are mostly made up of interactive panels, so there are fewer formal presentations than there used to be. We are not an "unconference" since an important part of our value proposition is to carefully structure the kinds of topics we think our audience needs to hear about, and to ensure diversity of opinion by assigning a variety of experts to debate the issues. But interaction is critical, and what our audience prefers, so we'll continue to balance serendipity and structure.
Relevance has always been the main goal of search for most of us searchers, although sometimes completeness can be even more important, e.g., when we want to determine relevance ourselves and volume is not an issue. Relevance is relative, and there is no way to write code that can anticipate relevance in a general way. (Of course quality is relative too!) Fortunately, search can be extremely useful even without the mind reading option - in fact, mind-reading wouldn't be enough to anticipate relevance enough anyway.
Much of the discussion about search quality these days revolves around the front-end of relevance, i.e., determining, as much as possible, searchers' intent. And we do have increasing amounts of information (such as surfing behavior) that allows us to make better guesses about intentions.
We can also make information richer so that search engines can make more accurate determinations about relevance. For example XML site maps provide context in the form of structural information; providing additional metadata to search engines provides even more context.
Despite the imprecise, and constantly changing meaning and use of language, we have been able to asymptotically improve our ability to determine both intent and relevance, and incrementally improve search quality.
I say "we", but I am neither a developer nor an expert on search technology. We are fortunate to have someone who is arguably the most influential expert and developer today speaking about search quality in two weeks at our San Francisco conference. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, Google is going to open the conference with a presentation on Search Quality and Continuous Innovation. While Udi won't be giving away any secrets, his presentation will provide valuable and fascinating insight into the way Google thinks about improving search quality. For a taste of Udi's clear and straightforward style, and what he'll be talking about read his recent blog post: Introduction to Google Search Quality
This year we have 5 half-day workshops following our conference with 5 excellent expert instructors. These are a great complement to the conference for those of you really need to dig-in to a topic.
A: Web Content Management Systems: Architectures & Products
Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch, Publisher, The CMS Report
B: Enterprise Search: How to Successfully Adopt and Deploy Search
Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst for Enterprise Search, the Gilbane Group
C: The Hive: A New Model for Extracting the Best from ECM Initiatives
Cairo Walker, Consultant, Enterprise Content Management Graduate Program, University of Technology, Sydney
D: Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems
Andrew Draheim, Globalization Consultant, Dig-IT!
E: Social Media 101: Building a Social Media Roadmap
Rachel Happe, Research Manager, Digital Business Economy, IDC
This is the last week for the "early-bird" discounts for Gilbane San Francisco.
For more details about the keynotes and conference sessions visit http://gilbanesf.com
The 2008 CM Pros US Spring summit will take place on June 17, the day before the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.
The Gilbane San Francisco 2008 program is now available, and registration is open. As usual we have had a tough time choosing from among all the possible panelists and presenters. Some speakers have not been notified yet, so we will not publish speaker names for another week or so. We have slightly re-configured the schedule to fit even more sessions in than we had in Boston.
The main conference site is http://gilbanesf.com. Here are the most popular links:
BTW, we will be using gilbanesf08 for tagging purposes.Proposals for Gilbane San Francisco are due today! See http://gilbanesf.com/
The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.
Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.
If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.
If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.
Now available! "Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, by Stephen Arnold
