It was lovely to have an excuse to visit Brighton again, and a quick, chilly wander along the seafront with my new-old Minolta CLE and tack-sharp 28mm Elmarit-M and a roll of Fuji 1600 ASA (golfball-grain)… results shared in due course if acceptable – although do see the results from Paris last month…).

The venue was cosy and there was an interesting group – many digital agencies, a sprinkling of retailers and some software vendors.

The fun began (ahem) when we realised that there was neither a projector nor a screen available. A couple of frantic calls later and we realised that they were ‘lost’. Hmm. In the Hove lanes we could see into people’s Home Offices and so was tempting to have Craig push in a door and ‘borrow’ a 40″ plasma, however in the end the cafe downstairs lent us their menu blackboard and – drumroll – a piece of chalk!

So – with the support and chuckles of the assembled, alcohol-fuelled crowd, I cracked on with a presentation with the power of waving hands and – yes – chalk

It was a laugh and the questions from the audience were tough, robustly-put and really engaging. I had a great night.

Indeed, I _knew_ it was a cunning group by the way they took my demonstration of Google History to heart. I’d mentioned how APML and attention tracking were alive and with us, witness Google’s history (and showed mine, noting how one should be careful sharing this in case of compromising past activity!).

Anyway, after the presentation I left my laptop at the front for people to see some of the demos and realised that a couple of people were looking a little _too_ sneakily pleased with themselves (yes, you know who!).

Turns out that they’d indulged in a little guerilla history frigging, gently porn surfing (along with the kindergarden ‘reset home page’ routine) in order for this to appear in my history: excellent!

I know that an audience has taken my points to heart when we see this sort of behaviour I can teach them no more than this

During the evening we took a journey that looked at the phenomena that occur when ever-better structured data, metadata, behavioural data meets open, free exchange over increasing numbers of nodes. We then considered further possibilities – ‘epiphenomena’, if you will – and how these in short order would become indistinguishable from ‘magic’.

It was a great opportunity to think a bit beyond the pressing commercial exigencies of 2009 and envision the services we’d be engaging with in a couple of years.

If you’re interested in seeing the slides they’re online at Slideshare:

Google’s Mobile App is a step closer.

I won’t rehash the explanatory video – it’s, er, self-explanatory – but the really interesting part for me isn’t the voice recognition but rather the emerging “common sense” in the google results. Note that there’s now an interpretive layer that’s interception calculations, directory-type enquiries (eg film listings, nearby restaurants) and informational or evaluative requests.

This is a major step forward for something that we tend to think of as a text-indexing service.

I’m a great fan of knowledge systems like TrueKnowledge (that has an inference engine built upon structured facts, questions and relationships – wonderful) – but it seems that Google’s slowly but surely adding equivalent capabilities by stealth and in parts.

Let’s start counting the days until this is seen as “just normal”…

UPDATE: been playing this morning at a client’s (different voices, male/female, Northern, Welsh, Australian) and we’re getting a one in five success rate. Still, that it even works 20% of the time is amazing and I’m sure it’ll train me to get clearer