Content Management Matters ™

Ahh, our insatiable need to spend hours viewing online video, whether it be our favorite episode of The Family Guy, or that hilarious commercial on YouTube. Yes we definitely are a world of watchers. And organizations are getting smarter everyday figuring how to use this vice to their advantage.

Online video search engine provider, blinkx, aims to help those organizations by providing the blinkx Advanced Media Platform, a video content management solution that will "unlock the potential of video assets and maximize their monetization".

It's now official, Microsoft has finalized it's tender offer for Fast Search & Transfer. They're pretty excited over at Microsoft these days knowing this deal is done.

FAST will operate as a Microsoft subsidiary and will have a dedicated research and development center in Norway.

John Markus Lervik, FAST CEO will be transitioning to the role of Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. He gets to work with all the latest and greatest Microsoft search technologies like MS Search Server Express 2008, MOSS search and FAST ESP -- the end result potentially being a single enterprise search platform.

The FAST product will retain it's own FAST sales, service and support teams, they'll just have a wider range of products to sell and support.

Open Source enthusiasts fear not, Microsoft is still very pro-proprietary. According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager for the SharePoint Business Group, "We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice."

Now Microsoft can renew it's full focus on Yahoo! -- if it isn't already too late.

The open social party is apparently the place to be. Even old Microsoft just announced LiveMesh). Now Yahoo, who's Flickr photo sharing site is the second most popular used API on the web, has rolled out a limited preview to the developer platform they announced in February called SearchMonkey.

For those attending the upcoming Gilbane conference who are more on the geeky side of the spectrum, get stoked: Udi Manber, a Google Vice President of Engineering, will start off the annual San Francisco conference on June 18th at 8:30am with a discussion on Google's search quality and continued innovation.

While Google's success is generally thought of as being a result of their use of link activity and PageRank to supplement keyword search, this is in fact just one of many signals that help provide users with most relevant results. Udi Manber will share valuable info on improving search that should be relevant to everyone in the tech industry.

"Udi Manber is the engineering vice president in charge of this ongoing, and necessarily secret effort (on improving searches). What Udi is able to share about improving search will be interesting to all, but especially valuable to knowledge workers whose need for quality search is critical," said Gilbane Group CEO Frank Gilbane.

The Gilbane Conference, now in its fourth year, has gained a reputation as a forum for bringing together vendor-neutral industry pros that share and debate the latest information technology experiences, research, trends and insights. Topics to be covered in depth will include enterprise search, text analytics and content globalization and location.

Details on the Google keynote session as well as other keynotes and conference breakout sessions can be found here.

The people have spoken and what they have told us is that they love online video. But besides that one friend we all seem to have who loves to send us link after link, what are the other ways people have of finding their latest cute pet video?

Enterprise infrastructure software purveyor and valiant digital copyright protector Autonomy has announced the availability of new advanced features for its Pan-Enterprise Search platform, IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). These features include drag and drop personalization, video indexing, and intent-based ranking among other new additions.

Traditional advertising is broken because it charges us time, when time is becoming our most valuable resource.

Installing Google for your public website or intranet does not replace the need for professional management.

IBM is pretty busy these days. They have released a new version of their OmniFind enterprise search product, making it the first enterprise search software that support the latest Lotus collaboration and social software. Of course it is their product, so one would assume they should be the first to support their own software.

But maybe it's just me being silly.

If you are a big believer in the benefits of social search, then there's a conference you need to attend -- The Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, March 17-20, 2008.

A new feature commeth from CMSWire. It’s our Weekly News Trawl, and the idea is to ensure that we are all up to date on smaller -- but just as important -- news items that touch our cozy little industry.

The collection is gathered by our multi-talented editorial team whose interests vary as widely their basic grammar skills.

Ascentium Corporation, an interactive marketing and technology consultancy, has announced the release of two new search tools for the Microsoft Enterprise Search platform: Search Center Branding Removal and ASP.NET Search Controls.

At the SharePoint Conference 2008, Bill Gates shared some interesting news in his opening keynote. Of course he has lots to brag about when it comes to the great SharePoint machine -- it reached 100 million licenses sold and surpassed sales of USD $1 billion this year.

So of course Microsoft would be planning even more solutions and capabilities that will encourage people to buy into the world of SharePoint. And it is becoming a world all on its own -- just look at the number of vendors who are partnering to provide integrated solutions (2,250 to be exact).

Often when I take inventory of a site's navigation and organization, I look at the analytics of the site. However, I don't concern myself so much with demographics or page views -- I am most interested in what things people are searching for. This is a great way to learn what's missing from your architecture, layout and design, as well as to gain a better perspective of what your customers are really seeking.

But there are tricks and tips to help you best utilize the search function on your site. This spring, treat yourself to a workshop that will help you understand the ins and outs of site search analytics.

Russian search engine Quintura has thrown its hat into the website search ring with a snazzy new search tool. Currently in private Beta, Quintura Site Search delivers the same search navigation principle to website search that Quintura.com brings to Web searches;searching content through a dynamic tag cloud that brings you deeper into the query with every click. The technology is built on semantic principles which focus on context and aim to deliver fewer false positives than Google's 'most-linked' algorithm.