Day 1 of Drilling Down

Great shower here at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. And lots of good stuff yesterday at the show and in the exhibit hall. Safa R. was very good as a keynote speaker (predicting that the further development of local search may actually hurt e-commerce). So was SuperPages President Eric Chandler, who made an announcement about a direct partnership with Google for SME distribution in Google’s paid results.

The National and SME advertiser panels were very interesting. So were most of the other panels. One of my favorites — I didn’t attend them all because I was moderating and couldn’t be at all the breakouts — was the social search panel. "Social media is here to stay" was the overall theme, and figuring out how to implement and integrate advertising are the challenges.

Today, among other things, I look forward to hearing Dan Gillmor discuss newspapers and local search and what he thinks they should be doing online to avoid being marginalized. Also we’ve got online classifieds and a panel on whether the Internet will become a buying platform for traditional media as well as online.

After today I’m going to take some time off, so this may be my last post.