Upcoming Speaking gig: SMX Social Media, April 22-23, Long Beach, CA

[ Forgive the self-promotion, but I want to get the word out about this really cool conference. ]

I will be speaking at the most excellent SMX Social Media event on a panel about human-powered search. For those of you counting this will be “round two” of Jimmy Wales vs. Jason Calacanis. The event is taking place on April 22-23rd. I highly recommend Danny’s events… very high quality speakers, attendees, and networking.

• The first day will end with Keynote – Social Search: The Human Challengers. As I mentioned, we’ve got three services that are all looking to see if humans can make a difference in how search results are generated. Jason Calacanis was first out of the gate with last year’s efforts, with his Mahalo designed to use human editors to hand-pick the best results for popular topics. Jimmy Wales announced Wikia Search last year, then launched it at the beginning of this year, an effort to see if human involvement in rating results drawn from crawling the web can produce a better search engine. Eurekster is the real vet in the space, having tried various flavors of social search until settling on its “Swicki” model that takes social search into specialized search topics. The panel will do a short overview of each service, then it’s to the audience for Q&A and discussion on whether any of these can revolutionize the space.