I was dismayed by Seth Godin's kickoff keynote at Blogon yesterday. It was really just the eBook he releases last week as part of the luanch of his new Squidoo venture. It was -- despite his posturing that the keynote was an attempt at motivating more general notions -- just a pitch for the company. Susan does a good job detailing the pitch:

[from Susan Mernit's Blog: BlogOn Kick Off: Seth Godin's Kick Off--AKA Commercial]

Recap: BlogOn?s key note by Seth Godin is a 20minute commercial for his new product, yet another tool set to harness bloggers to generate pages that can make Google Ad Words $$ for someone who has $250,000 to build a platform

AM I jaded, or is this really off focus for a conference kick off?

leaving aside Seth's motivations for the talk, which really runs against the grain of my personal expectations for a conference keynote, the Squidoo concept is interesting, although small. It's a simple premise: search a la Google yeilds too much. People need guidance rather than 100 million hits. So why not contrive authoritative guides to the inifinity of areas people might be interested in?

Jarvis seems to be taken with the idea, at least in a small way.

I think static "lenses" of the sort that Seth has envisioned are the wrong approach however. I have written a bunch about search as a shared space: new approaches to search (the primary way that people find stuff) where an individual or a group of people can augment the mechanized results of a Google-like search with reorganization of the contents, filtering out junk, adding comments and new links, and making sense of the chaos in general. Products like JetEye and Rollyo are examples. These are persistent, and growing search spaces. Instead of a static Squidoo lens on some topic I am arguably expert in, like Web 2.0 Apps, I might create a search space of this sort, leveraging key words, tags, specific sources, and the like.

So, Squidoo faces competition from the traditional search engines, but in the long run, it will be running up against the proliferation of these value-added search-as-shared-space offerings. And my bet is on the latter, especially as those features emerge in the majors. I anticipate social, shared search any time in the My Search History feature set at Google, for example. Yahoo and Microsoft are likely to follow.