First speech was an introduction into how realtime has become so vital and how it leads the way with breaking news stories, such as the death of Michael Jackson and how Google and Bing argued over deals with Twitter.in all honesty, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.

Second up was Rob Walk from a company called NovaRising. He showcases a platform they’ve develop which scans and parses tweets about music to break them down into thematic groups on genre, artist and sentiment. He feels this is something that Search Engines are missing.That is a fair point, especially when Google launched real-time and there was so much spam that wasn’t being filtered, but probably the key thing is a ranking alogirithm for all results to filter out spam.  This is something Google has improved on recently.  and I think the likes of sentiment analysis is in pretty early stages in terms of sophistication, but it may one day be incorporated by search engines. I don’t think that’s their role though.

Next up is Bill Scott from easelTV, talking about the integration of social network updates to TV screens, how TV watchers are profiled and how to “SEO TV” (something about metadata!).  Sorry to sound cranky and I will look at this again after the conference, but I really don’t see how this is (a) anything to do with realtime search, and (b) remotely interesting or forward thinking. Can you really think of anything worse than facebook or tweet updates showing up on my t.v. as I am watching my favourite programme. Let alone realtime ads (*shudder*).

Next up, William Fischer from workdigital talks about a product they’ve developed for the recruitment industry to semantically analyse realtime updates from twitter, linkedin, etc. It’s a sales pitch. This doesn’t interest me in the slightest. If I wanted a sales pitch, I would have visited a free conference such as Internet World or TFMA. Yawn.

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