Improved searching: "Welcome as these new features are, the big announcement from OnOneMap was the new feature of “Intuitive Searching” which enables users to combine search criteria to construct a sentence that instructs the service what properties to show, eg, “I want to buy a flat with up to 2 bedrooms for up to £300,000. It must be no more than 1 mile from a train station”."

I read the John Battelle book about search and Google recently (and found it really good - thoroughly recommended), and one of the striking points in this was the notion that search is a problem that's only 5% solved. Personally I'm so used to keyword searching (and comfortable with boolean search terms, exclusions etc.) that I can't imagine it working any other way... which only points at a lack of imagination on my part. If OnOneMap can actually do the stuff it's claiming reliably over a large body of data, that's a significant step forward for searching. It's a big IF IMHO - lots of folks have tried, and claimed to do, this sort of stuff before.

Then hook it up to something like Spinvox to do speech-to-text and you have natural-language interfaces to search which really make sense on mobile (after all, talking into a squawk box is way easier than poking it with your pudgy fingers).

I'm going to be taking part in a panel discussion at the Guardian Changing Media Summit on 22nd March, during a session titled "From mashups to money: leveraging location-based technologies for brand advantage". I'll be up there with Justin Davies of BuddyPing (who I'm really looking forward to meeting for the first time), the mighty Helen Keegan, and Andrew Scott of Playtxt - with Mike Butcher herding us capably no doubt...

It'll be fun :) Come along and ask awkward questions, throw fruit, etc.

So, here I am in Geneva for LIFT07. A remarkably uncomplicated journey out: not an alarm clock snoozed one time too many, not a train missed, not a departure dashed for across Gatwick, and I slept like a log on the plane over.

I've only been to Geneva once before, passing through on my way to an Aikido course in Cully with Tom and Carl, but I like what I've seen: it's so clean. That said, I seem to have booked myself into a reasonable yet basic hotel slap bang in the middle of the red light district. For some reason I hadn't considered the possibility that Geneva might have such a thing, but a quick walk round the block took me past 4 or 5 sex shops and a number of dodgy looking bars and clubs.

Also a surprise today was the air raid sirens: on my journey across town to get to the afternoon work shop, they seemed to be going off every few minutes. It's obviously normal round here - the locals were completely nonplussed - but it kept me pleasingly on edge...

• UniveRSS - a 3D Vista RSS reader
  "a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory". urk.
  (tags: rss awful visualisation)
• peterme.com :: Two things I’m thinking about
  If you want to deliver on an experience, as opposed to simply a set of features, it’s becoming clear you must take a systems view. When Eastman launched Kodak, he pledged, “You push the button, we do the rest.” When Apple launched iPod, it wanted to
  (tags: ui usability design experience)
• Musings of a mobile marketer: The Japanese do mobile content for women so well
  (tags: female women mobile apps japan)
• Development In the Fast Lane - Editorial - CIO
  Not sure how this differs from a sensible prototyping process...
  (tags: prototype dev software simulation)
• BBC ONE Twitter on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  (tags: twitter bbc mashup)
• factoids > Graham's number
  who suspect that the answer is: 6
  (tags: graham number)

I was chatting to Mr Ribot about Twitter earlier today and he's asked me to post up a few thoughts, so here you go...

After a brief period of feeling slightly uncomfortable with the whole thing (in an "oh Christ, am I just participating in the latest web 2.0 circle-jerk" sense), I've decided that I really like it; and the reason for this is more to do with what it doesn't do than what it does.

I find Twitter to be absolutely fantastic for connecting me to a group of friends, without giving me permission to be interrupted by them. As such it reminds me very much of Matt Webb's work on glancing: for what's essentially a written medium, it seems decidedly non-verbal. There's already a social convention layered upon it to allow direct communication, outside of the private messaging that the service gives you), but there's no expectation that you're available or willing to chat, and I appreciate that.

So Twitterific has replaced Adium as my presence-agent-of-choice for the time being.

Mind you, those people who get twitters sent to their mobiles? That's just plain weird...