It’s always suspicious (to a jaundiced marketing person’s eye) when a show organiser chooses to place a large seated cafe area at the centre of the exhibition floor.

There were some noticeable absences at this year’s Online Information exhibition at Olympia – no doubt the result of crunch-inspired budget caution – and the air of an industry bracing itself for further shocks.

Public sector cuts have come to be seen as one of the few predictable features of a scarily unpredictable outlook for 2010, but the recent news from Dubai has shown that the private sector may not have exhausted its store of nasty surprises yet. Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s one less book retailer on the high street this Christmas with Borders going down – and as print news sales continue in a similarly downward direction, Rupert Murdoch has sounded the retreat, enjoining other Publishers to follow his lead and dig in behind their paywalls.

Small wonder, perhaps, that the on-stand drinks parties spilling out into the aisles had plenty of space this year to spill out into.

Quality not quantity

When a show is in such a period of contraction it’s usually the organisers who like to bandy the phrase ‘quality not quantity’ about, but interestingly it was a Publisher we heard using it this year. A show like this is about conversations, and OK there were a few less conversations happening this year than last, but perhaps they really were more valuable ones. Certainly, there seemed a serious progression from last year in many quarters. Tech industries in boom are notoriously productive of hot air. Sometimes it takes a chillier climate to bring a greater air of reality.

Answers not results

The conference at Online Information is always an interesting one. We at Semantico were too busy with those valuable conversations, perhaps, to catch all the sessions worth seeing, but what we did see confirmed our view that, more than ever, Search is a critical issue for our industry.

Two extremes, perhaps, of the current landscape were visible here. The leading edge of semantic search was represented by Conrad Wolfram, who launched Wolfram Alpha earlier this year. Like all good things it is now available as an iPhone app. Wolfram’s assertion is that users don’t look for search results, but for answers. Being on the leading edge of search he of course denies that what he is doing is search: preferring to say that he is creating ‘knowledge environments’. One thing that really came across as distinctive in his approach is the emphasis on the presentational aspect of data.

At the other extreme, arguably, and at some remove from the leading edge, lies Bing. It is hard to gainsay the notion that Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google here, as in many of its recent offerings, and despite what it says in the marketing books about ‘fast follower’ being the more advantageous positioning in tech markets, surely this can’t seem a great place to be when you used to be … well, Microsoft. It’s hard to think that any sliver of useful innovation Microsoft manages to come up, any incremental enhancements to where we are now, won’t instantly be snapped up, and probably improved upon, by Google.

Which is not to say that Google doesn’t have its own catching up to do elsewhere …

Get real

There’s a lot of talk about real-time search at the moment, some of which was being purveyed at the conference by search guru Stephen Arnold. This interest largely results from the stellar rise of Twitter, and Google’s stated ambition to improve its game in this area. But real-time search is hard. At the moment, Google indexes certain sites hourly; however, there are many others that it indexes only three times per year. Keeping up with the global information stream, and prioritising exactly what should be kept up with, is an extremely challenging computational task.

Keeping up with the local information stream can be a challenging task too, even at a slightly downsized event such as this; so these notes are necessarily impressionistic. Over all, our impression is of a tougher, but perhaps slightly more real, marketplace for online publishing. Which bodes well for the upturn when it eventually comes.

We’d also like to thank all those who thronged our stand on Wednesday afternoon (and spilled out into the aisles) to help celebrate Semantico’s tenth birthday. Here’s to the next ten!